On December 14th, two gunmen opened fire on a celebration marking the first night of Hanukkah at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, killing 15 and injuring more than 40. The gunmen, a father and son, have since been linked to the Islamic State. Immediately, as observers near and far were just beginning to process and mourn, bad actors rushed in to claim the narrative. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered a rebuke of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, linking the antisemitic attack to Albanese’s call for a Palestinian state. Australian antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal similarly linked the attack to a peaceful August 3rd Palestine solidarity march over Harbour Bridge attended by 300,000. She used the opportunity to promote her controversial 20-point plan to combat antisemitism, which would necessitate the broad adoption of the flawed IHRA definition of antisemitism, mandate Trumpian funding cuts to universities, and crown herself arbiter of acceptable speech related to Israel/Palestine in the media. American politicians quickly weighed in to express solidarity with the state of Israel and link the violence to the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. Some prominent American Jewish figures like New York Times columnist Bret Stephens and former US antisemitism envoy Deborah Lipstadt claimed—without evidence and before anything was known about the shooters—that the attack was downstream from use of the phrase “globalize the intifada,” a dig at New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani who chose not to condemn the phrase.

On this episode of On the Nose, Jewish Currents editor-in-chief Arielle Angel and senior editor Mari Cohen spoke with Sarah Schwartz, the Melbourne-based executive officer of the new progressive, independent Jewish organization the Jewish Council of Australia. They parsed the various responses, from Australia to the US to Israel; explored the folly of conflating the ideology of the Islamic State with Palestinian national or solidarity politics; and reflected on the role and responsibility of the Jewish left amid antisemitic violence.

Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for producing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).”

Articles Mentioned and Further Reading

“Jews, antisemitism and power in Australia,” Max Kaiser, Meanjin

“Bondi Beach Is What ‘Globalize the Intifada’ Looks Like,” Bret Stephens, The New York Times

Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement on Bondi...

This year saw the release of two memoirs concerned with the Palestinian diasporic experience. Tareq Baconi’s Fire in Every Direction is a story of queer adolescent unrequited love, braided together with a family history of displacement from Haifa to Beirut to Amman. Sarah Aziza’s The Hollow Half is a story of surviving anorexia and the ways that the body holds the intergenerational grief of the ongoing Nakba. In this episode of On the Nose, Jewish Currents editor-in-chief Arielle Angel speaks with Baconi and Aziza about what it means to claim Palestinianness as a political identity, not just a familial one, and the radical necessity of turning silence—around queerness, Gaza, the Nakba—into speech.

Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for producing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).”

Books Mentioned and Further Reading

The Hollow Half by Sarah Aziza

Fire in Every Direction by Tareq Baconi

Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance by Tareq Baconi

“Al-Atlal, Now: On Language and Silence in Gaza’s Wake,” Sarah Aziza, Literary Hub

“The Work of the Witness,” Sarah Aziza, Jewish Currents

“The Trap of Palestinian Participation,” Tareq Baconi, Jewish Currents

Black Atlantic by Paul Gilroy

“Selling the Holocaust,” Arielle Angel, Menachem Kaiser, and Maia Ipp, Jewish Currents

Transcript forthcoming.

In spring 2023, journalist and filmmaker Antony Loewenstein published The Palestine Laboratory, a book tracing the way that Israeli military technology and weaponry, battle-tested on Palestinians, is exported around the world. Lowenstein argues that as Israel’s surveillance and combat technologies are sold far and wide, we can expect to see the forms of violence carried out in Gaza, for example, appear elsewhere in the world. Last month, Jewish Currents published an article by Rhys Machold called “The Myth of Israeli Innovation,” which takes a critical look at what Machold has termed “the laboratory thesis” and examines how it obscures Israel’s dependence on powerful allies, while doing PR for the overhyped Israeli tech sector.

On this episode of On the Nose, Jewish Currents editor-in-chief Arielle Angel hosts Loewenstein and Machold for a comradely debate about the “laboratory thesis” and whether it serves a narrative of Zionist exceptionalism. The guests discuss how advanced Israeli weapons really are; how “Israeli” they are, given the role of Western governments and corporations in their development; and how much of Israel’s “innovation” should be considered technological as opposed to political. They also explore whether or not Israel is on the verge of collapse, and how to characterize the balance of power between Israel and the US.

Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for producing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).”

Articles and Media Mentioned and Further Reading

The Palestine Laboratory by Antony Loewenstein

The Palestine Laboratory, documentary series by Antony Loewenstein on Al Jazeera

“The Myth of Israeli Innovation,” Rhys Machold, Jewish Currents

“Reconsidering the laboratory thesis: Palestine/Israel and the geopolitics of representation,” Rhys Machold, Political Geography

“How Palantir, Google & Amazon armed Israel's genocide in Gaza,” interview with Antony Loewenstein on The Big Picture, Middle East Eye

“‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza,” Yuval Abraham, +972 Magazine

“Profiting from Terror in Cold War Latin America: Bishara Bahbah’s Israel and Latin America: The Military Connection,” Alexander Aviña, Liberated Texts

“From Domination to Extermination,” Shir Hever, Phenomenal World

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