Season 3 - Episode 1- Start at the beginning

After the Bondi massacre, many Australian Jews were shocked — but not necessarily surprised. In the opening episode of season three of Tensions Transplanted, Rob Kaldor and Izzy Oderberg begin with the question now facing Australian Jewish life: where to from here? Not by replaying the horror of December 14, but by asking what it exposed about safety, extremism, anti-Semitism, political rhetoric, social cohesion and who gets heard when fear takes over. Featuring terrorism expert Michelle Grossman AM, Julian Leeser MP, Project Shema founder Zachary Schaffer, social commentator and writer Van Badham and Palestinian writer and activist Hamza Howidy, this episode is a powerful primer for the season ahead: sharp, uncomfortable, deeply human and determined to move beyond slogans.

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Coming up on this episode of Tensions Transplanted.

SPEAKER_01 0:04

I think every incident of mass violence against Jews in Israel and the diaspora causes the ground beneath our feet to tremble.

SPEAKER_05 0:15

Whether on the left or the right, that tendency is there. And pretending it's not there is really unhelpful.

SPEAKER_00 0:22

I'm trying, let's say, to break this narrative of that the Palestinians are just victims and we should do everything for them and we should decide for them. Or the other narrative that all Palestinians should be martyrs, should be killed, or whatever, because of some fantasies of the left about armed resistance or whatever. So, no, I I want the Palestinian with an agency to decide whatever he wants.

SPEAKER_03 0:44

Welcome to series three of Tensions Transplanted for the Jewish Independent. I'm Rob Caldor. While earlier series investigated how the October 7 Hamas attacks and the Gaza War deeply impacted Australian life and politics, we genuinely thought our work was done. But the devastating December 14, 2025 Bondi massacre changed everything. And this series unpacks the unpredictable, heavy aftermath of that tragic day. Joining me for this series is Izzy Oderberg. Izzy, tell me a bit about your background and why you think this series is important.

SPEAKER_06 1:18

Well, I am by background a journalist, so I've been a practicing journalist either full-time in newsrooms or out there freelancing, peddling my wares for almost uh well, just under three decades. Like so many Australian Jews, I just had so many questions. I had questions about how we got here, what happened here, where are we going from here. I saw this as an excuse for me to go out there and answer all of my own questions and in doing that, maybe answer some of the questions that other people have too. So I really approached this with a journalistic lens, but I do a lot of other things in my life, and I think I've always had like a strong commitment to social justice. I've worked in not-for-profit spaces, but also I'm I am a left-wing Jew, and we know that the left has been really shocked by some of the outpouring of vitriol and hatred, and I was really interested to put some of that under the microscope as well. So it's been a real I'm not gonna say it was a pleasure because there were things about it that were extremely uncomfortable, but I definitely feel like I am so fascinated by the answers that we got and the explanations that we got, and it's been just absolutely enlightening in so many ways.

SPEAKER_03 2:41

We won't recap December 14, that's been covered elsewhere. Instead, this series tackles the aftermath, legal accountability, and the push for a royal commission, media bias, council culture, and the roots of extremism leading to a final episode, a direct look at the state of social cohesion. Izzy, you have a very direct take on this.

SPEAKER_06 3:02

Fair warning, a little bit of dirty language coming, but I do have permission for this from our editor boss. How do we unfuck it? You know, it things are pretty fucked for Australian Jews right now, and we want to know how do we unfuck this? Whether this is addressing the risk of terrorism or social isolation or some of the fractures that have come into place. I certainly approached all of my interviews and conversations with people very much with a forward-looking lens. Not just about how do we make peace with what happened, but where do we go, how do we fix it? In the words of a famous Aussie politician, how do I fix it? I'm a fixer. I'm here to fix it. Now I don't know how whether I can fix it personally, but there are a lot of really smart people who have a lot of really constructive advice for how we can get to a point where we feel safe again. It's not going to be easy, and there's a lot of different things that need to happen, but there are a lot of voices that we're not hearing from in this space, and we really have made a concerted effort to bring in people who really know what they're talking about, experts in their field, who haven't had the microphone because the microphone consistently seems to be put in front of the loudest voices instead of not necessarily the people that are the most qualified to be speaking.

