Antisemitism in Australia and the Banality of Evil

'Ignorance' not 'malice': how the pro-Palestine movement’s totalitarian streak goes unchecked

Woodrow White, The Banality Of Evil, 2019

When Hamas launched its attack on Israel on October 7 last year I was in Melbourne, home to the vast majority of Australia’s Jews. Since arriving in Europe last December, I have observed the rise of what I take to be a distinctively Australian strain of antisemitism in my country from afar, in particular from Hungary, which has and continues to be one of the safest places in Europe for Jews since the attack.

At some point I will compile my extensive notes on this period into a long piece. For now, however, I will share with you one note that illustrates just how strikingly different the two countries are on this ‘issue’.

Somewhat predictably, Australian universities have turned into pro-Palestine encampments like the ones seen across Canada, the US, and the UK. The response from the left wing government in power to this can be summed up by a statement made by Australia’s Education Minister that chants of “from the river to the sea” and “intifada” mean “different things to different people”.

Somewhat differently, less than a week after the October 7 attack, Orban emphatically stated that Hungary will not allow sympathy protests for terrorists. Budapest’s left wing mayor immediately stated this was the left’s position too and that this “was one thing we and the government agree on”. “This is not a matter of debate or consideration, it’s a conviction”, he insisted, “Budapest says no to terror and no to those seeking to relativise terror in any way”.

How is it that the left in Budapest, itself a left-leaning city, managed to capture the issue in one: the relativisation of terror while much of the Anglosphere equivocates and mounts false, and hypocritical, appeals to ‘freedom of speech’?

I will leave you with that thought and present two pieces I wrote for the Spectator Australia on a recent antisemitic incident that occurred in Melbourne. I wrote two versions of this op-ed as my initial one named a business and a staff member of that business and this could prove legally tricky for the speccie. Both address the event in question, however, turned out slightly different in the end, and the Spectator piece published gives an idea of just how rife antisemitism has become. It begins:

Last month Prime Minister Anthony Albanese appointed Jewish lawyer and businesswoman Jillian Segal as Australia’s first antisemitism special envoy. While largely welcomed, Palestinian rights supporters have argued that the definition of antisemitism – taken from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) – could ‘chill political expressions of criticism of Israel as well as support for Palestinian rights’. According to The Conversation ‘Supporters of the IHRA definition argue such criticism is permissible, but not when it uses antisemitic tropes or dehumanisation’. Sound straightforward enough? Apparently not: ‘The debate is highly contentious…’ the authors conclude. You can make your own mind up about the definition here.

What is of more concern is the reason the government found it necessary to install an antisemitism special envoy in the first place. In the two-month period following the October 7 attack on Israel, The Executive Council of Australian Jewry reported a 738 per cent rise in antisemitic incidents compared to the same period the previous year. This year the data indicates a 591 per cent rise, with as many incidents since October 7 as there were for all of 2023.

One hopes that Jillian Segal’s appointment will quell – and this is where my opinion may differ from IHRA critics – cases of antisemitism dismissed as stemming from ‘ignorance’ rather than ‘malice’, that have no doubt contributed to these shocking numbers. It should go without saying that ignorantia juris non excusat, however, the distinction between ‘ignorance’ and ‘malice’ is frequently made, and the former used to dismiss or excuse cases of antisemitism when it comes to ‘hot button’ issues like the Israeli-Palestinian war.

Put differently, while Hanlon’s razor ‘never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity’ is a useful one, things become a bit more complicated when ‘ignorant’ actions performed in the name of a cause are dismissed or not adequately addressed.

Such cases should invite us to interrogate the cause itself, in this case the pro-Palestine movement, and ask whether such a movement might have a particular tendency to breed idiots.

You can read the rest of the piece ‘When Hanlon’s Razor Fails’ here: https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/when-hanlons-razor-fails/

My somewhat different, unpublished version is below, and any international readers confused by ‘Officeworks’ need only to know is that it is a large chain of office supplies stores.

The pro-Palestine movement’s totalitarian streak goes unchecked

Officeworks’ response to the clip of a self-declared ‘pro-Palestine’ Officeworks employee refusing to serve a Jewish customer released by the Anti-Defamation Commission last week confirmed what I have suspected for some time. Much of the antisemitism that is on the rise in Australia has been dismissed as cases of mere ‘ignorance’ while the totalitarian nature of the pro-Palestine movement’s apparatus remains ignored.

The video, which captures the staff member stating that “for political reasons” she is “not comfortable” laminating an article printed in the Jewish News featuring a photograph of a group who had visited Israel holding Israeli and Australian flags, has left many shocked and appalled, but also asking how on Earth this ‘incident’ happened in the first place.

