The Day After
On October 8, 2023, a day after the massacre of 1,200 people in Israel by Hamas terrorists, I called the only Palestinian Australian I knew. I feared reprisal against Palestinian civilians and expressed hope that these attacks would not incur any more horror. I was invited to an Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN) fundraiser that evening, where I met Nasser Mashni and watched Adam Bandt work the room.
The massacre went unmentioned. Hundreds of people ate and drank merrily, and speeches were delivered about resisting the Zionist entity. I was introduced as ‘one of the good ones’. I left early, overcome with anxiety and confusion. The person who had invited me has since been fired from the University of Sydney for posting on X: ‘I want Zionists executed’. He has since re-enrolled at the university as a student.
I was single and dating, and found myself inundated with purity tests on dates. One woman I went out with a few times enlisted a friend to pepper me with conspiratorial accusations about the Jewish state. Why was I being asked to speak about Israel? My concerns were with the victims, their families, and the hundreds of hostages dragged into tunnels.
I found myself repeatedly separating myself from anything associated with Israel or Zionism, a knee-jerk reaction to the interrogations of my peers. Hostility was directed towards one element of me — an element I was being given the option to amputate, as though I were being asked to renounce the continued existence of a Jewish state as gangrenous. I believed that if I could demonstrate that element was misunderstood, everything would be fine.
What alarmed me was the confidence with which people who knew almost nothing about Jews, Judaism, Jewishness, Israel, or the Levant developed strong opinions about the victims of a massacre. These opinions appeared to justify what had been done to them and to stigmatise people around the world who were considered proximal to them. I was expected to share in the collective punishment of the victims. I was also expected to participate in the condemnation of anyone unwilling to join the witch hunt that followed.
The strangest moments came when strangers — friends of friends, or now ex-friends — were appointed to explain terms like ‘colonialism’ and ‘intifada’ to me through the sharing of infographics and 1960s antizionist Soviet propaganda. Radicalised youth considered their hounding of me — a secular, Australian, diaspora Jew — to be a good-faith attempt to deradicalise me from my belief that tearing down hostage posters and calling for intifada were wrong, and that the continued existence of a Jewish state was not unreasonable.
I had attended anti-Netanyahu demonstrations prior to October 7. I had spent years criticising aspects of Israeli policy, just as I criticised Australia, the United States, Pakistan, Russia, Afghanistan, Iran, and other countries. It took me many years to learn that no form of criticism is sufficient to pass an antizionist’s purity test. Criticism did not satisfy the demands of the bigotry I was experiencing, and it still doesn’t.
Friends began posting their opinions online, engaging me in conversation, and seeking my counsel. Many appeared to expect me to be one of ‘the good Jews’. As a historically left-wing Jew, I was expected to join a movement directed against the continued existence of a Jewish state.
I knew the role they wanted me to perform because I had once performed it myself.
My Former Anti-Zionism
For several years in my 20s, I considered myself an anti-Zionist. This was before I had even read a book about Israel, spoken meaningfully with Jews or Israelis about the Jewish state, or developed any substantial relationships within Jewish communal life. I lived outside the Jewish community between the ages of 18 and 28. I played in bands, studied, worked, did too many drugs, and found fraternity in radical left-wing communities.
My anti-Zionism was convenient, not considered. It allowed the people around me to express hostility towards Zionists, Israel, and Jewish collective life while presenting me as evidence that their hostility could not be anti-Jewish. My Jewishness became a laundromat for antizionist bigotry, and I participated willingly in that process. I did not understand the system I was helping to sustain.
My relationship with Jewish life changed gradually. In my late 20s, after years of separation from the Jewish community, I found myself living among Jews in Melbourne’s southern suburbs, working with Jews, dating Jews, and building connections with my local community. Whether it was walking my dog, grocery shopping, or chatting to neighbours, I seemed to have fallen back into a tribe I’d walked away from.
I made no conscious decision to build a Jewish life. It happened through proximity, friendship, work, love, routine, and the generosity of Jews who knew better than to dismiss my rougher edges.
I found myself in synagogues and standing by chuppot. I dated a Jewish woman. On Friday nights, I walked my dog through Caulfield and Elsternwick, the warm glow of candles and challot drifting through open windows.
I began to recognise a Jewish identity within myself that had always been present, even when I lacked the language to describe it. In high school, I’d been called a stingy Jew if I’d refused to lend a peer a dollar — a rich Jew when I did. At university, on two separate occasions, my mother had been referred to not as a doctor, but as a ‘Jewish doctor’. A partner in my early 20s would make jokes about me ‘Jewing’ her, yet saw nothing problematic about her own family fleeing South Africa after apartheid ended.
