Latest news with #TonyJudt
Sydney Morning Herald
18-07-2025
- Politics
- Sydney Morning Herald
To defend our democracy, PM must disavow and abandon Segal report
The eminent Jewish historian, the late Tony Judt, put it this way in the leading Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2006: 'When Israel breaks international law in the occupied territories, when Israel publicly humiliates the subject populations whose land it has seized – but then responds to its critics with loud cries of 'antisemitism' – it is in effect saying that these acts are not Israeli acts, they are Jewish acts: The occupation is not an Israeli occupation, it is a Jewish occupation, and if you don't like these things it is because you don't like Jews. 'In many parts of the world this is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling assertion: Israel's reckless behaviour and insistent identification of all criticism with antisemitism is now the leading source of anti-Jewish sentiment in Western Europe and much of Asia.' Anyone repeating Judt's words would risk no longer being able to speak in mainstream Australia because they would have been branded as antisemitic. Similarly, a university or writers' festival or public broadcaster could lose its funding for hosting Ehud Olmert, Israel's former prime minister, who last week compared plans for a 'humanitarian city' to be built in Rafah to 'a concentration camp', making him yet another antisemite according to the Segal report. Pointedly, Olmert said, 'Attitudes inside Israel might start to shift only when Israelis started to feel the burden of international pressure.' In other words, leading Israelis are saying criticism of Israel can be helpful, rather than antisemitic. Yet, even by me doing no more than quoting word-for-word arguments made by globally distinguished Jews, could it be that I meet the Segal report's criteria for antisemitism? Would I be blacklisted for repeating what can be said in Israel about Israel but cannot be said in Australia? At the same time, in an Australia where protest is being increasingly criminalised, the Segal report creates an attractive template that could be broadened to silence dissenting voices that question the state's policies on other matters such as immigration, climate and environment. Loading That the ABC and SBS could be censored on the basis of 'monitoring' by Jillian Segal, a power she recommends she be given as the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, raises the unedifying vision of our public broadcasters being policed from the Segal family lounge room. No matter how much Segal seeks to now distance herself from her husband's political choices, that his family trust is a leading donor to Advance – a far-right lobby group which advocates anti-Palestinian, anti-immigrant positions, publishes racist cartoons and promotes the lie that climate change is a hoax – doesn't help engender in the Australian public a sense of political innocence about her report. It is hard to see how this helps a Jewish community that feels threatened, attacked and misunderstood. Could it be that the Segal report's only contribution to the necessary battle against antisemitism will be to fuel the growth of the antisemitism it is meant to combat? If the ironies are endless, the dangers are profound. Loading It is not simply that these things are absurd, it is that they are a threat to us as a democratic people. That the prime minister has unwisely put himself in a position where he now must disavow something he previously seemed to support is unfortunate. But disavow and abandon it he must. Antisemitism is real and, as is all racism, despicable. The federal government is right to do all it can within existing laws to act against the perpetrators of recent antisemitic outrages. Earlier this month, the Federal Court found Wissam Haddad guilty of breaching the Racial Discrimination Act with online posts that were ' fundamentally racist and antisemitic ' but ruled that criticism of Israel, Zionism and the Israel Defence Forces was not antisemitic. It is wrong to go beyond our laws in new ways that would damage Australian democracy and seem to only serve the interests of another nation that finds its actions the subject of global opprobrium. The example of the USA shows where forgetting what is at stake leads. Just because the most powerful in our country have endorsed this report does not mean we should agree with it. Just because it stifles criticism of another country does not make Australia better nor Jews safer. Nor, if we follow the logic of Ehud Olmert, does it even help Israel. As the Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi wrote, 'we too are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our own essential fragility. Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death and that close by the train is waiting.' The lessons of the ghetto are not the exclusive property of Israel but of all humanity. In every human heart as well as the lover and the liberator, there exists the oppressor and the murderer. And no nation-state, no matter the history of its people, has the right to mass murder and then expect of other peoples that they not speak of it. If we agree to that, if we forget our own essential fragility, we become complicit in the crime and the same evil raining down on the corpse-ridden sands of Gaza begins to poison us as well.