New information about the employee and Officeworks’ response offers some clues. It has now emerged that the employee was involved in another antisemitic incident on January 28 when she told a Jewish customer that it was “impossible” to print the pictures in the size she wanted “because the Jews had used all the paper”. According to managing director Sarah Hunter, Officeworks was alerted to “the matter” shortly after it occurred and “At the time, we concluded that the incident was linked to ignorance, not malice”. The employee was given a warning, relocated to a different store, and a visit to Melbourne’s Holocaust Museum booked for March 5, as part of “additional training”. The second incident occurred on March 4 and Officeworks stated that they were not made aware of this until March 13.

And Officeworks is, of course, “deeply sorry”. However, their failure to take swift action has left the company with “many questions to answer” according to Anti-Defamation Commission chair Dvir Abramovich, not least of: “At what point does an employee’s discriminatory behaviour and rhetoric get them dismissed?” 

But the language used by Officeworks also raises questions. The ‘staff member’ was ‘ignorant’ not ‘malicious’. The actions taken following the initial incident “were appropriate given the youth, inexperience, and clear remorse of the team member”. Any remorse displayed after the first incident was evidently feigned, but what of Officeworks’ emphasis on ‘ignorance’ as opposed to ‘malice’?

Oddly enough, Sarah Hunter’s distinction between ‘ignorance’ and ‘malice’ recalls philosopher and political thinker Hannah Arendt’s concept of ‘the banality of Evil’. In 1961 Arendt attended and reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the principal organiser of the systematic deportation of millions of Jews to extermination camps from 1941.

Throughout the trial, Eichmann presented not as a hateful fanatic, but as a man of unsettling mediocrity. His apparent lack of malice led Arendt to conclude that his defining characteristic was a lack of critical thinking, seemingly explained in part by the fact that he was a ‘joiner’ and his defence that he “feared to live a leaderless and difficult individual life, in which I would receive no directives from anybody.”

Banality, in the sense that his actions were motivated by a complacency that was wholly unexceptional, seemed to explain Evil understood in the context of a “dilemma between the unspeakable horror of the deeds and the undeniable ludicrousness of the man who perpetrated them”.

It turned out that Eichmann was far from unexceptional, he was an exceptionally antisemitic braggart. Recordings made while he was in hiding in 1957 but only made available in 1998 revealed his ‘I was just a cog in the machine’ line as a ruse. Four years before the trial Eichmann had stated that “Every fibre in me resists that we did something wrong. I must tell you honestly, had we killed 10.3 million Jews, then I would be satisfied and say, good, we have exterminated an enemy”.

While Arendt was wrong to use Eichmann as an example of the banality of evil, the upshot of the concept and her book – that totalitarian regimes have a unique ability to crush individual moral conscience through relentless propaganda, a blurring of the lines between truth and lies, and the constant creation of enemies both real and imagined, remains relevant for us today.

We are not living under a totalitarian regime, however much of the ‘pro-Palestine’ movement bubble is deeply ideological and views the world through a Manichaean ‘coloniser/colonised’ lens. This Good vs Evil divide dehumanises those on the ‘wrong side’ and a blind faith in the authority of the ‘right side’ replaces critical thinking, along with common sense and decency. 

Maybe this is why the employee was seemingly having difficulty between identifying as ‘pro-Palestine’ and choosing not to buy a Hyundai (one of the companies on the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) list) for example, and identifying as ‘pro-Palestine’ and refusing to serve a Jewish customer?

Then again, the employee does seem quite confused about Palestine. In the video she is shown wearing a rainbow LGBTQI+ lanyard, a sign that she either belongs to this community or is an ‘ally’ and supportive of their rights. As Benjamin Netanyahu put it in his recent address to Congress, protesters holding up signs proclaiming, ‘Gays for Gaza’ may as well be holding up signs saying ‘Chickens for KFC’. Such ideological crudity—a willingness to go along with a movement blindly—recalls those who attend protests chanting ‘from the river to the sea’ without knowing which river and sea the slogan refers to.

Arendt stated of Eichmann’s trial that “everybody could see that this man was not a "monster," but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown”. While off the mark when it came to the man in question, Arendt found the idea that a ‘clown’ could commit evil as, if not more, disturbing than the actions of a ‘monster’, and insisted that moral choice remains even under totalitarianism. In short, ‘banality’, ‘stupidity’, ‘ignorance’, and above all a lack of critical thinking are to be taken very seriously, indeed.

If as Officeworks claims, the employee was an “ignorant” clown, the fact that this “ignorance” stems from a pro-Palestine movement with a totalitarian streak must be acknowledged. MP’s David Davis and Julian Lesser have asserted that the government, and not only Officeworks, must stand up to antisemitism and start taking its rise in Australia seriously. This must involve not only standing up to monsters but acknowledging the pro-Palestine movement’s tendency to breed clowns.

LS

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