By Patrick LAWRENCE
I take the 15 victims at Bondi Beach and divide them by the 71,000 deaths in Gaza as of this writing. I get a fraction of 0.0002143.
I read in a BBC report that the victims of the Dec. 14 shooting at Bondi Beach, along the coast a few miles from central Sydney, were "generous, joyful and talented."
These were Jews who had gathered, a sizable group, to celebrate Hanukkah under Australia's summer sun. Immediately this is cast across the West as a case of out-of-control, come-from-nowhere anti-Semitism having nothing to do with the conduct of "the Jewish state."
Two of the victims, Sofia and Boris Gurman, "were people of deep kindness, quiet strength and unwavering care for others," the family said in a statement the Australian Broadcasting Corporation published Tuesday.
I read that Reuven Morrison, another of the 15 victims, was "the most beautiful, generous man who had a gorgeous smile that would light up the room." I read that the friends of Dan Elkayam, a French Jew marking the holiday in Australia, "described him as a down-to-earth, happy-to-lucky individual who was warmly embraced by those he met."
You can read about these victims of the Bondi Beach shooting, too. The ABC published commemorations of 12 of the 15. There are photographs, the intimate remembrances of those who knew the deceased, some boilerplate describing how Australia's state broadcaster is reporting the story. The New York Times published similar items on 13 of the victims under the headline, "What to Know About the Victims of the Bondi Beach Shooting."
The ABC report is here, and The New York Times's is here. If you study them briefly you find the themes common to both. Individuation is the essential point. We must know the names and see the faces of all of those killed. Innocence and virtue are the other running themes.
The Times ran a similar feature after Sept. 11, 2001. Under the headline, "Profiles in Grief," it published thumbnail biographies of the 2,977 victims of the World Trade Center attacks, a half-dozen or so a day all through that strange autumn. I studied those short pieces carefully, and it is the same now as then: Everyone is uniquely himself or herself, everyone innocent, everyone generous, everyone happy and caring. Every life precious, in a word.
I do not know how to continue writing this commentary other than bluntly and honestly. The Bondi Beach killings bring us to a transformative moment and warrant no less.
The 15 people who perished at Bondi last Sunday - and there may be more casualties to come among those hospitalized with wounds - did not deserve to die at the hands of a father-and-son act reportedly inspired by the remnants of the Islamic State. These were senseless murders by any conceivable judgment - so senseless I am stating the obvious by saying so.
The Dishonesty of Official Grief
Palestinians mourning relatives killed by an Israeli airstrike of Deir el-Balah, Gaza Strip, Jan. 12, 2024. (UNRWA /Ashraf Amra/Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 3.0)
But I cannot enter into the responses officials and the media serving them have urged incessantly since last weekend. Out of the question for any number of reasons, chief among them the dishonesty at the core of what I may as well call "official grief."
Read in the larger context of these awful events, the obsessive humanization of the Bondi Beach victims is an upside-down exercise in dehumanization. This is first, straight off the top. Jewish lives count, white lives count, names, faces, generous smiles - all this counts.
But the names, faces and lives of those the Zionist regime has terrorized and brutalized for the past two years or eight decades, depending on how you reckon history: No, no need for any of this because they do not count.
This is an obscenity, in my view - obscene for what it is and because it has a 500-year history. Since the opening of the imperial era in the late 15th century, the West has aggrandized itself with its never-to-be-questioned claims to civilization, decency, law and moral superiority, while the rest of the world consists of unruly, racially inferior, not-quite-human barbarians. The horrors of the mission civilisatrice - inhumanity in the name of humanity - were the inevitable outcome and so they remain.
Indulge in official grief as it is now more or less forced upon us and you are a 21st century participant in this self-serving... as I say, this obscenity. I do not see that it is any more complicated.
