Making a submission. Feedback welcome. · Liberty Politics Discussion

Making a submission. Feedback welcome.

Hi Everyone. I’ve been invited to make a submission to a Royal Commission into antisemitism in my country. I’m going to post my submission below and I welcome any feedback you’re prepared to give. There is a possibility I may be called in to give evidence, so any relevant thoughts you have would be welcome as they may add to my presentation. Herewith, my submission with some slight redactions for privacy reasons as requested by the Commission who may choose to publish with some similar redactions. I realise the document is long but if you choose to read it and have comments to offer, they will be most welcome.

My father and his family left Poland in 1927, well before WWII. They left because the writing was on the wall long before the nazis. Like most European Jews, they were the subject of pogroms; attacks aimed at Jews and Jewish property that were inadequately dealt with by European authorities. These attacks were overlooked, excused, inadequately policed and even encouraged by official policies.

My great-grandfather was sponsored to America around 1912. It was part of a long and arduous process towards citizenship for Jews. My great-grandfather took advantage of a small window of opportunity and with his two sons as dependents, left for a better life in America. The family knew he would send for them once he had achieved his citizenship and could sponsor them in turn. He left behind his wife (my great-grandmother), his daughter and his future son-in-law because the sponsorship limited the family members he could take. My great-grandmother knew that as soon as her daughter married, she and her children would no longer be considered dependents, so she stayed behind to help with the grandchildren who would surely come with the marriage.

When my father was about three years old, he was outside playing with his friends when a Pole rode up on horseback. As the Pole approached from behind, my father did not see him at first. He remembered only the horrified face of his friend who fled in terror. When he turned, he saw the rider atop his horse, whip in hand. Dad was beaten mercilessly. A three year old whipped for simply being a Jew.

My grandparents realised they could not wait for my great-grandfather’s call. My grandfather made applications all around the world and finally found a (foreign) employer who would sponsor the family, including my great-grandmother, to (another country).

(This country) became the haven for my family and a haven for which we were truly grateful. The situation in Europe continued to deteriorate until the descent into WWII. It was a good thing my grandparents had the foresight to see the signs and move the family when they did. To the best of my knowledge, none of the family who failed to leave prior to the war survived. Like most Jews today, I owe my existence to the prescience of ancestors who saw the signs and left while it was still possible to do so.

It took over ten years from when my great-grandfather left for the rest of the family to be able to leave. It took over two years between my father’s beating for my grandparents to be able to get out. After my father and his family left and while my great-grandfather was working on his American citizenship, the situation for Jews in Europe continued to decline. My father’s last letter from his Polish cousins in the early 1930s begged (my immediate) family to help them get out because they could see what was coming. It was the last letter we ever received from family in Europe and it tormented my father until the day he died. I think we call it “survivor guilt” these days.

By the time my great-grandfather could call for the family to come, WWII had started. The family prudently deferred making the crossing, which in those days was made by boat. By the time the war was over, the growing family was well-established in (the second country) and my great-grandmother had degenerated into dementia. Two decades passed in which she had not seen her husband or her sons and she would never see them again. She had gone from being the matriarch who helped her daughter with the children while my grandmother worked to help finance the family’s survival in this new (and wonderful) country, to being totally dependent on that same family. I never knew her because she died when my mother was pregnant with me; this strong woman who sacrificed so much for the survival of her family.

My father signed up with the (Country’s) Airforce during WWII. He flew overseas as an (Country name) team member on Lancasters and was a “Special Wireless Operator” which was part of a top secret project using people who spoke German “natively” to broadcast transmissions that would mislead the nazis. Dad did not discuss his war experiences but he was deeply traumatised by them, eventually retiring from a senior government position with a special veterans’ pension that recognised his trauma and incapacity as due to his wartime experiences. In those days, ptsd was not understood nor officially recognised. To a limited degree, “shell-shock” was accepted but only acknowledged if it occurred immediately after the war, rather than more than twenty years later which was the case with my father. However, they made an exception for him “due to the nature of his service” which was still classified and undisclosed.

To this day, I do not know why Dad received that special dispensation. I can only guess, but I relate my father’s war service to illustrate that as the Jews (of this country) we had become, we have always been loyal, dedicated and prepared to make sacrifices out of gratitude to this country.

Although I was born in (a Jewish neighbourhood), from the time I was five, we lived in areas without a large population of Jews. I grew up in places that didn’t know much about Jews among people who mostly didn’t realise I was Jewish unless they knew my maiden name. Apparently, I didn’t “look Jewish” what ever that means. Sometimes I think it means that I am considered proof towards the argument that we are “white colonisers” but when I was young I think it was meant to suggest that I could “pass” if I wanted. Consequently, I heard the kinds of things that people say about Jews when they don’t realise there is a Jew present.

