My Beloved Australia Has Become Confusing

Reflections on Gaza, grief and social cohesion

I never thought twice about Jewish identity in Australia.
That is simply a statement of fact.

For most of my life, religion sat quietly in the background of Australian civic life. People believed what they believed. It rarely entered public conversation, and never determined who was heard, excluded, or protected.

That is why the past year unsettled me.

I don’t understand the violence being perpetrated in Gaza against the Palestinian people. I don’t understand how the mass killing of civilians — children included — can be justified under any moral framework. And I struggle with how this level of destruction has become something to debate rather than to halt.

What puzzles me more is how criticism of the state of Israel — its government, its military actions, its policies — has so quickly and so often been labelled antisemitic.

These are not the same thing.

Criticising a government is not an attack on a people. Condemning military action is not condemning a faith. And insisting on accountability under international law is not hatred.

When those distinctions collapse, something dangerous happens. Moral scrutiny becomes untouchable, and fear replaces reason.

There is a long and painful history beneath this — colonisation, displacement, and decisions made far from the people who would live with their consequences. I don’t resolve that history. I only note that it exists — and that ignoring it does not make the present violence easier to understand, justify, or bear.

Then came Bondi.

Two men walking our streets with weapons. They aim to kill. And do. Fifteen people on a beach in New South Wales — a place that symbolised ease, safety, ordinariness.

Growing up in Australia, I don’t carry personal experience of antisemitism. And I didn’t think my country did either — not in any deep or defining way.

What troubled me was how quickly grief was consumed by something else. The shock barely had time to land before it was drawn into accusation, blame, and a language that suddenly appeared everywhere — “Jew-hatred”.

I find myself wrestling with resentment: the sense that Australia is no longer the primary point of civic allegiance in some of our public conversations. Global conflicts now arrive fully formed in our streets, our institutions, our cultural spaces, before we have even had time to grieve together as Australians.

The cancellation of Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah from Adelaide Writers’ Week marked a turning point for me. 

An Australian writer was removed from a cultural festival, not because of what she presented, but because of who she is, and the associations attributed to her. Cultural sensitivity was cited. Safety was implied. And the result was silence.

This is where definitions matter.

Dehumanising language — language that strips people of humanity or legitimises harm — should be confronted and rejected. But association is not dehumanisation. Discomfort is not danger. Criticism is not hatred.

When institutions blur these distinctions, they do not make people safer. They make conversations more brittle and trust harder to sustain.

The pressure to cancel her appearance came publicly from a pro-Israel advocacy group; this was stated openly. What disturbed me was how quickly an Australian literary institution chose exclusion over engagement.

This did not feel like a debate about ideas. It felt like an erasure based on identity.

That moment forced me to confront a discomfort I had been resisting. That some voices in Australia now carry institutional weight in ways that feel uneven — and that questioning this imbalance is itself treated as suspect.

This concerns power, pressure, and how institutions respond when controversy arises — not Jewish people as a collective.

Australia has many advocacy groups. Many are loud and effective. The problem arises when pressure replaces principle — when institutions stop trusting their own stated values and begin pre-emptively silencing voices to avoid discomfort.

When political advocacy is read as cultural authority, and criticism of a state is treated as an attack on a people, resentment grows — not because people are hateful, but because they feel they are being told not to see what is plainly in front of them.

That is how social cohesion begins to fray.

Another shift I can no longer ignore is the tone of Australia’s public conversation since Gaza, and especially since Bondi.

Voices associated with pro-Israel advocacy have become more prominent in mainstream and social media. The tone is often admonishing, absolutist, and dismissive — as though Australians are ignorant, morally suspect, or required to demonstrate unqualified allegiance.

There is little room for disagreement, complexity, or shared grief. Even large, peaceful demonstrations calling for humanitarian restraint are dismissed as extremist or aligned with terrorism.

This tone is reinforced by a troubling inconsistency in how responsibility is assigned. In recent commentary, Australia’s Prime Minister has been rhetorically linked to acts of individual violence he neither committed nor controlled. Yet when governments have demonstrably harmed their own citizens through unlawful policy, as with Robodebt, moral language has often been cautious, delayed, or absent.

What is also notably missing, at least publicly, is sustained empathy for Palestinian civilians caught in Gaza — children and families with no control over the forces acting upon them. That absence matters.

When public commentary shifts from persuasion to scolding, from dialogue to denunciation — and when accountability is applied selectively rather than proportionately — resentment grows. People feel spoken at, not with, in their own country.

Social cohesion is not built by silence. It is built by consistency.

It requires governments be criticised without identities being invoked as shields; that institutions can withstand pressure without abandoning principle; and that people can speak honestly without being assigned motives they do not hold.

When Australians begin to feel that some topics are off-limits, some criticisms forbidden, and some identities untouchable, trust erodes — not only between communities, but between citizens and the institutions meant to serve them.

That erosion doesn’t announce itself. It shows up as frustration. As resentment people don’t want to feel.

As the uncomfortable thought — this isn’t the Australia I recognise.

I am writing without answers.
I am watching the country I love struggle to hold complexity — and I don’t believe the solution lies in silence, exclusion, or fear.

Criticising a government should not fracture a society.
Protecting people from hatred should not require suppressing debate.
And social cohesion cannot be built on double standards.

If Australia is to remain a place where difference can coexist without suspicion, we must be able to talk — honestly, carefully, and without collapsing people into symbols.

Anything less is not cohesion. It is containment.