Split Cognition
My maternal grandmother was born in Budapest in 1933 and escaped Hungary in January 1939 with her parents. She was raised in Lane Cove, Sydney. During the war, her father was once detained on suspicion of being a German spy. Her mother cut a deal with the local priest — he’d supply a character reference to the police if they agreed to enrol my grandmother in a local Catholic school.
They hid their Jewishness in Sydney. My grandmother was baptised — a practice among many Hungarian Jews that predated the Holocaust — and was raised as a Hungarian Australian. Her parents told her they were ‘political refugees’. She married a white Australian and raised three girls, who attended Catholic schools. It was only upon the death of her parents that she opened boxes full of old, buried documents. Her nationality on her birth certificate listed her as an Israelite, ‘ISR’.
When I speak to her today about it, she continues to live in split cognition. She knew she was Jewish, deep down, but had done just as her family in Hungary had done for generations and buried it.
I repeatedly asked her about her hesitation to take an Ancestry.com test. In 2024, she confided in me: ‘What if I’m a changeling?’ For centuries, Jews have been forced to invent themselves within the parameters considered reasonable by our oppressors. These parameters change in accordance with what flavour of persecution any given era deems permissible. The fluidity of Jewish identity is a response to our persecutors’ changing appetites.
My mother took us to synagogue when we were children because, in her words, she did not want the Nazis to win. The Nazis did not win World War Two. But in my family, they came pretty close. And yet, to blame the Nazis for Jewish erasure — or to use the term ‘antisemitism’ as it is used in popular parlance — is to mistake that horrifying period at the beginning of the 20th century for an anomaly. It’s happening again.
My mother retained a stubborn attachment to the part of herself that others had tried to erase. She is not a stubborn person. But on this matter — the matter of her Jewishness — she has never faltered. I could not be prouder of my mother. ‘Life is not a dress rehearsal’, she says. She’s right.
She did not know how to conduct every ritual or explain every observance. Yet she knew enough to ensure that we attended synagogue at Newtown or Emanuel often enough to remember who we were. My grandmother offered resistance at one point, asking my mother to make sure they weren’t writing down any of our names. This was in the late ’90s.
She took us to the homes of Jewish family friends for the High Holidays. I watched families who had remained more closely connected to Jewish culture. I watched how they ate, how they washed their hands, what they said before and after meals, and how they interacted with one another. I learnt pieces of prayers by rote that I never understood, and I knew to buy two challot instead of one — but not why. I joked with our rebbetzin as I passed the shule on a Saturday morning a couple of months ago, AirPods in my ears, phone in hand: ‘I am Level 1 Shabbat’.
Our local shule, Newtown Synagogue, has become a beacon of resilience and humanity in an otherwise hostile locale. Among Jews today, I feel a kinship unlike any other. An acknowledgement of something shared. A candle, held by so many hands, weathering storm after storm to light the way for our children.
My mother gave us what she could. She preserved a connection that violence, displacement, assimilation, and shame had nearly severed.
The Jewish Double Bind
In high school, I began to understand my Jewishness through ordinary encounters. Jews who were friends were referred to as ‘The Jew Crew’. It was more loaded than I felt permitted to let on. ‘The Coin Game’, also called ‘The Running of the Jew’, involved throwing coins into a circle and assaulting the boy silly enough to try to brave picking them up.
Boys sitting at the back of the class would jeer ‘Jewshua’ and ‘Jewshua Jewbelstein’ but feign familiarity should I express any misgivings. To draw attention to any of these microaggressions was to be considered too sensitive or to be weaponising Jewish victimhood. So I didn’t. I didn’t want to look soft. All transgressions against Jews pale in significance to the Holocaust. G-d forbid a Jew express discomfort short of being shot into the Danube.
This double bind appears throughout Jewish life. Jewish persecution is dismissed because Jews are imagined as wealthy, powerful, coordinated, or protected. Anti-Jewish bigotry undermines attempts to make anti-Jewish bigotry visible and to ensure it is dealt with. When violence is committed against us, we are accused of causing it. Jewish victims are recast as Jewish oppressors receiving their comeuppance. Holocaust inversion, October 7 inversion, Bondi inversion. It’s all the same.
At university, I was identified by my ethnicity long before I disclosed that my mother was Jewish. Jewishness was treated as an explanatory category, carrying insinuations about profession, status, wealth, and social position. Attending Sydney Grammar was taken as evidence not of my parents’ many sacrifices, but of their involvement in an international, ethnocentric wealth-and-status hoarding enterprise.
As I progressed through my 20s, my Jewishness gave others permission to express ideas about Jews without overt racial or religious overtones. The label ‘Zionist’ could deliver the full brunt of anti-Jewish bigotry, sanitised by the language of politics and social justice. My assent to this bastardisation of language and dignity lent those ideas legitimacy. I didn’t understand.
