Time to move from defending to defining

Setting the Narrative

Eleven months ago, on a summer evening at Bondi Beach, Jewish families gathered to light the first Hanukkah candle. Gunmen opened fire. Fifteen people were murdered on one of the most famous beaches in the world.

Two years before that came October 7. And in between, what did we do?

We counted incidents. We issued statements. We reported posts and asked platforms to take down hate. We asked governments to protect us.

The people who did that work are heroes, and that work matters. But I want to say something uncomfortable tonight. For decades we have been playing defense, on a field drawn by others, under rules written by others. Defense alone has never won anything. Tonight I want to make the case for a different game.

The tectonic shift

Let me start with the big picture, because the West keeps making one mistake: it sees isolated events instead of the movement underneath them.

For 80 years the world lived inside an order built by America and its allies after the Second World War. That war killed between 70 and 85 million people. The victors drew a lesson: wars are fought over scarcity, so make humanity feel it has enough. Instead of crushing the defeated, they rebuilt them. The Marshall Plan poured billions into Germany and Europe; America rebuilt Japan. It worked remarkably well.

That order is now ending. In 2024 the world recorded 61 state-based armed conflicts, the most since 1946. Wars last longer. International institutions are losing authority, and many have been captured by small blocs of states that vote together. The superpower whose currency the world runs on let its own industry hollow out, and is now racing to rebuild chips, steel and munitions. We are moving to a multipolar world of ad-hoc coalitions. Some experts say it looks like the years before 1939.

In this world, Israel is a rising power: in technology, in defence, in resilience. And here is my point. The fight over Israel’s legitimacy is not a side story. It is one front in a contest over which values will organise the next world order.

Remember this: being free is not the natural state of humanity. We are free because Americans, Australians and Britons were willing to fight for freedom in Europe and the Pacific. If we are not willing to fight for it, it will be taken from us.

 What we are facing

To build a strategy, we first have to name what we face. At its core is what many now call the Red-Green alliance: extreme progressive ideology on one side, fundamentalist Islamism on the other. Both are funded and amplified by larger players, states and religious organizations, whose shared interest is to weaken Western societies from within.

• The Islamist movements, the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots, want to advance the rule of Islam over the unbeliever.
• The authoritarian regimes, Russia and others, want geopolitical power.
• Iran belongs to both camps. Add Qatar, North Korea and, to a degree, China.

For these actors, Israel is not a land dispute to be settled. They do not accept our right to exist on this land, if at all. For the global players, Israel is simply one front among many.

People will say, “But I know Muslims who are kind, law-abiding and just want to live in peace.” Of course. There are millions of them. But that is not the question. The question is which ideology is driving the movements trying to shape our societies. Islamism is a political ideology with imperial ambitions. It runs on all-or-nothing conviction, the belief that it carries a divine command. That is why appeasement has never satisfied it. Its appetite only grows.

And it uses our own strengths against us. A liberal democracy is open and tolerant, and it limits its own power. Those limits are being used to fight democracy itself. The 20th century gave us an answer: the defensive democracy, a free society that refuses to let tolerance be turned into a weapon against it.

This alliance is full of contradictions. Activists for gay rights march for movements that execute gay people. Feminist organisations stayed silent about the sexual violence of October 7. Exposing that contradiction, hypocrisy and danger to people who are simply uninformed is our opportunity.

The record

The world has been told that Israel refuses peace. Look at the record: 1993, Oslo. Israel recognised the PLO and handed over territory. The answer was buses blown up in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

• 1994. Months after signing, Arafat told a mosque in Johannesburg that Oslo was like the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah: a truce to be broken when strong enough.
• 2000, Camp David. Israel offered a state. The answer was the Second Intifada and more than a thousand Israelis murdered.
• 2005, Disengagement. Every Jew left Gaza. In 2006 Gazans elected Hamas, and there has not been an election since. Then came the rockets, the wars, Guardian of the Walls in 2021, and October 7.

And look at what is taught. Palestinian Authority money has gone to terrorists and their families, scaled to the length of their sentences. School materials glorify “martyrs”, including maths exercises that count them. Hamas runs summer camps that train small children in combat. A society that built more than 500 kilometers of tunnels for its fighters would not let its own children shelter in them.

