On the Segal Report

Zionism, anti-semitism, free inquiry and the destruction of Gaza

On the Segal Report: Zionism, anti-semitism, free thought and the destruction of Gaza

This is true Liberty when free born men

Having to advise the public may speak free,

Which he who can, and will, deserv's high praise,

Who neither can nor will, may hold his peace;

What can be juster in a State then this?

-epigram from Euripides, Milton, Areopagitica, 1644

The Segal Report and Labor’s cynicism

Though it is fashionable these days to regard Anthony Albanese as a sort of one-man sleeper cell, slumbering in the NSW Left for decades, waiting for the moment when he could burst out and be an agent of capital and the US, it doesn’t really add up. After the 2019 loss, Albo and others took one look at their lives, and decided they would have to do anything, anything to win and hold power. Hence the left deal with the ‘Conroyites’, which means being beholden to what is essentially a US asset within the party, bound up in the gambling, armaments and other industries. Not for a moment would Albo have been tying on a bandanna and yelling ‘Merdeka’ without the deal. But he would not have been so eager to trash much of what he once believed in this craven, capital-steered government. The style adopted is a new sort of tactic, and a clear-eyed one: give in immediately and totally to the dominant force, and avoid the left shilly-shallying, principle v pragmatism, splits etc. AUKUS and social policy are two examples of this. Whatever is demanded, give it, and more. Leave one’s enemies nothing to criticise, except stuff that is obviously ridiculous (look at Greg Sheridan’s now sad and desperate attempts to try and find a political front against Labor on defence). Throw it back on them.

Hence, last year, Labor not only responded to the demand by the ECAJ, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, for special action on anti-semitism, they appointed a former executive of the body, Jillian Segal, as the anti-semitism ‘envoy’. Anyone who knows the politics has to watch this pantomime play out in real time, as a committed political zionist is presented as some sort of hands-off sage, sorting out this difficult issue. But Labor, by doing this, has disarmed ECAJ, the forward flank of political zionism. With Segal’s report and plan they have got everything they wanted, the extension of zionist supervision of what constitutes ‘acceptable’ speech, not only into government, but into universities and the media. That is, thus, a trap of sorts, as can be seen in the ECAJ’s and Newscorpse’s attempts to pile further demands on the government. The report must be ‘implemented immediately’. Any further incidents will be ‘on the Albanese government’. And so on. The shrillness is visible, and Labor is inviting the Australian zionist lobby to over-extend itself. Public support for Israel probably remains the default, but it is much less so than it was 1, 5 10 years ago. Without the Cold War as a frame, there is much less invested in it. The Australian zionist lobby has spent so much time saying that Australia has no history of anti-semitism, they’ve started to believe it, a dangerous move. In the Anglo and European-Australian population there persists, though dormant, the mild anti-semitism that was commonplace up to the 1980s: residual notions that Jews were pushy, out for themselves, less than fully trustworthy, and collectively, a little narcissistic.

The Myth of an anti-semitism free Australia

The idea that we were free of anti-semitism is ludicrous. Robert Menzies, returning from Europe in 1938, praised Hitler as a ‘great gentleman’. We turned back Jewish refugee ships, and we had informal quotas on Jewish arrivals into the 1950s; the newspapers of the 20s and 30s were filled with anti-semitic jokes and cartoons, the prosperous Jewish couple being popular comic figures; access to professional degrees was informally limited, not least by lack of access to the private schools from whence most university entrants came; Labor’s mid-century obsession with finance capital ‘the money power’ was partly borne of simplistic anti-semitic theorising; the Liberal party’s ‘Uglies’ faction was full of virulent anti-semites; power networks such as private clubs were barred to Jews, as were elite gold clubs and the like. The term ‘Jewboy’ for an adult Jewish male was heard right into the 80s. Much of this dissipated publicly with general modernisation and multiculturalisation in the 90s. But, weakened, it has not gone away. Haute bourgeois anglos still think Jews are jabbering, excitable, annoying types, too impressed with culture, and both too philanthropic, and visible about it, plastering their names over hospital wings, etc. The working-class strain of it is what is expressed in ‘cooker’ anti-semitism, the stew of old and news conspiracy theories which join to anti-vaxx, 5G and other paranoias. Various east European and non-European migrant communities have brought their own strain of it. Every five years or so, going back decades, Jewish graveyards have been vandalised with swastikas.