SPEAKER_03 4:23

So, enough talk, let's get into episode one. An overview of December 14 and the immediate aftermath. It's a bit of a taster of the whole series.

SPEAKER_06 4:34

I don't think I was the only Jew in Australia to say I was shocked by what happened at Bondi. I don't think you could have not been shocked. But I always said to people that I wasn't surprised, and I felt that there was a real sense that this was coming, and I know a lot of other Jews felt the same way, but Michelle Grossman was surprised and she was also shocked. Michelle Grossman AM is an academic who specialises in terrorism and terror-related research and study at Deakin University. She's the co-convener of Avert, which is addressing violent extremism and radicalisation to terrorism, and she's the research network director at the Centre for Resilient and Inclusive Societies.

SPEAKER_04 5:25

So one of the reasons I was as surprised as I was is because I I did not think there was anything. Okay, let me take a step back. First of all, um we had already had like two years plus of protest, right? And a lot of very, very heightened rhetoric, which I regarded, and and this is one of the benefits of living in a democratic society, uh, the right to protest, the right to make your voice heard, uh, the right to say what uh some people call awful but lawful things, uh, you know, that don't cross a line into um, you know, don't cross a criminal threshold. I regard those as the safety valves uh of democratic societies. They allow people to have their say, um, and they allow people to attempt to um, you know, express and influence uh political policy and political standpoints through peaceful means. So my argument had been look, we've this has been going on, and there were there were things happening uh overseas, uh, you know, in in Gaza, um, you know, various points of intensification, and still we didn't really see the kind of spillover. So the the sense of feeling unsafe, I thought was more related to the way in which people, Jewish people felt threatened and unsettled by the heightened rhetoric, yes, but not the actual threat of fit of the of what we saw, uh the atrocity that we saw.

SPEAKER_06 6:58

Even like so, how did you how does like the attacks on synagogues and things like that, how does that play into that?

SPEAKER_04 7:07

Yeah, look, this is a this is this is a tough one. Um so first of all, we know that some of the, not all, but some of those attacks turned out, you know, they turned out to be, I mean, they were proxy supported attacks. I mean, this is what's been publicly said by our intelligence agencies, right? They were proxy-supported attacks from overseas, but the people who were committing them were just crims, right? They, you know, they were like crims for hire. They were they were sort of Australian uh suburban version of mercenaries, right? So so for me that and that is important, okay, because what that told me was that there was no uh rising or surging ideological commitment locally on the part of those attackers, some of them, okay. I think for others, perhaps um, you know, no question, hate crimes, bias crimes. Um, but I didn't feel that I don't I don't look, there are differences of opinion on this. No, no, and I'm not in your opinion. So absolutely I'm just I'm just trying to think. I mean, I've had uh discussions with many um uh Jewish friends and colleagues uh about this, um, some of whom consider an attack on a synagogue actually to be a form of terrorism. Others uh will say no. And I and I'm gonna say it's not, it is a hate crime, but it's not terrorism. And I'm gonna explain why I don't see it as terrorism. In and and and this is coming at a moment, I should say, when Australia is considering it's the definition, the legal definition of terrorism. Uh the independent national security legislation monitor is running an inquiry as we speak on uh uh whether our definition of terrorism uh is now fit for purpose, hasn't been reviewed uh, you know, for quite a long time. So there are two main components of terrorism, in my view. One of them is motive, and the other is impact. Okay, well, there's there's motive, intention, and impact. Let's let's call it three uh for the sake of argument. Um a lot of people in you know, everyday people in the public, um, they tend to be more focused on the impact, which is to say, am I terrified? Do I feel terrif? If I feel terrified, it's it's terrorism, right? Uh so I can remember there was a big debate uh among some people um around the Burke Street attack by Gargasoulis, right? This is the fellow who drove his vehicle up Burke Street was awful, awful, awful, awful. And he killed people with his car. Um, but he killed people with his car when he was hearing uh voices in his head telling him that he was Jesus, right? Uh there was no ideological motive. He was not, he was not um subscribing to a set of ideas or beliefs where he was um uh seeking to achieve some kind of political or social transformation in the name of a cause, okay? He was not advancing a cause. There was no politics involved, there was no, right, no, there was just no ideology. So for me, an ideological motive is an indispensable criterion for something to be judged as terrorism. It doesn't mean that that the crimes that uh the the kind of violence that we're talking about is not horrific. It doesn't mean it um it might not be an atrocity, but to be terrorism, which is a specific kind of crime, the motive needs to be ideological. The intent needs to be to seek uh to advance a cause or to um uh gain um some. And that can include using so you know using violence uh uh to um coerce change in a government, okay? Or to coerce change in a population, to so terrify a population that the population demands that the government change, you know, X uh and so forth and so on. So if that you know, absent those things, I don't think it qualifies as terrorism, even though it absolutely qualifies as other forms of crime. So unless you can demonstrate motive and intent as well as impact in terms of terrifying people, um, and the those attacks on um uh synagogues did not seem to me to necessarily meet the first two components.

