Newsletter Weekly Guest Statement
Larry Lockshin – Co-President UPJ
Today we bring you a beautiful message from the President of the World Union for Progressive Judaism. It was written last Friday before the final details of the ceasefire and hostage release were known. Even as I write this, we are awaiting the actual release of the living hostages and those who did not survive imprisonment in Gaza. It is fitting that this momentous occasion occurs almost to the day of the anniversary of that terrible day two years ago on Simchat Torah. As we celebrate, we also mourn the lives of all of those lost on October 7, those lost in defending Eretz Yisroel, and the Gazans who died having been subjugated by Hamas.
Our joy is also diluted by the knowledge that antisemitism has grown in the past two years, here in Australia and across the world. What was an undercurrent has become a visible everyday occurrence. Paul Kelly in last Saturday’s Australian detailed the issues we as Jews in Australia will continue to face by virtue of the inability of our current government to stand up for the long-term existence of Israel. One thing October 7 did was strengthen our avowed membership of ‘the Jewish people’, here in Australia, around the world and in Israel. We gained strength and support from the knowledge we are a people, not a set of disparate factions within Judaism. The UPJ supports Israel as the permanent home of the Jewish people.
Why a truce in Gaza won’t heal the hate at home – Paul Kelly
The Australian October 11, 2025
The likely end to the Gaza war – an event of hope – will not resolve Australia’s domestic fractures over the conflict or the entrenched anti-Semitism in our country.
As the Middle East enters a new phase, the sad legacy in Australia needs to be met with realism and courage.
Cessation of war in Gaza and release of the hostages will surely curb some of the inflamed hostility towards Israel over its military campaign and its killing of innocents.
But it misunderstands anti-Semitism in Australia to think its embedded sources will disappear or be busted.
That won’t happen because the core target for activists is not Israel’s tactics but Israel’s existence.
This difference is foundational.
The shadow of the Hamas October 7, 2023, massacre and Israel’s war in Gaza will long endure in the politics of the West after the violence stops.
The Palestinian cause over the past two years has become an ideological priority in Western nations including Australia – seared into progressive politics – in an alarming, long-term trend.
This week was dominated by campaigns for protests by pro-Palestinian activists simultaneous with the expected ending of the war off Donald Trump’s remarkable initiative.
What, pray, were the Australian protests about, given the ceasefire, hostage releases and aid flows?
Anyone who thought the main protest motive was peace – just think of the good people who marched across the Sydney Harbour Bridge – would be disabused.
The main motive is to delegitimise and even extinguish Israel, and that’s a permanent if doomed quest. So much for peace.
It was heartening to see Jewish MPs, the Liberal Party’s Julian Leeser and Labor’s Josh Burns, share the McKinnon Prize for Political Leadership.
Yet Leeser warned Australia faced a domestic crisis “that I sadly don’t think will abate even if there is a peace deal”.
Burns earlier in the week lashed Greens leader Larissa Waters for her appalling comments on the ABC when, asked about anti-Semitism, she kept complaining that Labor wasn’t tough enough on Israel, with Burns saying he found her comments “staggering” – the implication being Jews were legitimate targets because of Israeli government actions.
A shocking legacy of the past two years is progressive weakness, often sanction, of the anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic mindsets where progressive leaders are reluctant or even refuse to stand against such prejudice and assaults on social cohesion.
Two domestic flashpoints highlight this story. On Tuesday night, the two-year anniversary of the October 7 massacre by Hamas, and despite bipartisan urgings by political leaders to respect the day, the Stand4Palestine protest group held a rally to celebrate the murderous event under the banner “Glory to Our Martyrs” at Bankstown’s Paul Keating Park in Sydney.
I attended this event as a journalist. It was a fusion of religious belief and aggressive ideology. The speakers had no interest in any agreement involving Hamas to end the Gaza war. Indeed, President Trump’s peace plan was mocked and attacked. While our leaders have denounced the atrocities of Hamas, this event celebrated Hamas.
With a peaceful crowd estimated at 300 to 400, the speeches and atmospherics had two essential meanings – the illegitimacy of Israel as an occupying power in the Middle East and the justification of all means to wage resistance.
Resistance is cast as a religious mission. To a large extent this is inspired as a religious war, as was the October 7 massacre.
It is misleading to think that all Muslims and all protesters think this way. Obviously, most don’t.
But the reality of political causes is that the core activists drive the campaigns and increasingly set the agendas.
The banner promoting the event read: “Confronting Two Years of Genocide – Honouring Two Years of Resistance”.
The protest, in effect, was a religious justification for the murder of Jews and the justification for more murders in the celebration of martyrdom.
Unsurprisingly, Sheik Ibrahim Dadoun, who said after the initial attack two years ago that he was “smiling” and “elated”, told the rally: “The Zionists themselves know the resistance is justified.” Warming to his theme he said: “Zionism is at an end, it’s going to die.” In short, Israel will die as a state.
He was explicit saying that “resistance is justified” including “in all its forms” while ever Palestine was occupied. He likened Zionist organisations to “the Nazi regime that came before us”.
Israel was variously denounced by speakers as a “homicidal, genocidal” state, an “ethno, nationalist, supremist” state.
This mirrors a central theme of the past two years: anti-Zionism has blended into anti-Semitism. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is now a universal chant, and while many protesters seem unsure of what it means, many are sure – the elimination of Israel as a state and Jewish homeland.
While many Muslim groups declined to support this event, Stand4Palestine is linked to the radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir. Zionist Federation of Australia president Jeremy Leibler said the protest should not be allowed. He said: “Speakers have openly supported Hamas, publicly praised the October 7 massacre and called for sharia law to replace democracy in Australia.”