After October 7
Within months of October 7, my life in Melbourne began to feel alien.
Relationships I had maintained across Victoria, the ACT, and New South Wales seemed to fall through my fingers. I watched friends post ‘glory to the martyrs’ and ‘long live the intifada’ before the blood had even dried on the bodies of people murdered, raped, and mutilated in southern Israel. It felt as if the life I’d worked so hard to build was being overwritten by some new historical arc — one that cared not for the record, but for the emotional needs of today’s most frustrated and frail.
I spent too much time wondering whether I was being overly sensitive. I spent too much time attempting to quell the anxieties of Jews around me. I spent too much time believing this was nothing more than a hiccup — that my friends would wake up to themselves if they could only see the October 7 footage, if they understood the events of 1948, 1967, 1972, and 1994, the Hezbollah bombings in Argentina, the Oslo Accords, the intifadas, the Abraham Accords, Iranian proxies, antizionist eliminationism, eschatological bloodthirst, and recycled libels. Facts would prevail. Reality would prevail. Humanity would prevail.
In early 2024, Burgertory, a burger shop a few hundred metres from my then-home in Caulfield, was burnt down. Its owner had been using social media to spread antizionist conspiracies. When I heard about the fire, I felt sick at the possibility that someone from my community might have attacked the shop. I wanted to make a public statement. I wanted to stand in solidarity against this kind of hate, wherever it came from. Whatever I thought of this business owner’s hatemongering, we do not set fire to the property of those we do not like.
I heard that a rally was being organised nearby and walked towards the site. As much as I wanted nothing to do with an antizionist rally, I wanted to exercise whatever control I possibly could over the disaster.
As I approached, I heard tyres screeching and engines revving. Trucks full of young men of Middle Eastern appearance tore aggressively and menacingly through the quiet residential streets. They accelerated at speeds that could have killed someone. These are streets where children play, where teens wander after school, Slurpees in hand, using slang that makes the rest of us feel old.
Then I heard a truck approaching from behind me.
The driver crossed the street, mounted the pavement, and drove directly towards several Jewish people walking along the road. At the last moment, the truck swerved back onto the street and continued driving.
It came within feet of killing people.
Shortly afterwards, another truck pulled over, and a group of young men got out. They moved towards the burnt-out shop, chests out, ready to provoke an altercation. One of them walked directly into a pedestrian, attempting to knock him over with his shoulder. The man stumbled and hurried away.
These people had driven to Caulfield to intimidate us. They appeared to hold local Jewish residents responsible for the suspected burning of the restaurant in the same way that antizionism holds Jews everywhere responsible for allegations concerning Israel. The episode distilled a recurring pattern: Jews were collectively accused before the facts were known.
Every Jew in Caulfield became a possible target.
The fire was later reported to have stemmed from a criminal dispute unrelated to Jews or Israel. The Jewish community had nothing to do with it. The stigma remained. The justification for violence against Jews lingered. This is a story as old as time.
Leaving Melbourne
Antizionism has driven many of the people I knew and loved from my life.
People who stood by me through alcoholism and drug addiction exited my life shortly after October 7.
It was not my having often been a volatile menace to society that people objected to. No. The straw that broke the camel’s back came when, at five years sober, working full-time and volunteering in drug and alcohol services, I had the audacity to use social media to draw attention to the stigmatisation of Australian Jews.
I said that ripping down hostage posters was disgusting.
I asked why posters calling to ‘globalise the intifada’ were being marked with swastikas near my home.
I asked why non-Jews were leaving those posters in place.
These statements generated months of interrogation, accusation, and hostility.
The people who had forgiven serious conduct in my past could not tolerate my objections to the public humiliation and intimidation of Jews.
I packed up my business in Caulfield. I sold the equipment and possessions associated with the life I had built. I placed what remained in my ute and drove back to Sydney.
Starting Again
When I arrived in Sydney, I started again.
I put down my tools and returned to writing. I began submitting work to newspapers and was published across major Australian outlets. I appeared on television and radio.
I now devote much of my life to educating Jews and non-Jews about antizionist abuse. This abuse is routinely presented as political criticism, even when it bears no reasonable relationship to policy, government, war, or political analysis.
I have experienced editors ceasing communication after previously engaging with my work. I have been uninvited from social events. I have stopped hearing from friends I once imagined would remain in my life permanently.
I have been abused for requesting decorum.
All the while, ‘Zionism’ and Israel have rarely occupied much of my attention. I have never been to Israel. I do not spend my days discussing Israeli politics or constructing arguments about Zionism.