SPEAKER_06 11:47

Things had been pretty difficult for the Jewish community in the lead up to Bondi, but Bondi was the night when everything changed for us, I think. And we all remember where we were and what we were doing when news started to filter through. Opposition MP Julian Lisa is no different. He remembers exactly where he was and how he felt.

SPEAKER_02 12:07

I was at the Hanukkah um celebrations at St Ives, which is in northern Sydney. It was exactly the same time as Bondi. It was being run by Rabbi uh Mockham Shapiro, who's the president of the Rabbinical Council of Australia. I came with my kids and my wife, and in fact, it was to be a packed evening because being the member for Bararu, we we were to originally go to St Ives, which is outside my electorate for uh Hanukkah, and then I had three Christmas carols to go to afterwards. Um so uh I I got up, I made a speech uh with good humour and good warmth because it's that time of the year, and I said, Look, uh I I you know it's been a tough couple of years, but I I I'm I'm hopeful that this is going to be a better year than uh than the one we've seen. And as I walked back, uh Rabbi Mendy Shapiro said to me, There's just I just want to let you know, there's been 50 shots fired in Bondi, we don't know what's happening. And they were starting to get to they were saying, Oh, WhatsApp, while we were all standing there as the dignitaries, and of course having no idea about whether this was an event that was confined to Bondi or whether there was going to be a broader set of events. At the Hanukkah at Siddhas is always a cherry picker there that Rabbi Shapiro and I go in, and uh I usually do the brachot. Um, and I said to Rabbi Shapiro, I reckon we should get down as quickly as possible. Um I told um we came off the stage, they locked down our event. I told my wife and my seven-year-old boy um overheard um adults talking about shots, and he was in tears.

SPEAKER_06 13:45

Zachary Schaefer is based in New York and is an activist, a teacher, and the founder of Project Shema, which is an organization based out of New York that aims to build bridges and educate on anti-Semitism. He started this organization under the fundamental Jewish teaching that every human life is sacred. He visited Australia to assist the Jewish community here in understanding how to engage on issues of anti-Semitism and ran workshops around the country. He remembered how he felt when he heard about Bondi.

SPEAKER_01 14:16

I felt a lot of pain, of course. I had trained and worked with folks who were there, who are part of the Bondi community. And when I was in Australia, I heard the community saying they were afraid that the boycotts, the dehumanization, and the calls for violence would lead to violence. So I was in Australia one or two years ago and I heard the Jewish community saying that there would be violent incidents against the Jewish community. I heard Jewish leaders calling on the civil civic sector and civil society and the government to step up interventions and safeguard the Jewish community. And I feel that what happened at Bandai, which of course was a terrible tragedy, was probably not a surprise to many Australian Jews because when I was visiting, they told me they were afraid something like that would happen.