Here is what I learned. Historically, most (people in this country) were not particularly antisemitic. There are racists, like the teacher I had in kindergarten who called me a pagan, or the parents of the children who, when they went home saying “We have a Jew in our class. What is that?”, came back the next day and surrounded me, shoving and pushing me in the playground yelling “You killed Jesus!”. Or the regular customer to our shop who asked about the origins of my daughter’s name and then kept exclaiming over and over “Are you really Jewish? I didn’t realise you were Jewish”, and never came back to the shop again.

The majority of (people from this country) were not like that and most of the antisemitism I ran across were ideas that were based on tropes and ignorance rather than malevolence. Things like “One thing I’ll say about Jews, they’re good with money.” Or, “I don’t think of you as Jewish“, intended as somehow complimentary without insight into the embedded insult. I would say that most of the slights I received were based on misinformation and lack of insight rather than intentional bigotry.

Forty years ago, I pointed out that here, Jewish institutions, schools, synagogues and etc, already needed to be fortified with security fences, large gates and guards. I would point this out to my non-Jewish friends and ask them if they didn’t find it both horrifying and repugnant that this was necessary in (this country)? I asked them if they’d noticed there were no guards outside their own churches and schools, and whether they’d considered why this acceptable? Why didn’t (these people) address this? I wanted to know.

Unfortunately, that ignorance has created a fertile ground for today’s, only too common, incidents of antisemitism. I wrote a piece that I posted online, explaining that there are logical grounds for doubting that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. As well as discussing the historic tropes that have painted Jews as being guilty of wanting gentile (and now Gazan) babies dead and attempting to show the historic parallels, I used Hamas’ own official statistics to show that even their figures did not support evidence of the genocide which they obviously wanted people to believe. This post was received with great hostility and the people arguing against it had no insight into the fact that while they might want to disagree, what they were arguing for was the right to bandy around words like “genocide” even while it was disputed and that the use of this highly emotive language in the absence of clear evidence served only to raise the temperature of hostility, not only towards Israel but towards Jews in general.

One of the respondents to the thread ironically took the opportunity to call me a “genocide apologist”. He was the same person who, on a previous post by someone else had effectively labelled (this country’s) Jews as having responsibility for the (fatal terrorist) attack because (local) Jewish leaders had not publicly come out to condemn Israel. This was on a Mensa forum and the blind spots and lack of insight by many of the respondents were staggering.

In the main, while many (people from this country) give lip service to being appalled by antisemitism and mouth platitudes about how awful the (fatal terrorist) attack was, or even how awful October 7 was in Israel, it is always followed by a “but”, a qualification that pretends to be even-handed by “showing equivalence” on both sides, as in “…but if the leaders of the Jewish community were more forthright in showing disapproval of events in Israel”, or “…but Israel’s response to October 7is disproportionate” which is just antisemitism couched as criticism of Israel. Most of these responses are made by people who have taken on the mantle of support for Palestine while demonstrating a painful ignorance about the Middle East in general, or Israel in particular. They do not understand the legal definition of genocide as specified in the Geneva Convention, nor do they understand the legal term “disproportionate” when applied to war.

The fact that terms, such as “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” were coined as descriptions of the historic atrocities committed by the nazis gives particular pleasure to some malevolent actors who find satisfaction in accusing Jews of committing the same atrocities that were perpetrated against us in living memory. Their goals are fourfold, for the sadistic it serves to cause great pain to Jews, for the manipulative it raises the emotional impact of the narrative they are trying to drive, for those with the agenda to drive a narrative that Jews are the aggressors it is designed to subvert critical thinking through the creation of emotive propaganda and finally, by using distorted language it warps the moral compass of many who are encouraged to view Jews through the lens of nazism. By promoting this language as a descriptor for Jews, they are turning Jews into nazis and people who want to kill nazis take the moral high ground because if nazis deserve to die, then so too, do Jews. When our (political head of state) jumps on the bandwagon of cautioning Israel not to be “disproportionate” and hints at the danger of a potential genocide in carefully couched language, he impels that narrative forward and raises the impulsivity of vulnerable individuals while denying his complicity in raising the level of danger to (this country’s) Jews and weakly condemning the rising incidence of physical attacks against Jews and Jewish property. He gives his imprimatur to the implication that these accusations are factual rather than speculative. It’s redolent of the discourses by officials in pre-war Europe.

I also want to add that the response I got on the Mensa forum is unsurprising. The racist ideologies of nazi Germany were also supported and furthered by the intellectual classes of those times, who used a combination of political ideology and the “science” of eugenics to justify their racism and blind themselves to the paradoxes their views created and the ways in which they compromised their moral compasses. The highly intelligent are easily misled by their natural skills in verbal sophistry and their blinkered belief in their own intellectual abilities, such that they can become unable to dismantle their own arguments.

