Tapestries-70 | Danger

Jews, Australia's complacency, and the lack of an instinct for danger.

Photo by Mariano Carpentier

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I wrote a piece early last year about the experience of Australia’s Jews. I’ve just returned to New York after visiting home in Australia, and in the year since my earlier piece, the situation has worsened dramatically. Jewish homes and institutions are under attack, violent acts are escalating, terrorist attacks are being planned, and nurses are threatening to kill Israeli patients. In light of these escalating threats, the response from broader Australian society has been weak. Why is that?

Just as when I wrote the piece a year ago, there seems to be something unique about the Australian Jewish community’s experience in the Jewish diaspora, and Jewish peers and friends in the US remain shocked by what’s happening there. Many people have written about the what of Australia’s antisemitism, so instead, in this piece I want to discuss the why, and specifically, what it is about Australia and our culture that has allowed the situation to deteriorate to its current state. And to do so, I’m going to rely on an analogy, starting now.

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Nations function like living organisms. When the body politic faces internal threats, it should activate a defense mechanism—an immune response. Said another way, a functioning society should detect threats to its health and stability, and mobilize against them, not just through government, but across institutions, civic society, business, and individuals. The deterioration in the Australian Jewish community’s experience makes clear that our country’s immune system is failing, and as a result, Australian Jews are now experiencing some of the worst Jew-hatred in the Anglosphere.

Australia has historically been a safe and prosperous place for Jews, and while that may remain the case for many in a day-to-day sense, the trajectory is truly alarming. A healthy nation would recognize a threat to one of its communities as a threat to itself because diseases—even if they only impact a very small part of the body—can become chronic if left untreated, and can spread to inflict more damage elsewhere. So let’s continue the analogy, starting with this piece’s central question.

Why has Australia’s immune response been so weak?

To begin, I don’t think it’s because Australia is more antisemitic than comparable countries, even if we do have our fair share of vile antisemites. Instead, I think the immune response has been weak because our cultural instinct toward stability and social cohesion sometimes translates into passivity in the face of rising threats. In this section, I’ll describe what I mean by this instinct, and propose where it comes from.

#1 We have a cultural instinct for complacency and passivity

I know that the attacks on the Jewish community revile most reasonable Australians, but their shock value haven’t been enough to spur much of a response. My contention is that this is because Australian culture is relatively passive and complacent, and the idea that we are the “lucky country” is a useful launching off point for this assertion.

The genesis of the term “lucky country” was a book of the same name by Donald Horne in the 1960s, which was a sharp critique of Australia’s complacency. The book argued that our nation’s success was due more to luck—abundant resources, geographic isolation, and historical alliances—than to strong leadership or innovation. Horne’s contention was that this luck ingrained a sense of complacency that also fostered a broader cultural passivity, where Australians often avoid confrontation, resist ambitious change, and prioritize stability over dynamism, because our “luck” ensures we are able to maintain prosperity without significant challenges.

While this passivity has contributed to a relaxed and socially cohesive society—one we rightly cherish—it also means Australia struggles to respond decisively when faced with internal challenges. In the current context of antisemitism, our passive culture has allowed bad actors and agitators to develop disproportionate sway, because they are met with little resistance. I’m not sure whether the lack of response has been because the wider community doesn’t care, because it believes somebody else will deal with it, or because confronting it is uncomfortable. But either way, the passivity has permitted the attacks to escalate. Bad actors didn’t start by firebombing synagogues or plotting terrorist attacks. They started with the hounding of Jewish businesses, doxxing of Jewish people, and the waving of deeply offensive banners.

Despite the Jewish community’s repeated warnings of what would happen if this behavior was left unchecked or unchallenged, our collective passivity and complacency meant we simply allowed this wound to fester. There was no major immune response to these initial acts of aggression. As any doctor will tell you, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And unfortunately, today the country is left facing the dual (and much harder) challenge of both stamping out violent and antisemitic acts, and regaining the trust of the Jewish community.

#2 An underdeveloped instinct for detecting danger

Australia has been blessed with an incredible multi-generational run of security, stability and prosperity. We have generally avoided the upheavals of war and economic volatility that our peers elsewhere in the world have had to suffer through. As Jews, we’d call this having great mazal (“luck”). But I believe this luck partially explains our complacency, and that in turn, our complacency means that we haven’t developed an instinct to recognize threats or danger. To explain this further, let’s reflect briefly on the ideas we consider the core of Australian identity and mythology.

Our national identity is a collection of norms and attitudes, including “mateship”, the “fair go”, and the “lucky country”. Our founding myth, the ANZAC spirit, while deeply ingrained in Australia’s national consciousness, is rooted in a war fought on foreign soil in service of another empire, rather than a defining struggle for Australia’s own sovereignty or purpose. It’s as if camaraderie, stability and prosperity themselves are our national ideals. The comparison to some of our Western peers is instructive. The United States, forged in revolution, has embedded the idea of liberty and individual rights as a core national instinct. Israel is bound by the imperative of Jewish survival and national rebirth. And France’s national identity, rooted in secular republicanism, was forged through revolutionary upheavals.

To be abundantly clear, I am not suggesting these countries—and specifically their responses to crises—are a model for Australia to emulate, as they are all beset by significant challenges, shortcomings and disunity. My point is simply that their historical challenges have led their countries to develop national ideas and ethos’s with a highly attuned sense of danger, and with a bias for action (whether productive or not) when they detect emerging challenges. Said another way, while their response to crises may be imperfect, they’re much more conscious of when said consequential crises are bubbling up. We have the opposite problem in Australia. Our history and society have been so stable and prosperous that we’ve lost the instinct to identify danger, and as a result, we are passive and complacent when internal threats do emerge.