SPEAKER_06 15:21

He also reflected on how these sorts of attacks make us feel as part of a global diaspora and how this affects other communities. He also gave us a bit of insight into the how that feels across the world given the many, many Jewish communities he's visited.

SPEAKER_01 15:37

I think every incident of mass violence against Jews in Israel and the diaspora causes the ground beneath our feet to tremble. There is an ancestral memory of being pushed out of our communities. There is an ancestral memory within our bodies, within our DNA, within our memories of violence that is being state-sponsored or state-enabled or institutionalized by those in power. And for Jews, it's not just the fear of one-off incidents of violence. For Jews, it is the fear of disappearance. It is the fear of the world forgetting that we are here. It is the fear that we feel, that our belonging is always precarious, that our safety has never been permanent, and that despite our best attempts to stay visible and demand support and allyship and solidarity, that the cycle of anti-Jewish violence has played out for thousands of years, and that it may very well play out in a similar way again in all of the communities that we live in.

SPEAKER_06 16:52

Van Badam is a columnist with The Guardian Australian, a playwright, a writer, a broadcaster, an activist, and one of Australia's most sharpest political commentators. She wrote a book called Cue and On and On, a short and shocking history of internet conspiracy cults. I spoke to her about her experience of activism in left-wing spaces and the anti-Semitism that she has seen in those spaces since the early days of her activism, and also about how she felt after Bondi.

SPEAKER_05 17:23

It was not a surprise for lots of reasons, and that there has always been, like my experience on the left in the student movement, participating in sort of broad left coalitions and doing anti-fascist, anti-racist work, meant that I became aware that there was a certain kind of campus leftist who then grows into a certain kind of adult leftist who the internet is now calling purity leftists, the people who morally judge everybody but don't seem to do any organizing themselves. And there was a particular tendency of people who shared a lot of demographics with people in the far right, people who were from quite privileged backgrounds overwhelmingly, who were white overwhelmingly, not all men, but mostly men in these particular sort of communities who we described as red browns. We called them red browns because there was an issue with Jews. And I developed a political Jew in the room. If I was in a broad-left forum and there was no Jewish person there, I would consider that forum to be unsafe and to contain red browns, and I would not participate. And that I found that very conspicuous when I, because I was president of the National Union of Students in New South Wales in 1998, when this was when One Nation was in its sort of first bloom. There was enormous concerns about the anti-Semitic views of One Nation, as well as their blatant anti-Asian racism and their fear of Asian Asian lesbian cyborgs are really that was the thing that Pauline Hansen, that was her greatest fear that Australia would be run by Asian lesbian cyborgs. Get up. They were conspicuously not involved. These are people who would come to a protest for an envelope and were not doing that kind of work, working with different um, you know, like societies of Muslim students, societies of Jewish students, and things on campus. And I've always been very attuned to that tendency. It's not a majority tendency, but it is there. And you know, in Australia, Jewish people are still being banned from like golf clubs and various kinds of membership organizations. That was still happening when I was a young adult. Like that is part of a very recent social history of this country and this sort of cultural um anti-Semitism that wasn't expressed in language but was definitely policed, is part of the cultural memory. You know, this idea of this intrusion of these people who look like us but are not us. That is particularly prevalent in in wasp circles, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant kind of um communities, whether on the left or the right, that tendency is there. And pretending it's not there is really unhelpful. Like claiming that all left-wing people are without sin the moment they announce themselves as left-wing is like saying Russell Brand is free of all sin because he's found Jesus, you know. Like that's that's not how that works. Um and certainly, like, I've always been attuned to it on that level, and what that means in terms of anti-racist and anti-fascist campaigning. Like, if Jews aren't welcome in that in those campaigns, they're not really campaigns, are they? Like, they're not really doing what they are advertising on the tin. Um, and certainly in terms of like fascists always want to persecute Jews. And when I was the reason why that the persecution of Jews is part of the fascist project so implicitly was something that I talk about in my book. The research is like, look, and this comes out of um anti-racism scholars in the United States, they're like, Jews are absolutely crucial to the white supremacist mythos. Like, for people who aren't white supremacists, it can be difficult to understand the notion that you think you are inherently superior to everybody on earth just because you're white. And it's very difficult people to for people to process a worldview that is so weird and seemingly uh contradicted everywhere by facts and the hard surface of reality. But what these academics explain, if you're a white supremacist, if you Seriously, I believe the white people, you know, are the elect and the only source of capacity or intellectualism or leadership or culture or creativity in the universe? How do you explain the pyramids or the Great Wall of China or Machu Picchu or 60,000 years of continuous culture? Like, how do you explain uh song lines and how do you explain, you know, like mathematics or any of or Sanskrit or any of these things?

