For many years, no one spoke about Babi Yar. The Holocaust was remembered largely through the prism of Auschwitz, the slaughterhouse of a million Jews and the epitome of industrialised death. Kristallnacht, the other major focus of Holocaust commemoration represented the beginning of the end.
The defence of Jake Lynch and the students who stormed the lecture theatre at the University of Sydney during a talk by Colonel Richard Kemp, has been speciously framed as a struggle for the right of free speech and dissent.
On July 25, as Israel’s war with Hamas raged, my niece, who is nearly 5 years of age, arrived at her Jewish day school in Perth to find the words “Zionist scum” daubed on the outer walls of the school.
When Dr Norman Finkelstein, an icon of the anti-Israel movement, blasted the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign as a “duplicitous, disingenuous cult,” his words were met with a great sense of betrayal among the campaign’s adherents. After all, Finkelstein was once revered as a veteran campaigner who among many other things, called Israel a “satanic state.”
The Government’s decision to revert to Howard-era voting patterns on Israel at the United Nations General Assembly has been criticised as a betrayal of the Palestinians.