So, it is obvious there is a lack of education in (this country’s) society about Jews, about Israel and about what constitutes racism, particularly the form of racism that is uniquely applied to Jews, antisemitism. This brings me to the next part of my submission; the lack of education that makes a fertile ground for the obvious growth of antisemitism in (this country}..

We live in a regional area and we are the only, openly Jewish family here. My grand-daughter goes to a local high school. One morning she arrived in class to find the desks had been arranged by senior students into the shape of a swastika. Some children took to making nazi salutes and goose-stepping around her. A history teacher, also responsible for Middle Eastern Studies, stated to the children that the probable outcome of current events would likely be a genocide.

My daughter and her husband had several meetings with the school. At one of these meetings, the history teacher was present. She was at pains to say that the curriculum she had devised presented a balanced account of “both sides”. She offered to send my daughter a copy of her class plan to “reassure them”. This teacher was so forthcoming with her offer, I believe she honestly believed what she was teaching the children was “balanced”.

My daughter and I went over the class plan together. The teacher’s document waxed lyrical on Palestinian claims to the region. Lovely pictures of Al Alqsa mosque (with no mention of what it was built on), some claims about Jewish attacks against Arabs, and a general historical timeline supporting claims to Palestinian indigeneity offered without complexity and in such a way that no sane person could support Jewish or Israeli claims.

The only narrative in support of Jewish claims was the statement, “The Jews say that G-d gave it to them”. No mention of thousands of years of Jewish presence, no mention of the archeological evidence, no understanding concerning the nature of indigeneity, ethnicity, culture and spirituality. No mention of Israel’s offers to the Palestinians to divide the land between them, or the historic refusal of the Palestinians to accept those offers. No mention of the complex way in which Israel achieved statehood and why it is not “a colonial, imperialist project”. Ethnicity was not explained. The Palestinian claims were framed as claims of ethnicity and indigeneity while, from the argument given, you could only assume that Jews are purely a religion and therefore, lacking any layer of indigenous claim.

Even worse were the sources that had been provided by the (government body responsible for curriculum content in our schools). They were mainly compromised and biased sources like Al Jazeera. There were no primary sources and reasons to problematise the sources were not offered. This is a government generated statewide resource for all teachers at all State schools.

I understand that children need to be taught to discriminate the potential bias of sources but the university educated history teacher? If she has not been taught how to research sources and detect bias, or even propaganda, then I can only see that she, too, is the product of a flawed educational system that bakes soft racism into a mix on which future generations will likely build.

Then, there’s the issue that the source material was supplied by an (government) organisation responsible for the education of our next generation of business people and leaders. What future in (this country) for my Jewish children, grandchildren and their descendants when the rot runs this deep?

Finally, we come to the profound impact the course of these events has on our family. My Yiddish name is (redacted), named for the great-grandmother who left the country of her birth and never saw her sons or husband again. She did that because she saw what was coming. I have a similar ominous sense.

My grandparents left Poland twenty years before the Shoah. Timing is always a problem. Many Jews like to think we can tell when the time has come. No-one wants to give up their homes, their businesses and their social and family connections. Perhaps my family could have waited a little longer in Poland. Maybe they could have waited a few more years and trusted they wouldn’t be the victim of another attack. But those who didn’t leave when my father did, are not here to tell me what were the signs they recognise in retrospect that told them when the opportune time that they missed, had arrived.

This is what I see: an education system that sows the seeds of something toxic in the next generation, a government with policies that are not addressing the problem but are subtly enhancing it, ideas in the current generation of (this country’s) adults that incline them towards not understanding the subtlety of their own biases and a failure to recognise the serious nature of the problem and how important it is to tackle it now.

I am doing what my namesake did. I am immigrating and making Aliyah. My gentile friends are astonished and ask me if I’m not afraid to go to a war zone. I tell them I’m going to a country that’s got my back and sadly, I’m no longer convinced that (this country) is such a country. It’s a tragedy because it has been a fabulous nation but once antisemitism gets its hold in a population, releasing its grip is a monumental task and I’m not convinced that my fellow non-Jewish (countrymen) can see it and understand the steps they must take now to sort it. Nor do they comprehend the damage it will do to them, let alone to us.

My children are still trying to guess when “the right time” might be before they are forced to dismantle their lives. I fear that they may only leave when circumstances force them to flee. They may come, like my aunt, who arrived with only the clothes on her back (not all of them I believe), when she and her siblings were expelled with the other Jews of Egypt. I will take all my assets and dismantle my life in hopes of setting up a safe place if they should need to come suddenly. I will leave them for now to set up a space should they arrive without their shoes. I want (the country I am currently in) to turn this ship around but if it doesn’t, I hope my children will not leave it too late. I know, that like my great-grandmother, there’s a possibility I will not see them again. I’m aging rapidly, my health is not what it was but I have the legacy of my ancestors to uphold. Prepare for the worst and pray for the best.

3 comments