SPEAKER_06 22:29

I think the thing that hurts the most being a left-wing Jew, and not all Jews are, obviously, we're not homogenous group, I don't need to tell you that, but I will anyway. But I think it's that having been subjected to that sort of othering, like they're not like us, they look like us, but they're not like us, you know, all that sort of stuff. And then to be presented with the argument that actually Jews are the worst of the white colonial project and the worst of the what white supremacy has to offer is very, very confusing because, you know, my family died in gas chambers because they weren't white enough. And now we're being told that actually Jews are not just white, but the worst of the white. They're like, it's like the white supremacists hate us because we're not white enough. And the left, from the left, I would say, obviously, um, and not necessarily the majority, but there's still a substantial number if you're on the left of leftists saying not only a Jews white, they're like the worst of the white. They're the whitest of the white of the most evil, you know, of the white. And it's like, it's very difficult. I had trouble getting out of bed because I was like, I don't know who hates me more, the left or the right, you know. And as a Jewish mother to Aboriginal children, I was like, does anyone not hate my family right now? Like, is there anyone on my side? And obviously that's an extreme reaction, but it's real. It is real, you know, it's how it feels, especially if you do play in online spaces like you and I do.

SPEAKER_05 24:03

But the thing is, Izzy, that if the the whole project of you know, a cult-like extremist community depends on a historical nonsense. Right? Like if you are taking an extremist position, one that is against the majority, against democracy, and against community, you are taking that, you can only do that by creating, you know, an ideological bricolage for yourself that is based on garbage. And this is what I mean. Like, the when I say Jews are absolutely central to the white supremacist project, it's that you need somebody to blame or hold responsible for the fact that you know, white authority or white power has been shared with the Peruvians or Chinese culture or Japan or or you know, all of those things. So you need sneaky devious bad white people, Jews, who sell secrets who can be bought, who are mercantile and transactional, and create this whole like it's insane. Like obviously, it's completely insane, but white supremacy is insane, like it is a historical nonsense. Similarly, if you're like a self-appointed pseudo-leftist morality per police whose sense of virtue and identity is dependent on taking a like a more leftist than now position than any any of us who get our grubby hands um into the actual work. If you're one of those people, um you absolutely depend on an ideological structure that is also a historical nonsense that can position familiar tropes in a way that you subject them to your ideologies. So the things that we're familiar with, I mean, anti-Semitism infects Western literature and culture. Like there's anti-Semitic deliberate mischaracterizations throughout some of the most important texts of Western culture. You know, they are there, like from Shylock to references in Marx to like in in visual art, in painting, evil Jews, you know, like constantly this these symbols reappear, and they are familiar to the point where we can't even articulate them. And then you have people who rely on those to get. I keep using the word purchase because it's about buying people into a worldview or a practice or a discourse or a you know series of decisions or languages or activism or the rest of it. It's easier to do with what is familiar, and you just sub out the words to some people. Um, you know, you would talk about evil juice, to other people you would talk about lizard people. To other people, you would misappropriate their own language, and which I refuse to do. There are words that are endemic to cultures that are contested within those cultures, that belong to those cultures, that are difficult and nuanced and exist in culturally specific terms. And that is as true for the Jewish community as it is for the Islamic community, as it is for the for you know the 250 different indigenous communities in this country. There are words that are not appropriate for other people to impose meaning on because they don't have a fixed meaning within their own communities, and I just won't use them for that reason. I don't think the world needs another overopinionated white woman to tell everybody else how to live. Like, and and this is what is so concerning because I'm just like, you know, and it's the it's the mealy-mouthed sort of, oh, I'm not anti-Semitic. I just have a critique of everything about what it means to be Jewish, and I will take Jewish language and use as a weapon to marginalise them and perpetuate a bunch of stereotypes that have been popularised for two and a half thousand years.

