As war rages between Israel and Hamas, so the rivalries play out 12,000km away in Australia. Nowhere is the activism rawer than on university campuses. In the past week I have seen stickers pasted over the top of posters of Israeli kidnap victims labelling them “Zionist propaganda”. Yesterday, a large rally graffitied a Vice Chancellor’s office building with “Hate Zionism, Love Jews”.

It’s questionable how much history of this intractable conflict the Australian protestors understand. In universities, postmodern deconstructions of history point the finger at colonialism. Coupled with other stereotypes, taking sides on campus ends up being as reductive as white vs brown, powerful vs weak, and Jews v Palestinians. Jews are portrayed as powerful white settler colonists. This portrayal is an historical abomination.

Sadly, it has now become impossible to disentangle the more modern phenomenon of anti-Zionism from the ancient tradition of antisemitism.

The history of antisemitism predates Christianity, with one of the most enduring forms evolving from the early Christian Church accusing the Jews of murdering Christ. For over 2000 years, Jews have suffered persecution, discrimination and segregation, and many times death, for their beliefs. At the turn of the last century, the made-up “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” spurred a conspiracy of Jewish global domination that lives on today in the dark recesses of the internet.

But Zionism, and its converse anti-Zionism, are much newer. Zionism was born out a European Jewish nationalist movement in the 19th century which called for a Jewish homeland in the Land of Israel (Palestine). Australian troops successfully fought the Turks in the Battle of Beersheba (around 50 kms from Gaza) in World War I, which helped lead to the creation of British Mandated Palestine and the subsequent 1917 Balfour Declaration in which Britain declared support for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Due to the mistreatment of Jews in Europe, thousands of Jews began to move to Palestine, purchasing land and creating agricultural settlements. By 1933, the Jewish population of Palestine numbered 203,000 people. Arab concerns and ultimately violent uprisings against the growing Jewish population in British Mandatory Palestine led to Britain reassessing its position on the creation of Israel. But the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis led to the newly created United Nations proposing the creation of both an Arab and Jewish state in 1947 and the internationalization of Jerusalem. The State of Israel was born in 1948 and admitted to the UN in 1949.

Australia was the “surrogate midwife” in the creation of the State of Israel, with then External Affairs Minister H.V. ‘Doc’ Evatt taking a leadership role at the United Nations as president of the Ad Hoc Committee on Palestine. Opposition leader Robert Menzies, who would go on to become Australia’s longest-serving Prime Minister, said Israel’s creation was “a shining symbol of delivery from bondage, and (I believe) of world repentance.”

Despite the absolute centrality of the United Nations to the creation of Israel in the 1940s, since the 1970s the UN has led a campaign against it. The UN has become the world locus of anti-Zionist sentiment, passing a resolution in 1975 equating Zionism with racism (this was revoked in 1991), countless resolutions denouncing Israel and legitimisation of the terror wrought against it. In recent days we have been fed views from the UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territory Francesca Albanese who labelled Israel an “apartheid state” and “colonial regime” which “commits genocide” against the Palestinians.

Like the UN, the protesters have found a moral equivalence between Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attacks on Israelis and Israel’s campaign against Gaza in self-defence. In their eyes, Hamas is entitled to brutally attack and butcher innocent Israelis in a reign of terror and take hundreds hostage (in breach of international law) because of Israel’s colonialist apartheid regime. Protestors calling for a “ceasefire” are asking Israel to accept rolling attacks from a terrorist organisation and stop defending itself until it ceases to exist.

The fact that the October 7th attacks are now being questioned as “Zionist propaganda” is a bitter reminder of the experience of those who first witnessed the unbelievable horrors of the Holocaust. It was in April 1945 when United States General Dwight Eisenhower (who would go on to be President) visited a liberated a Nazi concentration camp for the first time. He was horrified at the unbelievable evil that he witnessed. Dead bodies piled high like planks of wood and the survivors resembling walking skeletons such was their malnutrition. He invited the media in to make sure that “the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt” and no room for denial.

Sadly, Holocaust denial is real. And so it seems are denials of the terrorist attacks and mass atrocities against the people of Israel on October 7th.

Hamas does not entertain a two-state solution. It is a terrorist organisation driven by an antisemitic death cult. Antisemitism dressed up as anti-Zionism discriminates against Jews as it does not accept Jewish self-determination or Jewish nationalism. It ignores the historical establishment of the state of Israel and denies the truth of the Holocaust. When did discrimination against Jewish aspiration become acceptable? How did the world miss the legitimisation of antisemitism, yet again?

Australia played a role at the beginning of Israel because it was morally the right thing to do as the world woke up to the worst of humanity and antisemitism. It is Doc Evatt’s greatest legacy. It was strongly supported by Menzies. Will our current politicians and institutions stand up to those who practice antisemitism and seek the end of Israel? Only time will tell.

Written by Georgina Downer, originally published on Sky News Australia, 20 November 2023.