I am about to do something no Jew has any business doing. I am giving away Yom Kippur.
On Yom Kippur last month the Jews of this country stopped eating, stopped drinking, walked past the armed guards into synagogue and spent twenty-five hours doing the hardest thing a human being can do. We looked at ourselves. We said out loud what we did wrong. We said sorry and meant it.
We are the world champions of guilt.
So this year I have a better idea. We have done ours. Now you do it.
You. The ones who watched. The ones who knew. The ones who saw what was being done to the Jews of Australia after October 7, felt a small cold flicker somewhere under the ribs, and scrolled on to the next video on Instagram and TikTok.
This one is yours.
This month Mike Burgess, the head of ASIO, said eight words that should have come from a prime minister three years ago.
“All of us should have stood up more.”
The least sentimental man in Canberra said it “breaks my heart” to hear about the Jewish family at Melbourne Airport, a story first made public by the Anti-Defamation Commission, which I chair: a mother, a father and their children screamed at by a stranger, “Nazis, Zionist Nazis, baby killers”, until the little ones were in tears.
Then he counted the steps from vilification to funerals. It started with threats and intimidation. A year later it moved to the targeting of people, places of worship and businesses. “And then we saw the death of 15 people.”
He saw every step. So did you. You watched them being taken.
In July, after two Jews were stabbed on the streets of Manhattan, a New York rabbi named Benjamin Spratt put the whole thing in one sentence. “Words do not wield the knife, but they make a target imaginable and violence justifiable.” You heard the words. You heard them at the rally and on your social media feed. You watched the target being made imaginable, one slur, one slogan, one shrug at a time, and you decided it was none of your business.
And Burgess has his own sins to carry. The Royal Commission heard that his agency investigated the Bondi gunmen back in 2019, and later left them off the radar because of a resourcing decision. He knows exactly what he is confessing to. He said it anyway.
Now let me show you what three years of your silence bought.
The NSW Police taskforce created to protect Jews had a lovely name. Operation Shelter. On the night of 14 December, the Royal Commission was told, Operation Shelter existed “in name only”. The Jewish community’s own security volunteers had rated the risk of violence as high. The police wrote no threat assessment. They left Chanukah by the Sea to a local inspector, who sent four officers to look in from time to time.
Eleven people were shot in the first twenty-nine seconds. Ten of them died.
Then we did what you always ask of us. We trusted the process. We walked into the Royal Commission and told the truth. Among the witnesses was a schoolgirl, fifteen years old, who described how classmates threw Nazi salutes at her school.
Somebody went online and wrote that it was “terrible, that only a couple of students were throwing” the salute. Then came the punchline: “We need to pick up those numbers.” Another suggested that the oil refineries could be turned into concentration camps.
Virginia Bell has spent a lifetime looking at the worst of human beings, and she said the “undiluted level of hatred and bigotry” was beyond her.
Where were you?
I know where you were, Minister. You were issuing the statement. “There is no place for antisemitism in Australia.” There was plenty of place. There was place on the steps of the Opera House two days after the Hamas slaughter. There was place on the campus lawns for months. The people who were paid to slam the door looked at the lock and called it complicated.
I know where you were, the universities. At the ANU, the encampment ran for 110 days. Greg Craven’s finding fitted on a postage stamp: “No Australian university assessed met the definitional requirements of the report card.”
I know where you were, platform bosses. Meta’s man came to the commission and was shown his own company’s numbers. Hate speech removals on Facebook down from 5.8 million to 1.2 million after they loosened the rules. His answer: “I truly don’t know and I don’t want to speculate.”
And I know where you were, the beautiful people. The festival boards. The open-letter signers. The ones who find every cause on earth except the one bleeding on your own doorstep. Barrie Kosky, one of the great stage directors alive, an Australian Jew who has made his life in Berlin, came home last month and said that Germany is now “one of the safest places for diaspora Jews to live”. A Jewish artist looks at Berlin and sees the safe place. Berlin.
But it is the last group I really want to talk to. Our friends.
Dara Horn has a new book with the most shocking title in any shop window in the world: The Final Solution to the Jewish Question. Her last one was called People Love Dead Jews, and it said what nobody wanted said. The world adores us in museums. It lights candles for Anne Frank. It weeps on the correct day and goes home feeling enlarged. It is the Jews who are still breathing that give it trouble.
Horn tells a story I cannot shake. Two days after October 7, she went to get her hair cut. The hairdresser had seen the news. That’s really sad, she said. And then: “But it’s not like you know anybody there.”
Horn’s answer should be printed on a billboard. “Lady, every Jew you’ve ever had in the seat knows people there.”
That hairdresser is no villain. She is no Nazi. She is you. She is the friend who came to the bar mitzvah and danced the hora badly. She is the colleague of fifteen years. She is the mum from the school gate. And on October 8, when the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust was still being counted, she said nothing. After Bondi, when fifteen people lay dead at a Chanukah celebration, she said nothing again.
And then, three weeks after Yom Kippur, came October 7 itself. Three years. Candles on the sand, names read out behind the guards, a boy of three somewhere in Israel who had to tell his father his mother was not coming back. Scroll back through your phone to that day. Find what you sent us. Take your time.
Your phone worked. We checked.
Every Jew in this country can tell you exactly who called and exactly who didn’t. We never wrote the list down. We didn’t need to.
In her new book Horn calls antisemitism “a lie told by people who want to gain or maintain power.” Here is what three years have taught me about that lie. The liars only ever need one thing from the rest of you, and it is the cheapest thing in the world. They need you to do nothing. A lie can live for a thousand years in a quiet room.
In March the Blue Square Alliance surveyed 7,000 Americans. Fifty-five per cent said Jewish people can handle antisemitism on their own. That figure is up fifteen points in three years.
“Handle it on their own” is the national anthem of the bystander. He never throws the stone. He explains why picking it up is somebody else’s job.
We are fewer than one in every two hundred Australians. We cannot handle it on our own. No minority in history ever has.
And please, spare me the condolences and the compliments. “So resilient, your community.” Every time you applaud our strength, you are admiring a weight you could be helping to lift.
So here is the one piece of Jewish law you need, and then I will let you go.
On Yom Kippur, God forgives what you did to God. What you did to another human being, God will not touch. For that you must go to the person you wronged. You say what you did. You fix what you broke. Only then may you ask. There are no shortcuts, and a statement from the media office does not count.
It can be done. Mike Burgess did it on air. Last month the Human Rights Commissioner, Lorraine Finlay, stood in front of Jewish women in Sydney and apologised, and then put it in writing: “My greatest regret is that I did not speak out earlier and more clearly about the rise in antisemitism.” The eSafety Commissioner said she was “really sorry” that her scheme had failed the Jews who came to it for help.
Three officials in a nation of 27 million. I am keeping count, and I have fingers to spare.
If, God forbid, there is another Bondi, the guest list at that funeral will include every person who saw this coming and decided it was somebody else’s job.
In our tradition the gates of forgiveness closed at sundown on Yom Kippur. For you, I am holding them open a little longer. My arm is getting tired.
We have done our soul-searching. Yom Kippur is over for us. Yours has not started. Think about what you didn’t say, and who you didn’t call, and what it cost.
Then come and find us. We are easy to find.
We are the ones behind the guards.