SPEAKER_06 27:59

I did a lot of interviews for this podcast, and you're gonna hear all of them as we roll out the episodes. But by far the most illuminating and probably the most hopeful interview that I did was with a man called Hamza Howadi. Hamza is a Palestinian man born and raised in Gaza under Hamas rule. He escaped from Gaza just one month before October 7, and he's now living as a refugee in Berlin. The reason that he had to flee Gaza was because as a vocal critic of Hamas, he had been imprisoned, tortured, and his family's safety had also been threatened. He's now written a book. It's only just been released, so I haven't managed to get a copy yet, but it's called Seashells on the Shores of Gaza: Testimonies and Memories from a Shattered Land. I spoke to him about many, many topics, and I'm really looking forward to sharing this interview and the various aspects of it with you. But one of the things that I asked him out really asked him about really first of all was um what is it like to be a moderate? What is it like to be criticized on both sides uh or all sides of politics when you're trying to hold more than one truth and hold the humanity of everyone involved in a conflict?

SPEAKER_00 29:07

It's it's it's really annoying for me, two things, actually. Not only those people, uh, on the one hand, because yes, we also, the Palestinians have the people who would uh call us some things, maybe they would just replace the word kapo with a Zionist, and this is how they make us look worse. And that happened to me because it was a crazy event for my friends, for my society in Gaza, that Hamza came on October the 8th and he's condemning and he's talking in a harsh way against Hamas. Then one month after to write uh in US media calling for the release of the hostages. So I got some anger. I got all of these accusations, and to the extent that people started harassing even my family in Gaza. And my family was threatened by some Hamas people. Then I took them out, and even when I got them out, they were not safe. And every time, like until now I cannot disclose my place or my family's place because of the opinions that I write, because there is some people who don't like the message that I'm sharing. They they they can see that Hamza is criticizing everyone, but they just want someone who can turn a blind eye to his own society and say, Yes, the devil is there. It's Israel and we are fine, we are angels, we don't do something wrong. But she's wrong. We do bad things. Israel also did bad things, lots of bad thing uh things during the war, but this is the message that I'm trying to share. So yes, we do have those people.

SPEAKER_06 30:24

How does it feel when people that don't have skin in the game, that don't have a connection, that maybe they've been interested they've been interested in this issue since October 9th. People I I I find it very frustrating. I just find it I can't imagine how you find it, because I like it.

SPEAKER_00 30:40

It's but I think it's annoying. It's it's annoying and for me I feel like it it it's not a nice feeling when you see a group of people who claim to support you, then they take the agency from you and they speak on your behalf. And if if if they didn't like your message, as it happened with me when I criticized Hamas, they will start attacking you. You will become less Palestinian for them. The problem for us, with our supporters, for the Palestinians, is that they now started to define for us what it means to be a pro-Palestinian. And this is completely wrong. I'm working on the other side, I'm working to for us, the Palestinians, to define for them what it means to be a pro-Palestinian. Yes, we we we don't want to live under occupation. At the same time, we don't want to live under an Islamist uh fundamentalist rule. Go try it for one week and then uh then you will know what we are talking about. So we are trying, I'm trying, let's say, to break this narrative of that uh the Palestinians are just victims and we we should do everything for them and we should decide for them, or the other narrative that all Palestinians should be martyrs, should be killed, or whatever, because of some fantasies of the left about armed resistance or whatever. So, no, I I I want the Palestinian with an agency to decide whatever he wants. Now, if you talk to the people in Gaza, no one wants any war, no one wants any escalation. They wanted this army to Hamas and the rebuilding of the strip because those people are simply tired of living in the street for two years.