I have been called a ‘Zio-Nazi’. I have been told to ‘get back in the oven’. I have been followed, doxxed, and deleted from the lives of people I’ve known for decades.
I refuse to change my Uber name to Max
For months, I told people that Jews were overreacting to antizionism. I told them that I came from the left, that I knew these political spaces, and that the hostility would pass.
I told parents of Jewish children experiencing bullying that their children might be taking events too seriously. I told my partner that older Jews comparing the present period to the 1930s were expressing inherited trauma.
I made excuses for antizionist abuse while it stripped away parts of my life. I understand the allure of justifying the bigotry of others. But it took me far too long to understand what was really happening.
Antizionism affected my capacity to play in bands. It changed how I feel when entering an art gallery. It damaged my relationships with people I had grown up with in Sydney. It affected my willingness to tell people who I am.
I had never felt self-conscious about my surname. I now think about it when sending emails, ordering cars, entering unfamiliar spaces, and introducing myself. Even when I sign an email ‘JD’, my full name remains visible in the address.
I have considered whether my name makes me easier to identify. I have considered whether I should walk a longer route home. I have considered whether public expression will expose my partner or family to harassment.
These calculations have become ordinary.
But I refuse to change my Uber name to Max.
I refuse to walk the long way home as a permanent accommodation to other people’s hatred.
I refuse to begin every statement with a dissertation about the errors of the Israeli government.
I refuse to make apologies for a state I have never visited. I would never demand that an Australian of Pakistani background apologise for Pakistan, that a Chinese Australian answer for the Chinese government, or that an Iranian Australian account for the Islamic Republic.
Jews are routinely subjected to that demand.
A rabbi’s seven-year-old daughter was spat on in King Street in Sydney. She was targeted because another person had absorbed years of propaganda concerning the allegedly evil Jewish state.
This is the lived form of antizionism.
Collective Punishment
Earlier systems of anti-Jewish hostility focused on Jewish religion, race, blood, wealth, or conspiracy. Antizionism focuses on Jewish proximity to the establishment, existence, or defence of a Jewish state. It renders that state inherently evil and illegitimate from birth. It then treats Jews worldwide as extensions of that supposed evil.
The individual Jew is expected to declare their distance from Israel, condemn Zionism, respond to allegations, disavow other Jews, and establish their moral innocence before entering public conversation.
The Jew who complies becomes useful. Their Jewishness can be presented as proof that the movement targeting other Jews is free of anti-Jewish hostility.
The Jew who refuses becomes a Zionist, and the term ‘Zionist’ becomes a licence to subject that person to conduct that would be recognised as bigotry if directed towards any other minority. All bigotry believes itself to be a social justice movement, removing something bad for the improvement of the rest.
This permission structure has entered universities, cultural institutions, workplaces, friendship groups, activist organisations, media spaces, and everyday social life. It has allowed people to intimidate Jews while seeing themselves as participants in a social justice movement. It is frequently described by its adherents as a form of resistance, and in contemporary Australia, it is deeply institutionalised, socially rewarded, and culturally fashionable.
We live in an antizionist era now. In this era — much like in prior iterations of anti-Jewish suspicion, vilification, and violence — to be suspicious of Jews is to be morally vigilant. Century after century, informed and emboldened by appeals to theological, scientific, and diplomatic authorities, normal people mark some facet of Jewish existence for removal on moral grounds. The amputation of the Jewish religion, ethnicity, or state is to suck the venom from a snakebite and spit it into red dirt. A toxic element must be removed — not out of spite or cruelty — but to protect the body politic from some profound indecency.
My life has been irrevocably shaped by antizionism. It has altered where I live, who remains in my life, how I work, how I move through public space, and how safely I can identify myself. It has shaped my life through social exclusion, collective punishment, intimidation, estrangement, and the expectation that I answer for a conspiratorial obsession with a libellously constructed version of a country I have never visited. It has forced me to account for my Jewishness in rooms where no other person is required to explain their ancestry, their people, or their perceived support for a foreign state and events overseas. I say perceived because the word Zionist is not used to describe a Jewish position, but to stigmatise the Jewish soul.
It is clear to me now that antizionism is nothing but an obsession with the collective punishment of Jews under a political banner. I am done pretending that the treatment I’ve received in its name stems from a serious engagement with Israeli policy. I am done apologising for my existence.
I refuse to participate in the collective punishment of my own people.
This piece is an excerpt from ‘Submission to the Royal Commission’ by Joshua Dabelstein, edited by Michele Seminara.
Joshua Dabelstein is a freelance writer based in Sydney. He has written for The Age, The Australian, The Australian Financial Review, The Sydney Morning Herald and the ABC. He is the nonfiction editor at Verity La. You can find more of his work at his Substack, For Normal People.