All week our political leaders – Anthony Albanese, NSW Premier Chris Minns and Sussan Ley, among others – called for restraint and respect, no protests on October 7.
Yet their appeals and the Stand4Palestine reaction belong to completely separate worlds.
The fundamentalist Muslim groups that Australia has nurtured now operate to a significant extent in a separate political zone with different values to the Australian norm.
Such differences are now supercharged by the recent conflict: they constitute one group of Australians locked into permanent and dangerous conflict with another group of Australians. Appeals by politicians based on secular rationalism don’t work.They don’t even register.
Uncomfortable truth
Again, this constitutes a minority of Muslims but that minority will presumably grow with more Muslim immigration.
Any such growing religious-based anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism would be an unacceptable outcome for Australia.
The truth is our political leaders don’t know how to manage this.
The second event was the failed effort by the pro-Palestinian movement to secure a large-scale demonstration in the Sydney Opera House forecourt on Sunday night after the NSW Supreme Court rejected on Thursday the bid by the Palestinian Action Group on the grounds of a “public safety risk”.
The court did not address the politics of the issue. But its decision was convincing and a reversal of the approval given in August for the Harbour Bridge demonstration. This decision has saved Australia from the domestic and global ignominy of having the nation’s architectural icon hijacked for a second time in the cause of a heavily slanted anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic display of hostility by one group of Australians against another group, a violation of every sense of multiculturalism.
After their judicial defeat, organisers from the Palestine Action Group were explicit: they wanted the Opera House for political purposes, to maximise their message and symbolism.
They wanted to send a message to the world depicting Australia as a pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli nation. The impact on the same weekend that Trump’s peace initiative was coming to fruition would have been damaging for Australia’s domestic unity and global standing. Organisers attacked Israel as “an apartheid regime that has been suppressing Palestinians since 1947”.
The proposal by the organisers was reckless in terms of public safety and social cohesion. It was strongly opposed by the NSW Premier, who applauded the court’s decision. The court has not stopped a protest.
But by making clear that protesters going to the Opera House would be in contempt of court, it effectively prevented a demonstration at that location. The organisers intend instead to march on Sunday from Hyde Park to Belmore Park.
Organisers had estimated a crowd of 40,000 would have gathered at the Opera House and NSW police in opposing the application told the court the proposal had “disaster written all over it”. The forecourt’s legal capacity is around 6000. The Supreme Court said it would be “irresponsible to allow the public assembly to proceed, irrespective of the political significance of the event”.
Alex Ryvchin from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, said the pro-Palestinian activists were determined to keep going despite the ending of the war in Gaza.
“They claim to be peace activists, but there’re war activists,” he told Sky News. They would have no impact whatsoever on events in the Middle East but they would damage social cohesion in Australia. He warned that two years of “relentless incitement” against the Jewish community would not be easily undone.
The hypocrisy and false moralism of much of the protest movement is described in an article in The Free Press (republished in these pages) by Gaza native and founder and director of Realign For Palestine, Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib.
The author wrote: “Strangely, however, activists and organisations formerly insistent on an immediate ceasefire suddenly appear quite opposed to ending the war in Gaza if it is based on the US proposal, which they have denounced as a colonial attempt to continue the genocide, even though the plan literally stops the actual war …
“I have watched the devolution of the pro-Palestine narrative into widespread adoption of Hamas’s views and positions to such an extent that the Islamist fascist organisation has become legitimised as an actual ‘resistance’ movement. With that false belief comes the false corollary that October 7 was indeed a just, even rational, reaction to decades to failed efforts to free the Palestinian people …
“One of the first steps to freeing Palestinians from the horrors of war is to free them from the ‘Free Palestine Movement’ in the diaspora and Western world. The unholy alliance between the far left, far right and Islamist hooligans who normalise Hamas’s narrative is harmful first and foremost to the Palestinian people.”
None of this is to support or justify the most recent Israeli military campaign in Gaza, driven by Benjamin Netanyahu, with mass casualties and many thousands of civilian deaths – a campaign opposed by senior Israel Defence Forces commanders and most of the Israeli population. The sad reality, however, is that in Australia the extremes of the progressive left have aligned with the extremes of the Palestinian movement to encourage a destructive narrative – exploiting Netanyahu’s military recklessness – their real purpose being to demonise or to eliminate Israel as the desired path to a free Palestine.
This cultural poison has infected Australian institutions over the past two years to an extent that was once inconceivable. In many respects the worse aspect has been the reaction of people in power, institutional leaders and much of the progressive media – the people who aren’t extremist in any way – yet who have turned a blind eye, or been indifferent or played down the obvious damage being done to our social and cultural order. Of course, if it had been the Hansonite right doing such harm their agitated voices would have rung across the land in a daily and deafening cycle.
In mid-year when visiting Israel with an Australian media group we were shown the 42-minute video produced by the IDF from the cameras of the terrorists and soldiers on the day. They showed young and old Israelis being murdered, women being dismantled, corpses being mutilated, beheaded, paraded as trophies, all the while the chant “Allah is Great” coming from the perpetrators. This was a religious event; it was a religious massacre, the sort of violent ritual once performed by Christians and other faiths in past centuries.
Most Australians don’t really comprehend what October 7 was about. The upshot is that far too many rationalist, progressive Australians have misunderstood the elemental drivers of this conflict.
The grave risk is that Jewish Australians will continue to need security protection and special measures to safeguard their lives and families. The danger is that politicians – who have largely failed this community – will interpret the end of the Gaza war as an excuse against firmer anti-Semitism measures.