And look at the map. Israel is 15 TO 20 kilometers wide at its waist. The hills of Judea and Samaria overlook our main airport and most of our population. The danger is existential and real, not imagined.

This is not a right-wing view. It was the view of Labor’s founders. Golda Meir is remembered for saying peace would come when our enemies loved their children more than they hated us. As we say in Israel: if they lay down their weapons, there will be peace. If we lay down ours, there will be no Israel.

So the burden of proof is on them, not on us.

One more thing. Britain’s firestorm in Hamburg in 1943 killed around 40,000 people. America’s firebombing of Tokyo killed around 100,000 in one night. Nobody calls Churchill or Roosevelt Nazis; we understand they were fighting barbarism. Israel warns civilians by phone, by text, by leaflet, steps few armies in history have ever taken. And the Jews are the ones called Nazis. The language of human rights is being exploited to strip Israel of its moral and legal standing.

Why our response has failed

Now, our side of the ledger. Organisations like the ADL, and hundreds of grassroots groups, built a model around hate speech: monitor it, measure it, report it, condemn it, ask for it to be removed. That work is necessary. But as a strategy, it has three flaws.

1. It is reactive. We wait for the attack, then respond. The other side sets the agenda every single day.
2. It is fought on their ground. We argue about what may be said. They argue about what is true and what is just. They win that argument by default.
3. It casts us as victims asking institutions to protect us, often the very institutions that have already been captured.

Israel’s own effort has failed too. Since October 2023, Israel has spent over a billion dollars on public diplomacy: paid influencers, ad campaigns, even attempts to shape what AI chatbots say. Several of those tactics backfired and became their own scandal. Meanwhile, Gallup found only 9% of Americans aged 18 to 34 approved of the Gaza campaign, and Pew shows negative views of Israel still rising.

The deepest problem is simple: there is no strategy. No single owner. No audience segmentation. No testing of what works. No measurement. For more than a year Israel’s national information directorate had no permanent director, and messaging was split across four ministries. Thousands of good, committed people, and no plan.

The new paradigm

So what changes? We move from reactive to proactive. From defending to defining. From victims to the bearers of a story.

We stop waiting for the next accusation and we set the narrative ourselves: who we are, what we stand for, and why it matters to every free society. Our motto is simple: Jewish identity and the Land of Israel.

Our Jewish heritage is our backbone. It is the mine from which we will quarry the materials of our unity, our hope and our identity. The socialism that accompanied Israel’s national awakening faded along with socialism around the world. What replaced it on much of the left is self-doubt, pessimism and a negative view of the world. It mocks the other side, but it offers no alternative.

It is not enough to plough and to build. We have to give meaning: a spirit that explains who we are, gives it a name, and is taught in our schools. And let me say this clearly: sincerity is not a badge of shame. Believing in your people and your cause is not naive.

We are a nation with a different story and a different calling. And our story can return hope to a Western culture that has lost faith in itself.

On the front line, the work must be precise. Online, we must identify the actions that matter most. The work being done to counter violent extremist groups and their recruitment is essential. But recruitment is the symptom. The core is the ideology driving radical religious movements, among the greatest threats to Australia and Western civilisation today. Treat the symptom and ignore the cause, and we will be here again next year.

Close

There is one reality many Jews in the Diaspora have yet to accept. This problem cannot be escaped, and it cannot be contained by silence. History has shown again and again that concessions, silence and the fear of drawing clear lines do not reduce hatred. They encourage it.

Unless we are ready to stand up with determination, in the media, in politics, in the courts and in the public square, nothing will change. And we may discover that the societies that protected us for generations can no longer do so.

This is not only about Israel, or Gaza, or even antisemitism. It is about whether the free world still recognises the ideologies that want to replace it, and whether it still has the will, the conviction and the resolve to defend itself.

So tonight I am asking you to stop asking permission to exist. Stop defending. Start defining. Bring us your expertise, your networks, your resources. Join the eighth front.

Ayal Marek is President of ARZA Australia and Founder of the Eighth Front