The Age
18-07-2025
- Politics
- The Age
To defend our democracy, PM must disavow and abandon Segal report
The eminent Jewish historian, the late Tony Judt, put it this way in the leading Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2006: 'When Israel breaks international law in the occupied territories, when Israel publicly humiliates the subject populations whose land it has seized – but then responds to its critics with loud cries of 'antisemitism' – it is in effect saying that these acts are not Israeli acts, they are Jewish acts: The occupation is not an Israeli occupation, it is a Jewish occupation, and if you don't like these things it is because you don't like Jews. 'In many parts of the world this is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling assertion: Israel's reckless behaviour and insistent identification of all criticism with antisemitism is now the leading source of anti-Jewish sentiment in Western Europe and much of Asia.' Anyone repeating Judt's words would risk no longer being able to speak in mainstream Australia because they would have been branded as antisemitic. Similarly, a university or writers' festival or public broadcaster could lose its funding for hosting Ehud Olmert, Israel's former prime minister, who last week compared plans for a 'humanitarian city' to be built in Rafah to 'a concentration camp', making him yet another antisemite according to the Segal report. Pointedly, Olmert said, 'Attitudes inside Israel might start to shift only when Israelis started to feel the burden of international pressure.' In other words, leading Israelis are saying criticism of Israel can be helpful, rather than antisemitic. Yet, even by me doing no more than quoting word-for-word arguments made by globally distinguished Jews, could it be that I meet the Segal report's criteria for antisemitism? Would I be blacklisted for repeating what can be said in Israel about Israel but cannot be said in Australia? At the same time, in an Australia where protest is being increasingly criminalised, the Segal report creates an attractive template that could be broadened to silence dissenting voices that question the state's policies on other matters such as immigration, climate and environment. Loading That the ABC and SBS could be censored on the basis of 'monitoring' by Jillian Segal, a power she recommends she be given as the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, raises the unedifying vision of our public broadcasters being policed from the Segal family lounge room. No matter how much Segal seeks to now distance herself from her husband's political choices, that his family trust is a leading donor to Advance – a far-right lobby group which advocates anti-Palestinian, anti-immigrant positions, publishes racist cartoons and promotes the lie that climate change is a hoax – doesn't help engender in the Australian public a sense of political innocence about her report. It is hard to see how this helps a Jewish community that feels threatened, attacked and misunderstood. Could it be that the Segal report's only contribution to the necessary battle against antisemitism will be to fuel the growth of the antisemitism it is meant to combat? If the ironies are endless, the dangers are profound. Loading It is not simply that these things are absurd, it is that they are a threat to us as a democratic people. That the prime minister has unwisely put himself in a position where he now must disavow something he previously seemed to support is unfortunate. But disavow and abandon it he must. Antisemitism is real and, as is all racism, despicable. The federal government is right to do all it can within existing laws to act against the perpetrators of recent antisemitic outrages. Earlier this month, the Federal Court found Wissam Haddad guilty of breaching the Racial Discrimination Act with online posts that were ' fundamentally racist and antisemitic ' but ruled that criticism of Israel, Zionism and the Israel Defence Forces was not antisemitic. It is wrong to go beyond our laws in new ways that would damage Australian democracy and seem to only serve the interests of another nation that finds its actions the subject of global opprobrium. The example of the USA shows where forgetting what is at stake leads. Just because the most powerful in our country have endorsed this report does not mean we should agree with it. Just because it stifles criticism of another country does not make Australia better nor Jews safer. Nor, if we follow the logic of Ehud Olmert, does it even help Israel. As the Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi wrote, 'we too are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our own essential fragility. Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death and that close by the train is waiting.' The lessons of the ghetto are not the exclusive property of Israel but of all humanity. In every human heart as well as the lover and the liberator, there exists the oppressor and the murderer. And no nation-state, no matter the history of its people, has the right to mass murder and then expect of other peoples that they not speak of it. If we agree to that, if we forget our own essential fragility, we become complicit in the crime and the same evil raining down on the corpse-ridden sands of Gaza begins to poison us as well.