The New York Times published an especially egregious case in point a day after the attacks. "I no longer want to hear, after a mass shooting, of the remarkable ways a community came together," Sharon Brous, a rabbi in Los Angeles, wrote in the paper's opinion section. "I don't want platitudes and pieties. I want justice.... I don't want to celebrate resiliency. I want reform" - reform, that is, to combat the anti-semitism she understands to be the beginning and the end of the Bondi Beach story.
Rabbi Brous went on to explain that, post-Bondi, she struggles against despair. But she found great humanity, on the other hand, in "the vibrancy of the worldwide Jewish community that immediately rallied in solidarity, reminding us that when one limb is struck the whole body is unwell."
Simply typing these brief passages leaves me incredulous. Justice, reform, rallies in solidarity with the 15, nothing for the 71,000 (the Gaza Health Ministry's count at this writing), who evidently do not even enter Rabbi Brous's head. And the Zionist terror machine's daily strikes in Gaza and the West Bank as we speak ? No, nothing, for they are not part of any "whole body," however this is conceived.
Yes, I can grieve for those who died last Sunday, but it is a question of recognition, of keeping things in proportion. Here is my admittedly simplified formula: I take the 15 victims at Bondi Beach and divide them by the 71,000 deaths in Gaza as of this writing. I get a fraction of 0.0002143 and this is the extent of my grief for the 15.
Victims of Israeli massacre of Al-Tabieen school where Palestinian refugees had come to seek refuge, Aug. 10, 2024. (Hussam Shabat/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0)
I have called the Bondi Beach attack transformative. Two reasons.
One, these awful events mark a major step in the erasure not only of history and memory but of sheer cognition. I have heard or read no mention from any mainstream quarter of the campaign of terror and dehumanization the Zionist state now wages not just in Gaza and in the West Bank but against Muslim populations across much of West Asia.
This is hardly new. Apartheid Israel and its too-numerous, too-powerful enablers have sought to erase and otherwise obscure the truth of the Zionist project since there was a Zionist project to speak of. But Bondi Beach looks set not merely to normalize the human mind's incapacity to see, think and judge but to enforce this damage to the collective consciousness by means of those "reforms" Rabbi Brous proposes.
Two, Zionists and their fellow travelers instantly began to use the events of last Sunday to condemn the Palestinian cause altogether. This is again nothing new.
Utter "From the river to the sea..." or "Globalize the intifada," and you risk your job, your professorship, your visa; arrest in Britain; profess support for Palestine Action, the British protest group, and you will be arrested and tried under the U.K.'s draconian terrorism laws.
But Bondi Beach already serves to license Zionists to advance a blanket condemnation of the Palestinian cause. Predictably enough, the Zionist-supervised New York Times gives us another case in point.
Immediately after last Sunday's attack the inimitable (thank goodness) Bret Stephens published " Bondi Beach Is What 'Globalize the Intifada' Looks Like." In the preposterous but predictable piece that follows Stephens finds peril and fear in the prospect that the father-and-son shooters took seriously such thoughts as "resistance is justified" and "by any means necessary."
I read Stephens as stating aloud what is otherwise implicit in an emergent orthodoxy on the Palestine question. In his denunciations, Stephens is no better than Itamar Ben-Givr, Bezalel Smotrich and all those other Israeli monsters calling for the extermination of the Palestinian people - the "sub-human animals," in the words of Yoav Gallant, defense minister at the time of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.
Stephens puts their shockingly bald racism on the Times's opinion page: This is all that makes his copy important. To condemn the Palestinians' cause in this manner, including their legally recognized right to armed resistance against an occupying power, is to condemn the Palestinian people to genocide, ethnic-cleansing or some combination of both.
Judaism Versus Zionism
Yakov M. Rabkin, 2017. (Alexandr Shcherba /Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 4.0)
Just as I was thinking through the events at Bondi Beach and wondering why my sympathies came to 0.0002143 percent of what they were officially supposed to be, I began reading the book Yakov Rabkin, the distinguished professor of history at the University of Montreal, just published.