But it now suits the zionist lobby to construct the current flare-up as a myth of the Fall, in which the pro-Palestine movement has summoned Satan ab nihilo, rather than that the fraught situation of the present has stirred diverse and contradictory forces into being. Thus, rather than distinguish between phenomena - political, criminal etc - the lobby is keen to lump them into one, and make them all expressions of an opaque and unexamined scourge. This is obviously contrary to what is occurring. There has been a vigorous pro-Palestine movement, some of whose slogans - ‘all zionists are terrorists’ and ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ - are confronting, to varying degrees. On the fringes of that, there has been some explicit, occasional frustrated anti-semitism. Separately, there has been vandalism, graffiti etc. And attacks on synagogues. This has all been rolled into one, and conveyed as such by a media that is complicit, or has journalists simply too dimwitted to make distinctions. This has become so standard now, that it seems unremarkable.

One anti-semitism to rule them all

Yet take a step back from it, and you’ll see what a politically compromised approach this is. The truthful and confident approach would be to name these phenomena for what they are. Most of the graffiti and vandalism appears to have been a mix of grudge and false-flag operations by a handful of people, explicitly intending to give the appearance of a larger movement. The synagogue burnings appear to be the product of disturbed loners, the types who might look political on the surface, but are really just attaching their obsessions to Judaism, and its distinct position in Christian dominated societies. Surely, a Jewish community leadership that wanted to affirm its equality and legitimacy here, would be pointing out the obvious. There is no organised anti-semitism here, as there is with groups like Casa Pound in Italy, or Orban’s government, and parties further right, in Hungary or elsewhere. Why wouldn’t you be keen to talk its fragmented expression here down, rather than co-operating with bad actors in bigging up dodged up incidents, such as the NSW graffiti ‘wave’?

The answer of course is that the ramping up of the situation, doesn’t serve the Jewish community here, it serves the foreign policy and image of Israel, and represents the total takeover of Jewish peak community bodies by the zionist lobby. To do this, they have rolled over the generalised concept of [total, cultural] ‘safety’, developed by the left and ‘anti-colonial’ groups (and foolishly returned to) to the question of anti-semitism. There’s a sleight of hand going on. Synagogue burning is obviously anti-semitic; Jewish students having to witness some abrasive stuff on campus might be. But it is all joined as a single substance, each and expression of the other. To shout ‘Death to Israel’ becomes the same as burning a synagogue, and society must be re-organised to try and abolish all manifestation of such.

The uses of ‘Safety’

Now this is an interesting twist when you think about, because the whole point of zionism as a movement was its assessment that Jews would never be safe in Christian countries. Crystallised for its founders Herzl and Nordau by the Dreyfus affair - and the realisation that no matter how much you assimilated, anti-semitism would re-occur - that is zionism’s whole argument about creating a homeland and moving there. The demand of total abolition of anti-semitism, and the belief it was possible, was the argument of the Jewish integrationists/assimilationists, against zionism, before World War Two.

So the demand for total abolition of anti-semitism - like prison abolition, or abolition of violence against women and children - is a fantasy projection of intellectuals, trying to create the wholly ethical world by fiat. With zionism it is politically weaponised to the nth degree. Segal’s report and programme is simply the ECAJ and other political demands, put under a different letterhead. The two interviews Segal gave - on 7.30 Report and RN Breakfast - show Segal to be a substantially unreflective functionary, a corporate lawyer pushing a pre-determined agenda. The RN interview (not particularly incisive) showed her purely instrumental side. Confronted with critics of the process and findings she said, twice, that ‘the train had moved on’ from where they were, and that ‘there’ll always be critics, you’ve just got to get on with it!’ Look, ah, in the context of anti-semitism and the invoked Holocaust, I’d suggest that celebrating your own adamantine will in the face of criticism, is not best done with the image of the train, relentlessly and mercilessly moving forward. I’d even suggest that if the problem with that image doesn’t occur to you, as you go to use it, you are missing something about what you’re doing. Segal is simply an instrumental thinker, who, to judge from her public statements, genuinely does not understand the nature of a pluralist society, and brings a scientistic idea of ‘truth’ to the issue - which will be adjudicated, in actively interventionist fashion, by an arm of the state.