Irish Times
16-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
Was it for this craven display that London endured the Blitz?
Britain, we are often told, likes to put aside its differences in coming together to commemorate its war sacrifices and victories. This was evident last week during the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe (V-E) Day . Narratives honed around such commemorations gloss over fragility and uncertainty as the ghost and words of British wartime prime minister Winston Churchill are invoked to emphasise a uniquely resilient British spirit. One of the French founding fathers of the postwar European integration project, Jean Monnet, suggested that what was believed to differentiate Britain from the rest of western Europe after V-E Day was the lack of a 'need to exorcise history'. The historian Tony Judt, in his sweeping tome Postwar (2005), elaborated on this, writing: 'In France the war had revealed everything that was wrong with the nation's political culture; in Britain it had seemed to confirm everything that was right and good about national institutions and habits.' READ MORE But myth, mirage and selective history were also part of Britain's narrative and condition. Along with his focus on defeating Hitler, Churchill's Victorian mind was saturated with imperialism and his career tarnished with the crimes that went with that. Yet the wartime saviour iconography around Churchill – the man who united Britons – prevailed. His memory was invoked for an additional reason last week during the V-E Day anniversary as the White House – where Donald Trump after his election promptly insisted on the return of Jacob Epstein's bust of Churchill to the Oval Office, originally gifted by the British government – and Downing Street trumpeted their trade deal to cement their 'special relationship'. Historically this union has been presented as grounded not just in free trade, but in democracy and the rule of law. Such a perspective was not just born of the second World War ; as far back as the 1890s, John Hay, then US ambassador to Britain, said that both countries were 'bound by a tie we did not forge and which we cannot break; we are joint ministers of the same sacred mission of liberty'. Over a century later, in 2001, George W Bush described the two countries' relationship as 'the rock upon which all dictators this century have perished'. Such historic assertions have been hollowed out beyond meaning. Few would envy Britain managing a US president who is a deranged dictator, but it is a measure of the current international cowardice in dealing with Trump that British prime minister Keir Starmer , a former human rights lawyer, heralded last week's announcement of the trade deal as a 'historic, fantastic day'. Quickly after Starmer's display of cravenness, he denounced Vladimir Putin due to the war on Ukraine . Europe, he suggested, was 'stepping up' on the anniversary of V-E Day to secure Ukraine's future and European leaders were united with the US and 'are calling Putin out'. This is because of Russia 's 'deadly attacks on civilians' in Ukraine. At the same time, the Israeli policy of genocide and imposing famine in Gaza is tolerated, as the Israel Defense Forces spends US money on its sickening policy of annihilation. The relentless focus on trade has skewed any determination to confront the terrifying echoes of the 1930s and this is something that Europeans should be much more vocal about given that the rationale for the creation of what became the European Union was to ensure the prevention of a third world war. As Tony Judt was to lament in 2010 about the long-term loss of focus, 'we have substituted endless commerce for public purpose and expect no higher aspirations from our leaders'. Such a pursuit also relegates climate change policy, despite its devastating global consequences, to the margins, because selling cars and keeping quiet about fascism is more convenient. It is delusional to think American democracy is robust enough to withstand the excesses of an elected leader. As historian Ian Kershaw points out, in 1930, three army officers with Nazi sympathies were put on trial in Germany charged with preparing to commit high treason. Hitler told the court in Leipzig his movement would come to power legally, but would then shape the state as its members saw fit and that 'heads would roll.' The eliding of Trump's version of that involves normalising his contemptuous autocracy. It also emboldens other leaders internationally to indulge their worst instincts. Was it for this that London endured the Blitz? As wartime prime minister, Churchill made himself Minister of Defence, sat on military committees and replaced generals he regarded as below par. When Alan Francis Brooke became military chief of staff in late 1941, things shifted. 'When I thump the table and push my face towards him, what does he do?' Churchill recorded. 'He thumps the table harder and glares at me.' Churchill needed to be restrained. Trump, however, is facing no table thumpers, at home or abroad.
