Following this week’s Hanukkah massacre in the land you rule, you must assume this Israeli, like millions of Jews worldwide, has written you off. He hasn’t. In fact, like millions of other Jews, he has some good things to say about you.
First, you had a tough childhood, having been raised by a single mother who worked as a cleaner and didn’t tell you that the man who fathered you was actually alive. Despite this unfair starting point, you became the prime minister of a continent. We Jews respect this kind of self-made career, part of a heritage of social mobility that harks back to antiquity.
Yet, our subject right now is not your background, but your record, and on that front, too, two things should be said in your favor.
Albanese's record in combating antisemitism
First, when you learned that Iran had masterminded attacks on a synagogue in Melbourne and a kosher restaurant in Sydney, you confronted the ayatollahs. Calling a spade a spade, you expelled the Iranian ambassador. If all victims of Iranian subversion had taken similar actions, the world would be a safer place.
Second, you backed the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside a secure Jewish state. That is what this Israeli has been advocating for decades, along with millions of my countrymen who voted over the years for Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Ehud Olmert. Like you, we think such a settlement is just, practical, and urgent.
Even so, over the past two years, you lost us.
The bodies of the victims of Hamas’s massacre were still unburied when a multitude emerged in Sydney’s most iconic location, and there, in front of cameras and microphones, so the whole world would hear, waved fists and shouted, “Gas the Jews.”
We Jews are born with sensors that make us hear such delirium from afar, and grasp its warning even in languages we don’t know. And English we do know. As someone whose four grandparents were gassed in Auschwitz, take it from me: These people were out to kill us.
Some Australians were trying to explain this to you, but you were unimpressed. No arrests were made, and no leaders were called to task, let alone tried and jailed. Effectively unanswered by you, the Sydney Opera House rally signaled the beginning of an antisemitic nightmare that culminated in what you now face.
It was an attitude, an affinity for the perceived weak, underscored by your foreign minister’s refusal during a visit to Israel to visit Kibbutz Be’eri, and the family of the Hamas massacre’s Australian victim.
Underlying all this was your government’s delusion that what happened on October 7 was essentially a clash between moral equals, and that its antagonists’ conflict was distant from Australia’s shores. They weren’t equal, and it wasn’t distant.
As events on your own streets made plain, the conflict was not about nationalism, as your actions suggested, but about jihadism. That’s what demonstrators on your soil meant when they shouted “Muhammad’s army will return,” and that’s what “globalize the intifada” and “from the river to the sea” mean. It’s certainly what Hamas meant when it ordered babies beheaded and women raped.
And the jihadists knew you a lot better than you knew them. They knew they could use you and your colleagues as useful idiots. They are progressives, they said of you, we will tell them Israel is fighting innocent freedom seekers, victims of colonialism, imperialism, apartheid, genocide, misogyny, homophobia, global warming – you name it, they’ll buy it. And buy it they did.
The people who – in front of your eyes – were targeting our children, and did so from behind their own children, deliberately, as a strategy, were actually accusing us of doing what they themselves were doing, and you never called their lie.
Listen well, Anthony: that’s how it started in Europe. Antisemites marched in the streets, synagogues were torched, and Jews were shamed, boycotted, and accused. The accusations were absurd, but the free world refused to fight for its values – not politically, certainly not militarily, not even rhetorically.
It all happened in broad daylight, but the free world did nothing – not because it agreed with the antisemites, but because it refused to believe it had an enemy, an enemy that would settle for nothing less than war, the war over the free world’s life.
Freedom’s enemies knew this, and that calculation is what made them use the Jews as their Armageddon warm-up act. Targeting the Jews, they knew, would keep the free world sedated while its enemies consolidated their power and prepared for the real war, the apocalypse they were determined to unleash.
That is jihadism’s current ploy. That is how you became its hostage, and your country its stage. And that is the enemy you must now help unmask, target, and defeat.
There are, of course, many differences between what happened in my grandparents’ Europe and what happened between your Australia and our war. The biggest difference is that this time the Jews are fighting back. That is why the mobs you faced were not out to change any Israeli policy, as your actions implied, but to deny us Israelis’ right to fight. On the battlefield, they told themselves, Israel defeats us, but with Australians like you, we might defeat them from the rear.
Now, as you stare at 15 bodies in your own living room, it’s not too late for you to change course, and tell your people six words – Australia is at war, with jihadism – and the rest of civilization another six words: we are all in this together.
In between these statements, you can say two words to us Israelis, especially to those of us who have spent a lifetime fighting for peace: forgive me.
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of Ha’Sfar Ha’Yehudi Ha’Aharon (The Last Jewish Frontier, Yediot Sefarim 2025), a sequel to Theodor Herzl’s The Old New Land.