SPEAKER_06 32:04

I also asked Hamza about what scares him the most, the extreme left or the extreme right, because now it feels like there's a sort of equal opportunity going around to you know involve hatred.

SPEAKER_00 32:20

It it it depends where where are you sitting, but it's it's both dangerous, I would say. I mean I'm sitting in Germany, this is one thing, and I do know the history of this of this uh beautiful country, I guess. Uh but at the same time, it's it's really hard of those people because um I wouldn't define myself as a leftist or a right wing, but seeing the crazy people from there, whether I'm talking about Trump and his uh the the people surrounding him, or looking at the the the extreme left in the streets when they said yeah, we are there to support the Palestinians, only to see them saying go back to Poland or seeing them saying yeah, let's go destroy the Zionist entity. For me, it's the it's it's the same um mistakes. It's it's it's really horrific, and I guess we should work to to to to push back the two of them because the two are really crazy, and if we leave them to do whatever they dream of, we will be in a totally different place. We will be in a totally different place.

SPEAKER_06 33:20

Around the time that I spoke to Hamza, we'd actually just seen in Australia a well-known Australian activist get up at a rally in Sydney and call to globalize the interfada. I also asked Hamza how he felt about that phrase and how he felt about it being used by an Australian activist in a foreign land.

SPEAKER_00 33:49

So going to the word intifada, because people uh say that they mean uh a revolution with it, and in the Arabic word, there is many synonyms for the word revolution, like tawrah and uh other words, and the word intifada is not known in the Arabic uh glossary to be for uh for for a peaceful resolution. Yes, maybe the first intifada did not have much violence, but the word is known for the second intifada. I don't like this wokness uh who want to define Arabic for me. I studied Arabic for a long time and they know what it means. Some people, unfortunately, in the West, they don't know the history of the word. So they will just take it, go to Google, translate, oh yeah, it's revolution, let's go say it in the street. No, it's not. Take some time and learn it. This is also uh a lesson for those who want to have an opinion. Or not, no, you have the opinion, but if you want to say it explicitly in the street to protest for it, just spend five minutes reading about it because it's it's really embarrassing for you, and it's harming us when you don't know anything you are talking about. Yes, uh I uh I'm talking genuinely because um I'm also someone who's worried about my society. I I have to admit, 4,000 Palestinians were killed in the second Intifada. So no, please don't child for that. I mean, what kind of people call for a revolution for an antifada? Why the same people they say there is a genocide in Gaza? Like, how you can make the two together? You are saying that there is a genocide at the same time you are calling for an antifada, like it's one of them is false and you are not saying it. So it's it does it really doesn't make sense. It it was even harming for me because as I said, like I also went uh to one or two protests. Yes, I criticized them, but I also tried to go to good ones, and then I wanted to go to a protest only calling for ceasefire for more aid for release of the hostages. Then I go see people shouting for the Intifada. I left back home because this is not what I want to see happening in Gaza or the West Bank. I don't want it. Be it the first or the second Intifada, it's not the time for it. We are seeing people being killed and families uh held hostages in tunnels, and you are telling me you you want a revolution.

SPEAKER_06 35:58

If you could talk to the Australian government, if you could give the Australian government your advice, what would that look like? What would it be?

