Slander won’t stop students from resisting genocide
“Resembled a Hitler Youth rally”. Those are the slanderous words that Executive Council of Australian Jewry Deputy President Robert Goot chose to describe the 500-strong student general meeting held by Students for Palestine at the University of New South Wales on 25 September.
Quoted in the Australian last week, Goot’s comment adds another salvo to the barrage of attacks on the student-led Palestine solidarity movement, levelled under the pretext of “combating antisemitism” on campuses.
It was a strange sort of “Hitler Youth rally”, where half the speaking list was Jewish, and the vast majority of attendees voted against a genocide. Two of those Jewish speakers, UNSW associate professor Dr Peter Slezak and Students for Palestine member Milo Riggs, spoke in favour of the motion to stand for a Free Palestine and demand that UNSW sever its ties to weapons companies.
For all the howling about a climate of fear prevailing on campus for Jewish students, and the supposedly Nazi-like nature of Palestine activism, seventeen pro-Israel students attended the meeting draped in Israeli flags and holding a banner that said “Students Supporting Israel”. They were able to participate in the meeting and make their case—they were not harassed or silenced.
Comments like Goot’s trivialise one of the worst crimes against humanity ever committed. The idea that hundreds of students gathering to vote against genocide and for peace is anything like a rally of Nazis calling for the murder of millions of Jews is beyond offensive and patently absurd. It’s a cynical strategy to deflect criticism of Israel’s atrocities—using the legacy of one genocide to justify another.
Thousands of students across Australia have mobilised because they have watched as Israeli leaders describe Palestinians as “human animals”, pledge to “raze Gaza to the ground”, and then proceed to obliterate human life and vital infrastructure in the Gaza strip. Yet in Australia today, if you attend a mass meeting to register your opposition to this unfolding genocide, it is completely acceptable for a public figure such as Goot to compare you to a Nazi and demand retribution. This will then be published in a major news publication such as the Australian without any challenge from journalists.
Goot was particularly upset by the fact that meeting attendees applauded Dr Slezak’s comment that “Jews should feel uncomfortable. It’s our duty to make them uncomfortable”. The Australian makes out like Dr Slezak was saying Jewish people should be made to feel uncomfortable simply for being Jewish. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
His point, wilfully taken out of context, was an important one. Israel purports to act in the interests of all Jews, and many pro-Israel Jewish organisations actively promote this idea. But growing number of Jews feel uncomfortable about the crimes Israel is committing in Gaza in their name, and they are right to feel this way. And it is understandable then that they appeal to other Jews to resist this. As Dr Slezak pointed out, this is precisely why there is now a growing constituency of Jewish people who have shunned the lie that Judaism and Israel are synonymous and joined the movement for Palestine.
The foundational Zionist idea—that the only decent response to the Holocaust is to unconditionally defend Israel—is in tatters. In fact, it’s the brutal reality of the genocide in Gaza that has driven many progressive Jews, who know all too well what a genocide looks like, to speak out against Israel. Imploring students to vote in support of Palestine, Riggs, a Jewish student activist, argued that “never again”, a rallying call to prevent future Holocausts, “means never again for anybody”.
The other part of Dr Slezak’s point about discomfort was to say that the oppressed are not obliged to account for the feelings of their oppressors. If wearing keffiyehs, calling for justice “from the river to the sea”, and mobilising against Israel on an unprecedented scale means that defenders of a genocidal state feel uncomfortable, then so be it. No such handwringing about discomfort is afforded to Israel’s actual victims, nor to the students of Palestinian and Lebanese background who are confronted by students draped in the Israeli flag—the symbol of their oppression. Nor is the discomfort of Russian students who might support the invasion of Ukraine, or Chinese students who might approve of human rights abuses in Xin Jiang, afforded the same deference. And nor should it.
Incapable of making, let alone winning, a convincing argument amongst the student body, all
that supporters of Israel can do is rile up university administrators and the political establishment
to repress pro-Palestine students on bogus charges. While the universities, that are tied to the weapons industry that arms Israel, might relish this line of attack to put activists back in the box for daring to oppose them, they’re sorely mistaken if they think it will stop the movement.
As the campus meetings all over the country demonstrate, students know that the enablers of genocide are not just in Tel Aviv and Washington. They also sit in executive suites and chancelleries right here in Australia, counting their millions as the bombs rain down on children. Thousands of students have
mobilised against them this year in Australia’s largest ever campus actions for Palestine. The
days where slander like this would deter anyone from standing on the right side of history are over.
