Jewish nurse ‘urged to empathise’ with Bondi gunmen
At the Royal Commission today, a Jewish health worker explained how she was urged to put herself in the shoes of the Bondi gunmen during an employer-organised counselling session.
The veteran midwife, whose cousin was one of those taken hostage in Israel and killed by Hamas on October 7, 2023, said she went to counselling the day after the Bondi attack to deal with her grief and anger at the government.
Flowers left near the site of the Bondi Beach terrorist attack
“I felt really angry at the time because I felt very betrayed by our government, that they failed the Jewish people but also Australians, by not addressing the risk of fundamental Islamism here,” the woman told the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion on Thursday.
“I felt that wasn’t healthy, and it wasn’t going to help me provide health care services.”
During the session, she said the counsellor urged her to understand why the men might have committed the massacre and told her to imagine herself sitting across from a Gazan mother.
“The counsellor spoke to me and said, ‘well, can you perhaps put yourself in the position of those men and try and understand why they might have acted that way?'” the woman said.
“I thought I’ve actually misheard her. She cannot have said that to me.”
The commission is holding two weeks of public hearings into the lived experiences of Australia’s Jewish community.
A failure of journalism
Former newspaper editor Michael Gawenda told the inquiry on Thursday there had been relative silence on antisemitism in Australia, which he described as a “failure of journalism”.
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Mr Gawenda, who was editor of The Age from 1997 to 2004, came to Australia aged two after his parents fled the Holocaust.
He accused some journalists of becoming activists for a cause he believes perpetuates harmful narratives about Jews, Israel and Zionism.
He identified some journalists signing letters and petitions calling for Jewish voices, “pro-Zionist voices”, not to be featured in the media, but instead to feature Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices.
“I thought this was unethical. This is not the way we do journalism,” he said.
“We go out with open minds. We allow people to have their say, and we don’t decide who has a right to speak and who has not a right to speak.”
Mr Gawenda said the Australian media had failed to report on the lived experiences of the Jewish community and instead had given voice to claims that antisemitism was a concocted notion designed to silence criticism of Israel.
“There’s been an enormous failure of journalism in Australia,” he said.
“Where is the coverage in the media of what these actual communities are experiencing?”
Former High Court judge Virginia Bell, who is heading the commission, asked Mr Gawenda to give his definition of Zionism.
“I am deeply connected to Israel. I have family there. I love the country in many ways, for all its flaws,” he said.
“So if that’s a Zionist, then I’m a Zionist.”
For a full transcript of Gawenda’s submission, see here
By Duncan Murray/AAP
