It’s Not About Israel. It’s About Us.

I've recently tried to inject some nuance into the catastrophe in Gaza and Israel on radio and on my podcast. No sooner does the syllable "Gah-" slip from my lips than the comments start pouring in. “How do you feel about Gazan babies being murdered?"

The listeners don’t need to add the “Jew” part out loud.

The images out of Gaza are utterly heartbreaking. Emotions are raw on both sides. My grandparents were Holocaust survivors. My father was born in a refugee camp during World War II before coming to Australia by boat. They wanted justice for Arabs. They would've been appalled by the failure of right-wing Israeli governments to pursue peace. It’s unsustainable and unethical to build settlements on another people’s land and to condemn millions to rot in squalid open-air refugee camps in perpetuity.

But let’s be clear about what happened two weeks ago. Southern Israel is not populated by right-wing settlers who oppose peace—not that it would justify Hamas’s atrocities if it were. It is populated largely by left-wing peaceniks on kibbutzim. It's a hippy dippy part of the country. The largest group of victims were kids in their early twenties dancing at an all-night outdoor peace rave.

Terrorists with bodycams swarmed in; the Christchurch shooter en masse. They shot up kindergartens, executed babies, beheaded half-dead soldiers, dragged old ladies bleeding from their genitals through cheering crowds. Some of the young concertgoers who weren't gunned down found shelter. Hamas rolled grenades into their midst. Writhing bodies with their limbs ripped off. The bodycam footage has been verified by international journalists.

If you find yourself responding to these facts with a knee-jerk “BUT WHAT ABOUT GAZA”, you need your humanity checked. This isn’t a game of Who Has The Most Corpses Wins. It's lose-lose. And it’s deeply depressing that our reaction, as a nation, seems to be to refract the events into our pre-existing moral certainties, grievance score cards and whataboutisms.

Gazans have been betrayed by Hamas, by Israel, by Egypt, by Jordan, by the Arab world. But the only people who are expected to answer for their plight are Jews. We don’t hold Iranian Australians responsible for the crimes of Hezbollah. We don’t expect them to renounce the mullahs of Tehran. We don’t place the crimes of the Chinese Communist Party at the feet of Chinese Australians. We don’t argue that China’s barbarism against the Uighers negates the Chinese people’s right to a state. But the Jews? Well, the Jews are different. They’re not a real “people”, are they… except when they’re evil puppeteers. Either way, they have some explaining to do. They always do.

The underlying fury at Israel is not about settlements or Gaza. It’s about whether Jews are a pain in the arse. It’s about whether Israel should reeeeeally exist at all; whether it’s a fundamentally illegitimate project. A colonising power.

Look, you may think Israel is a misbegotten venture. You may think it was wrong to ship Jews back to that part of the world, steamrolling the interests of many people who were living there at the time. But Israel was not a colonial project, not like the British Empire or the Spanish conquistadors or the Dutch in the East Indies. Jews are a tiny population -- 16 million, globally -- who were never accepted into any society they've ever lived in. They were never allowed to join the professional classes. They couldn’t get mainstream educations. They couldn’t join the elite. After being hounded and slaughtered and excluded from every other place, they were allowed in 1948 to self-govern the land that King David ruled in 1000 BC.

There is a laudable instinct in Western democracies to trust our post-colonial guilt. Given the barbarous history of colonisation, we’re biased towards assuming that brown-skinned poor people are usually in the right, while whiter-skinned people who speak good English and wear fancy suits are usually the oppressors. In the case of Israel, it’s nonsense.

Think about what an Acknowledgement of Country is. It's a recognition that, regardless of whatever has happened in the past few hundred years, having ancestors who lived here thousands of years ago counts for something. If anyone was doing Welcomes to Country in the Middle East, it would be Jews.

To repeat: This doesn't justify West Bank settlements. It doesn't justify the abysmal treatment of Palestinians. But let's cut the nonsense about colonialism. There really, truly are two people with legitimate claims to Israel-Palestine. Yet only one side of the conflict agrees with this. There are about thirty times as many Arabs as Jews. If the former put down their weapons, there could be peace. If the latter did, there’d be no Jews left in the Middle East.

How long will the experiment of Jewish self-government last? How successful do Hamas, the Taliban, Hezbollah and Iran have to get, for Australia’s well-meaning anti-Israelites to reject an Islamist death cult as vocally as they reject a Jewish state?

My father now has Alzheimers and recently moved into Jewish aged care. The nursing home recently hired armed guards, in case some glassy-eyed devotee enacts Allah's will by slaughtering as many elderly Sydney Jews as he can. My friend’s daughter goes to a Jewish school in Sydney. She worries about her little girl waiting at a bus stop, wearing *that* school uniform. A uniform as distinctive as a yellow Star of David embroidered on her chest. Jewish civilians are collateral damage, everywhere, always. They are the top target of hate crimes. Sydney's mosques, by contrast, do not feel the need to arm themselves against homicidal Jews.

So yes, let us weep for Gazans. But let us not lose sight of ourselves, of our shared Australian humanity. My dad was born eighty years ago amid the cinders of flaming Jewish flesh. He will die, again, protected by armed guards. A full circle. A timeless trap. The oldest hatred. “But but but Gazan babies! Israel deserves it. Jews are the oppressors. This time is different!”

Yes, when it comes to Jew hatred, this time is always different. It always has been.