Israel in Palestine: Jewish Rejection of Palestine (Aspect Editions), is a brief, superbly lucid essay on the difference between Judaism and Zionism - the former embodying an excellently humanist tradition and the latter its violent perversion into a limitlessly vicious ethno-nationalist ideology.
Some pages in I came to this sentence:
"Across Israel and worldwide, Jews grapple with contradictions between the Judaism they profess and the Zionist ideology that has in fact taken hold of them."
This simply stated reality landed squarely. I immediately went back to those brief biographies the Australian Broadcasting Corp. and The New York Times just published. Yes, I thought. Generous, kind toward others, compassionate: They put the victims exactly in the Judaic tradition as Rabkin described it.
Rabkin gives an excellent précis of the long history of animosity most Jews felt toward Zionism during its emergent phase in the late 19th and early 20th century. They, especially Jews residing in Palestine prior to the arrival of the first Zionist settlers, who lived peaceably side-by side with indigenous Arabs, wanted nothing to do with it.
Then came some questions.
Did the Jews killed at Bondi Beach grapple with the sharp contradictions between Judaism and Zionism, as Rabkin asserts ? Did they stand with the majority in history and reject Zionism's perversions of Judaism's honorable tradition ? Did they profess their Judaism but in fact support the Zionist project?
There is no indication - none made public, in any case - that the Bondi Beach victims had denounced Zionism in the name of Judaism. I count this a very key point. It is another way last Sunday's events are transformative.
We do not know with certainty the motivations of the shooters. John Whitbeck, the international lawyer with long experience in the Israel-Palestine crisis, pointed out:
"Islamic State ideology has always been focused on intra-Muslim issues and particularly on establishing its 'caliphate' in the portions of Iraq and Syria under its control. Islamic State has never shown any significant interest in the Palestinian cause and its leaders have even attacked Hamas and other Palestinian factions as 'apostate' groups because they operate within national boundaries and engage in political and diplomatic activities."
Various accusations of culpability have been floated these past few days. While the Australian government assigns guilt and motivation to followers of the Islamic State, the Netanyahu regime instantly blamed Iran. Again, there is little sense here: The Islamic State was comprised of Sunni Salafists, ideological enemies of the Islamic Republic, which is Shi'a.
Now I read suggestions that the Bondi attack was another of the merciless false flags for which the Zionists are infamous. In the cause of blunt honesty I confess this was one of the first thoughts to cross my mind on hearing news of the shootings.
There is absolutely no certainty on this point, of course, and it is unlikely there ever will be. But the possibility of a Mossad provocation cannot be dismissed. The historical record suggests this. (Mossad is now assisting Australian investigators into the attack). And given the use Zionists make of the Bondi Beach events, the cui bono argument cannot be thrown out of court..
Already there are Zionists in Australia and elsewhere asserting that anyone who has until now stood for the Palestinian cause bears responsible for the gruesome events at an Australian beach last Sunday. Reflecting this sentiment-and the political influence of militant Zionism in Australia-federal and state governments are now considering legislation that would, among much else, allow authorities to ban demonstrations and even speech in support of a free Palestine.
I take the opposite view as to where responsibility lies: Mossad op or no Mossad op, it is fairer to say it is Zionists who are responsible, directly or by way of the war they wage against Palestinians - and against morality and ordinary decency, against our public discourse, our laws and civil liberties, our consciences, our faculties of reason - for the deaths at Bondi Beach.
Post-Bondi, it follows immediately, it is ever more imperative that Jews the world over declare themselves either as Jews in the Judaic tradition or as Zionists. The urgency of mass denunciations of Zionism could hardly be more evident.
The precise count of the dead in Gaza as I write this is 70,669. As I type this number my mind goes to Dylan Thomas' famous poem, A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London, written after a bombing raid shortly before World War II ended. What the lyrical Welshman refused was cheap sentiment and condolence-card clichés in favor of the larger truths inherent in any death:
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.
"After the first death, there is no other," is the poem's celebrated concluding line. Yes, altogether so. After the first 70,669, there is no other.
Original article: consortiumnews.com