SPEAKER_00 36:05

I mean, first and foremost, I would like them to first open their eyes because uh you still remember when the protests started, uh, there was some question marks, not on all of the protests, but in some protests. Because some protests happened on October the seventh in the US. Uh others and they have question marks behind this, who's behind this, who's organizing, who's pushing for that. So this is one thing. The the the the second thing is also to help us as Palestinians, because uh I think Australia wants to uh help the Palestinians. The the the the only way that you can help us is not to give us more aid or to give us more money or whatever. Help us to build our own country with the moderate hands, help us uh to amplify uh the moderate message. Uh unfortunately it's not that common because of those people who are shouting for bad things. So help people like me, help pro peace, pro-Palestinians who are close to News uh to Australia, and I think there is many of them, I assume at least. And those people need an opportunity to be hit. Because um unfortunately, our media and the Arab border and the Middle East they only amplify the extremist mentalities, and this is very bad. So I want the support from the Australian government for that. I want their support against anyone who supports Hamas as a terrorist group who harmed me personally and harmed my neighbors, my society. And I also want them to advocate for a free Palestinian state next to an Israeli one, of course, and without an occupation or seizure or anything. This is uh all what I can think of.

SPEAKER_06 37:33

I also touched on the issue of the frustration of the binary and how we can break out of that binary and start talking with more than one truth and including a bit more nuance and how we can achieve that and whether he's been frustrated by the nature of the discourse.

SPEAKER_00 37:49

Don't understand the current Israeli coalitation and think, yeah, all everyone is like Smotrich and Bing Fir, and they are all sitting and they have the same ideology, which is completely false. I mean, I do also acknowledge how the Israeli society actually criticizes and hates those people. They might only be loved in the in the West Bank, but in the if you went to Israel, I don't think so. The same goes for us. And as I said, we need more uh media coverage of the moderates, and we need uh protection and safety for those because uh a Jewish voice or an Israeli voice who's criticizing his own society will be called a kapoo and maybe attacked or harassed. This needs safety and protection. The same goes for the Palestinians because right now and even the world stopped, Hamas is uh continue to execute and torture people who criticize them. And those people, even us as as the Palestinian community in the diaspora, they are now uh going after our families inside Gaza. Many of my friends got their mothers even with a phone call threatened, their fathers interrogated and helped. So we need protection and uh safety for those people. We need your help to to to give us an opportunity to say our opinions clearly. And I think for for Gaza right now, the focus should be on the rebuilding of Gaza. Of course, Hamas should be completely outside of that. This is how they can support us with that. They can also support us with with uh making pressure on the Israeli government to stop the the the the settler attacks in the West Banks and uh stop even the building of settlements because since the the the the some European states recognized the state of Palestine, uh smotrich went like a crazy and they started building settlements here, settlements there. So this will also be an obesticle at the end of the day. The same th way I see the extremist uh groups are then as an obstacle to be so I also see the the the settlements as an obstacle, maybe not in the same way, but it it will be hard when we try to make peace and have many settlements to evacuate them. We saw in 2005 when uh Israel did that. So, yes, I I uh I this is what I can think of as ways to help the Palestinians.

SPEAKER_03 39:51

A big thanks to our guests in episode one: Julian Lisa, Michelle Grossman, Zack Schaefer, Van Batam, and Hamza Howdy. We'll be hearing more from all these guests as well as many more people later in the series. Izzy, what's planned for the next episode?

SPEAKER_06 40:09

The theme of episode two is law and accountability. We speak to a range of different people, all experts again in their field. Topics that we're going to look to cover is like, you know, calling for a royal commission, the background on the royal commission, some of the concerns of the community. But we're also going to be looking at like what are some of the other ways forward, like hate laws. I am personally very, very concerned by the use of uh the word Zionist or Zionism as as code, which then apparently gives you freedom to engage in blood libel or whatever else. Clearly it doesn't give you that freedom, but I am interested in how we, you know, how do we navigate that? It's a very important area, and we have the right people to talk about all these issues. So it's a great conversation.

SPEAKER_03 40:54

If you want to contact us, you can email us at tt at the jewishindependent.com.au. Don't forget to rate and review us. Please forward this podcast to anyone you think will find it valuable. Thanks for listening.