The Facts.
Discrimination, racism and bias against Jews and Israelis are all predicated on libels, denials, inversion, conspiracy theories, misinformation and disinformation. There may be those unwilling to engage with you in constructive conversation and debate, however it is very important to explore and understand the truth and lived experiences from history and about the current situation for both Jews and Israel.
References have been provided to present a variety of voices, not hostile to Israel and Jews, on each topic.
No, Jews are a people who have lived in the Levant for over 3,000 years who do not fit into modern racial or religious classifications. Jews have a millennial old central text, shared language and attachment to ancestral land. After over 2,000 years in exile where Jews experienced persecution, forced conversion, ethnic cleansing, violence and murder, many Jews who were refugees or in exile in the diaspora returned to their ancestral homeland.
Jewish laws, customs and prayers, which are thousands of years old, reference the land of Israel, Judea, Jerusalem and Zion.
Are Jews white colonisers?
Zionism is the right for Jews to have self determination in their ancestral homeland of Israel.
Zion is another biblical name given to Jerusalem, the first and only capital of the Jewish people.
What is Zionism?
Antizionism is a bigoted hate movement that uses libels, denials, inversion, conspiracy theories and stigmatisation to demonise and dehumanise Jews (and anyone proximal to Jews) to justify the erasure and murder of Jews.
Antizionism is the modern form of Jew hatred. In the common era, the first iteration of Jew hatred was Antijudaism where Jews were hated for the religion. When religious intolerance became socially unacceptable, Jews were hated for their race and the word Antisemitism was popularised. When racial hatred of Jews became socially unacceptable, Antizionism has taken hold where hating Jews for their nation state is socially acceptable.
What is Antizionism?
“From the river to the sea Palestine will be free” calls for the destruction of Israel, Israel’s borders being the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea.
In Arabic, the call is “From water to water Palestine will be Arab” ie. the destruction of Israel.
What do “globalise the intifada” and “from the river to the sea” mean?
Intifada literally means ‘resistance’ or ‘uprising’ however is understood to be a call for violence against Jews since thousands of Jewish civilians were murdered in the first and second Intifadas. On and after October 7 2023, a popular phrase “resistance is justified” by those who support Hamas’ actions which re-enforces that intifada (resistance in the context in which it is used) refers to the murder of Jews. Globalising the intifada means violence against Jews everywhere. Bondi Beach is an example of globalising the Intifada.
The kaffiyeh: To the majority of Jews seeing a kaffiyeh worn by an Australian a visitor is like seeing Nazi swastika, as this is a appropriated clothing worn by Palestinian terrorists who stab, rape, murder and kidnap Jews.
The watermelon - symbol of the antizionist movement. It represents the colours of the Palestinian flag and is used to symbolise the replacement of Israel with a Palestinian state.
Upside down Red triangle - used to mark and target Jews for violence.
“Red hands” - On 12 October 2000 two Israeli reservists inadvertently took a wrong turn into Palestinian-controlled territory in the West Bank, they were taken captive by a frenzied local crowd and lynched in Ramallah. They were brutally murdered in the El-Bireh police station, with one murderer displaying his blood-soaked hands to cheering crowds. After the soldiers were beaten, stabbed and mutilated, their dead bodies were dragged to Al-Manara Square for a victory celebration. In recent years, the use of red-painted hands or red hand pins by protesters and celebrities (such as the Artists4Ceasefire pin) are used as protest against Israel thus evoking the brutal murder of Jews.
What do so called “Pro-Palestinian” symbols mean?
No, Israel is fighting a defensive war against Palestinian terrorists who started the war by invading the sovereign State of Israel murdering, raping and kidnapping anyone they encountered. Just as every other nation, Israel has the right and obligation to defend its citizens.
War is of course tragic and in every war innocent people suffer. However, anyone claiming that there is a genocide in Gaza is repeating a libel propagated by the antizionist hate movement to demonise Israel and Jews so that calling for the erasure of Israel and Jews seems justified.
Is there a genocide in Gaza?
Hezbollah, a proxy army of the IRGC with the mission of destroying Israel, has since 7 October been attacking Israeli civilians with missiles and drones. Residents in the north of Israel have for year been displaced for their safety.
In order to defend their citizens, Israel is diminishing Hezbollah’s capabilities which require boots on the ground since Hezbollah positions its army and weapons within civilian populations and the IDF policy is the minimisation of civilian casualties. Israel has no expansionist ambitions in Lebanon, the IDF is there as a defensive measure.
Why is the IDF fighting in Lebanon?
Nakba means “catastrophe” and it actually refers to the embarrassment the Arabs felt for their failure to defeat the Jews in the war they started against the newly declared State of Israel in 1948 because the Arabs would not accept a Jewish state. There was displacement of people for various reasons, which happens in every war. However the Antizionist narrative has changed the meaning to try delegitimise Israel and justify their call for the eradication of the Jewish state.
What was the “Nakba”?
No, Israel is a democratic state where all its citizens have the right to vote, study any profession, work in any job industry, have freedom of movement and freedom of religion. In fact Israel is the only state in the Middle East where all citizens are afforded these rights.
23-24% of Israeli citizens are not Jewish (the majority being Arab Muslims) with the same rights as Jewish citizens. The only difference is that Jewish Israelis have the obligation to serve in the IDF, whole is optional for other citizens. Gaza is not part of Israel and Israel does not govern Gaza. Areas A & B in Judea and Samaria (commonly called the West Bank - as in West of Jordan), are governed by the Palestinian Authority and its residents are not citizens of Israel and therefore to not have the same rights as Israelis, as would be the case in any other country. Jews are prohibited from living in Palestinian controlled areas like Gaza and areas A & B.
Is Israel an apartheid state?
his is a form of antisemitism which weaponises the memory of the Holocaust to promote prejudice, spread misinformation and libels and to attack Jews.
Holocaust denial and inversion are explicitly categorised as forms of antisemitism by the IHRA working definition as adopted by the Australian government and the Royal Commission in Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.
This tactic is commonly used by the Antizionist movement to manipulate the gravity of the Holocaust to pass moral indictment on Jews, to trivialise atrocities done to Jews and to demonise and dehumanise Jews by denying or minimising that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, negating or rewriting historical facts of the Nazi genocide against Jews, distorting the intentions of the Nazis, victim blaming Jews and accusing Jews and Israel of being the perpetrators of the crimes against humanity that were done to them (ie. calling Jews and Israelis Nazis, claiming that Palestinians are the “new Jews” and spreading the libel of genocide against Jews and Israelis).