So now we have the expansive IHRA definition to anti-semitism - in which it is anti-semitic to suggest that Israel be abolished as a state - weaponised and given state power to enforce on newspapers, universities and the arts. This, and other provisions, as the leading edge, will have a chilling effect on free speech and inquiry, since most of the people involved in such are cowards and crumple easily, presuming they care at all. The Holocaust, already taught, will have its arguably unique character, asserted as a simple fact, for schoolchildren in a multicultural society, whose heritage includes colonial horrors that match the Holocaust in suffering and destruction, even if they lack its glittering abyssal character. Segal says she wants with her report, to re-unify Australia. Yet she, and those supporting her, are giving Judaism and the Jewish community a special status within Australian society, which they argue, merits the re-construction of state forms to serve.

The Report will make anti-semitism worse

Quite aside from the deleterious effect this will have on free speech and inquiry, the counter-productive idiocy of this is hard to exaggerate. They are going to put obeisance to the sufferings of the Jewish people at the centre of the master’s discourse, across social life. The effects of this will be that , as with any state-imposed value, transgressing it, becomes a way of asserting one’s resistant identity. The zionist lobby’s manic desire to control what is said, rather than debate it, to turn every moth-eastern campus encampment into krystallnacht, are going to single handedly revive a ‘discursive’ anti-semitsim, which begins to advance arguments about the ‘difference’ of the Jews. The blithe dimwitted attempt to stamp it out, will kindle it. Which will create a fresh round of repression. And round and round we go.

The second effect will be to give raw material for the anti-semitism that is most likely behind synagogue burnings and attacks: mentally disorganised, unprogrammatic and, if having a political expression at all, usually as a channel for a free-floating paranoia. If your aim is to take a drifter off his meds, and convince him that the route to mental peace comes by setting fire the secret temple that lies at the centre of all social discourse, then there is no better way to do that, than to turn anti-semitism into a transcendental evil, lying deeper than other wrongs, and at the root of our social life. The Segal process is taking the obsessiveness of anti-semitism, mirroring it, and then injecting that response into the state. It is so reliably producing more of the anti-semitism it is trying to wipe out, that you may as well call the fire brigade now.

The Muskelschlemiel - tapdancing for Israel

But the hard truth is that I don’t think the pro-Gaza destruction zionists care anymore. Such zionism has become a rather unlovely mix of Nordau’s 1898 call for a ‘Muskeljudentum’ a muscular Judaism, with the plaintive petitioning Judaism that zionism was supposed to supplant. Thus we get the crowing, harrumphing swagger of the zio-fascists in the Australian Jewish Association at every act of cruelty and mass murder by the I ”D” F, at the same time as politics here centres around ‘hurt feelings’ and ‘psychological’ safety from a few slogans. This is a bit pathetic, the whiny schlemiel act of the sort that Woody Allen’s screen persona represents. Its apogee was a bizarre series of articles in The Australian, whining that their mediocre cartoonist Johannes Leak didn’t make the Archibald Prize longlist with his (utterly dull) portrait of ECAJ head Alex Ryvchin. This went on for days, with Rychin himself joining in.

Imagine that! Imagine being, on the one hand, an Australian representative of a Jewish state with nuclear weapons - the army the zionists sought, so that Jews wouldn’t have to do the schlemiel tapdance to save their skins - and then, for a bit of political advantage for that state, whining about a portrait of you getting excluded from the world’s worst art prize. How craven. How pathetic. What a suspension of self-respect. Yet it is this contradiction that the Segal report and its recommendations are based upon, a sort of institutionalised hysteria, in which any social conflict which might have some whiff of racial-religious character, is taken as the gates of Auschwitz. It will be enormously counterproductive, it will collapse into unworkability. But before it does so, it will solve advance the zionist lobby propaganda effort, solve Albo’s political problem, and further damage an anglo-heritage of pluralist and liberal political freedoms - the ones to which Jews have been coming, and contributing to, since Menassah ben Israel brought the Dutch Sephardics to revolutionary London, in 1655.