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One of the most striking elements of the Jewish community’s experience of escalating antisemitism is the lack of any sense of national urgency, and no instinctive recognition that clear moral lines have been crossed. I am certain that if it was another community—Christians, Muslims, or the LGBTQ+ community—being subject to the same level of violence and vitriol, there would be a much swifter and stronger societal response. Our country’s antibodies have been intensely culturally conditioned to detect threats to other minority communities, and the immune response when these groups are threatened is ruthless. For what it’s worth, I would call progressive overreach and self-righteousness a classic example of an auto-immune disease, but we digress. My point is that antisemitism and Jew hatred is clearly different, but that this qualitative difference is not sufficient to explain Australian Jews’ experience. To explain it, I believe we must acknowledge that complacency and passivity have been central to the escalation of Jew hatred in our country.

Assessing Australia’s immune response

My sense is that the two areas in which Australia’s response has been most deficient is through the weakness of our leaders, and the relative silence from our non-Jewish friends.

Leadership matters. The person or people leading a country set the tone for its important conversations. They set the starting posture and shape the nature of our debates. Anthony Albanese is probably a decent bloke, but he is a completely flaccid leader. It drives me insane whenever I read his statements in response to escalating acts of violence against Jews. “There is a technical process”. “We unequivocally condemn”. “The Victorian Police and the Australian Federal Police will be a having a meeting”. It’s embarrassing. Compare Albanese’s vague procedural statements to incoming Senate Majority Leader Jon Thune’s recent words: “To the Jewish people around the world, my message to you is this: Reinforcements are on the way”. Australia is not the US, but my point is that leadership still sets the tone, and the contrast could not be starker. Australia needs leaders willing to bend the arc of our national conversations, not hide behind bureaucratic formalities. And if you want to look closer to home, Howard and Hawke provide models of what strong leadership looks like too.

Shifting from the national to the personal, I have been deeply disappointed in the lack of response or solidarity—even in private—from many of my non-Jewish Australian friends and peers, and the majority of Jewish friends I speak with describe a similar lack of outreach. On the flipside, I’m very grateful to those friends who have reached out, even with a single line text, because it makes a difference. This is not meant to be an aggressive and anonymous attack on people reading this. I know the lack of outreach comes from a place of discomfort and passivity, not malice, so the feedback isn’t intended to be damning. But I do hope it compels some reflection, as the response (or lack of) is inconsistent with my model of friendship or mateship, which includes holding each other to account when appropriate. A friend once called me out on my lack of interest in a terrible situation unfolding in his home country. And if I’m being honest, I didn’t react particularly well to being called out. That experience has stayed with me. So to any friends reading this, I hope you take this reflection in the constructive and understanding spirit with which I share it.

Bringing it together

Australians should not take the lives they lead for granted. Stability and prosperity aren’t self-sustaining. They require vigilance, moral clarity, and the willingness to defend what makes us who we are. In the context of a historically stable society, the current crisis for the Jewish community is actually an opportunity for the rest of the country to more clearly articulate what it is we stand for, and what we’re willing to do in pursuit of our national ideas.

Elections matter. I have no partisan or party loyalty, and will be voting on one issue: whether Jewish Australians can feel safe in Australia. Under the current government, they don’t. I don’t love Peter Dutton, but I believe that under his leadership, the country would respond more decisively to the threat facing Jewish Australians, and that as a result, my family and friends would be safer. That’s more than enough for me. But leadership isn’t the only problem. Political change is just one piece of a broader shift that needs to happen. Institutions, businesses, and individuals need to make a choice: Will they continue to tolerate the intolerable, or will they push back? If you are a non-Jewish Australian and you are troubled by what is happening, don’t assume someone else will act. If you believe this country is special, act like it. Reach out, and contribute in a small way to ensuring this poison doesn’t continue spreading unchecked. If you run a business or institution, ensure Jewish Australians are as safe and supported as any other group. While it may be scary to stick your head up, I assure you the culture is shifting back towards valuing these important shows of strength.

At the same time, the Jewish community must also recognize that it must adapt to the new environment we find ourselves in. As Australians, the complacency and passivity I refer to here applies to us too. Our community must be more assertive in defending itself, because history is unambiguous on this point: no one will fight for us if we will not fight for ourselves. So it’s on all of us—politicians, Jewish community leaders, and our supporters—to get more aggressive and direct in the way we confront the challenges we’re facing, because we’re in a new paradigm. Australia will either remain a country where Jews can live, grow, and contribute without fear, or it will slowly become something smaller, meaner, and unrecognizable. I want to believe in the former. But right now, I don’t take that for granted. And neither should you.

Jews have been forced to develop a sense for danger over millennia of persecution and upheaval. Vandalism, torching cars, fire bombings, and now nurses who claim they will kill Israeli patients, are all signals of societal danger. You must decide if these are the types of people you want as your neighbours, let alone as your nurses. Jews have made enormous contributions to Australian business, culture, arts, philanthropy, and healthcare (where practitioners “have been warning about extreme content posted by other doctors and nurses online”). So to non-Jewish Australians reading this: we offer our sense for danger as the latest contribution to Australian society. What you choose to do with it is up to you.