Antisemitism Mutates

Damian Joshua Arkeveld, 27, who daubed the words “f… Jews”, swastikas and other antisemitic graffiti across several Perth suburbs, was sentenced in March. His grandfather Cornelius Arkeveld reportedly blamed himself. His explanation succinctly reveals how he may well have motivated the antisemitic vandalism of his grandson and how antisemitism has mutated and is infecting Australian society today.

He said:

The false accusation that Israel is committing genocide is part of a propaganda campaign to destroy the Jewish nation and the Jewish people.

It’s patently false and an inversion of the truth. Israel didn’t spend billions of dollars and decades building terrorist tunnels and rocketing its neighbour’s civilian population with the expressed aim of genocide. Hamas did. Israel is now defending itself from the most horrific and barbaric, genocidal attack by Hamas and the Iranian axis, since the Holocaust.

The Holocaust and other genocides featured the deliberate killing of as many of the victim population as possible.

Israel is fighting a war of self-defence against a terror group that not only carried out the 7 October atrocities but has vowed to keep carrying out similar attacks. Israel has targeted only the terrorists. It has warned and evacuated civilians before attacking, set up safe zones for them, facilitated the entry of vast amounts of aid, and even carried out two rounds of polio vaccines. These are not the actions of an army committing genocide. While the Gaza casualties are tragic, if they make Israel into a Nazi state, then the US, UK and Australia were also Nazi states during World War II, when they caused vast casualties to German civilians.

The false accusation that Israel is a ‘Nazi state’ committing genocide is part of a 100-year-old propaganda campaign, originating with the first Palestinian Arab leader, the Mufti of Jerusalem, a Nazi ally, amplified by the Cold War Soviet Union, and today funded and abetted by the Iranian Regime and its allies, to delegitimise and ultimately destroy Jewish sovereignty.

Antisemitism is a prejudice that like a virus, has survived over time by mutating. In the Middle Ages, Jews were persecuted because of their religion, justified by theology. In the 19th and 20th centuries persecuted because of their race, justified by a purported science of racial superiority. Today, Jews are attacked because of the existence of their nation state, Israel, purportedly in defence of human rights. Israel has always been central to Judaism—and ties to Israel are essential to the Jewish identity of more than 90% of all Jews around the world. Denying Israel’s right to exist in any boundaries effectively attacks a core part of Jewish peoplehood, as well as denying Jews the right to self- determination that all other peoples are entitled to.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) is an intergovernmental body, currently representing 35 member countries, including Australia, the UK, the US and Canada. It has a Working Definition of Antisemitism that has been endorsed by both major Parties in Australia. The IHRA Definition states that “Manifestations [of antisemitism] might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity.

…Contemporary examples… could… include… Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”

The comparison of Israel to the Nazis is antisemitic because it seeks to portray the Jewish state as uniquely evil, in much the same way the Nazis and other anti- Semites have historically sought to portray Jews; because it is a form of Holocaust denial in that it effectively minimises what the Nazis did to the Jews; and because it is a deliberately cruel provocation to Jews to accuse them of being the same as those who sought to exterminate them.

Cornelius Arkeveld is quite right to blame himself for his grandson’s antisemitic rampage. He, and a few other Australians, from the top down, should take a close look at the lies they disseminate.