In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein describe how political elites capitalise on disasters, both natural and man-made, to push through long-held agendas for which they’d never get support in normal times.

We’re living through something similar, as the horror of the Bondi killings facilitates a renewed ideological campaign against Gaza solidarity by those who always hated the anti-genocide movement.

Activist Tasnim Mahmoud Sammak has already argued the point in this magazine today: the protests against the Gaza genocide did not contribute to the Bondi massacre.

The atrocity was committed by men who seem to have supported ISIS — the same ISIS that inspired the Lindt café attack in 2014, long before the anti-genocide protests began. It is not a Palestinian organisation. On the contrary, it violently opposes all the major Palestinian factions, including Hamas. Until very recently, it lacked any presence in Gaza, in part because Hamas suppressed it. Some reports now link ISIS to the criminal gangs that have looted aid and attacked Palestinian institutions with the tacit support of an Israeli state that sees them as a useful counterweight to Hamas.

None of that has anything to do with protests in Melbourne or Sydney.

The demonstrations against the Gaza genocide constitute the longest sustained street mobilisation in Australian history. Over more than two years, vast numbers of Australians have marched against the genocide — and they have done so with extraordinary discipline. Sports crowds generate more street violence than the weekly anti-genocide rallies.

The right-wing memes mocking “Queers for Palestine” tacitly acknowledge the remarkable diversity of the movement. The anti-genocide protests skew young but never exclusively so: plenty of older people march with them. The crowds look, in fact, very much like modern Australia: a cosmopolitan mixture of ages, ethnicities and faiths, walking together despite their differences. Shamefully, a media capable of identifying the single off-colour placard amid tens of thousands of people rarely reports what everyone at the events knows: namely, for more than two years now, Jewish individuals and organisations have been disproportionately represented both in the crowds and on the platforms.

At every rally, protest leaders denounce all forms of racism, as you would expect from a movement hostile to what Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem and scores of other credible observers denounce as apartheid. No organiser has ever advocated anything akin to the Bondi pogrom — if they had, the footage would have, almost immediately, circulated worldwide.

In lieu of any such statement, those seeking to link Palestinian solidarity to an ISIS-inspired massacre seize on the phrase “globalise the intifada” — a slogan that, they say, inspired the Bondi rampage. The brazenness of the slander almost beggars belief. For what it’s worth, the formulation most often used in Melbourne hasn’t been “globalise the intifada” but rather “stop the genocide” — a demand that retains all its relevance since, as Amnesty International points out, the genocide continues. In any case, the demonisation of the “intifada” slogan depends on a blanket refusal to accept that activists say what they mean and mean what they say. In almost any other context, a political demand would be discussed in relation to its advocates’ explanations of their program and cause. If, say, journalists wanted to know what “intifada” meant to an anti-genocide orator, they could, perhaps, ask her. Instead, we’re supposed to believe that activists utterly desperate to communicate their message do so through a code phrase that secretly contradicts the words they say.

Of course, anyone who cares to know understands that “intifada” means “uprising”, and so, by calling for its globalisation, activists advocate a world-wide revolt against Israeli apartheid and its enablers. Earlier this year, for instance, Marco Rubio boasted that “since taking office, the Trump Administration has approved nearly $12 billion in major FMS sales to Israel”. The association of the slogan with a gun massacre requires a perverse re-interpretation of “intifada” entirely at odds with the dictionary and with normal usage.

This underscores the danger of what’s being mooted, including the prime minister’s pledge earlier today to extend laws targeting hate speech and his renewed support of the deeply problematic “plan to combat antisemitism” by Jill Segal — the envoy who repeatedly attacks marches for Palestine but said nothing whatsoever when National Socialists rallied.

By emphasising the need for a global movement against genocide, the Palestine solidarity campaign undercuts the racialised essentialism taking hold almost everywhere. Opposition to Israeli apartheid implies a democratic universalism. It asserts that the ultimate solution to the horrors emanating from Gaza requires the provision of equal rights to everyone now living in historic Palestine, in precisely the same way that the ANC advocated a rainbow nation as an alternative to South African apartheid.

That shouldn’t be a controversial idea, as it expresses the most basic democratic principles. But, increasingly, it conflicts with political orthodoxies, both new and emerging. In the US, Donald Trump now spruiks, more or less openly, a racial nationalism in which, for instance, people of Somali background pose a threat to a “real America” that must be protected against immigrants. The far-right parties growing throughout the developed world all put the same kind of argument — as does, ironically,  ISIS, with its so-called “caliphate” predicated on sectarian purity enforced by violence.   

In the wake of the Bondi massacre, identitarian politics will receive a huge boost, not least because the attempt to associate Palestine with an attack initiated by an Indian national affiliated with a group based in Iraq and Syria depends on the insinuation that non-white “foreigners” are all more or less the same. Already, we’re seeing the usual suspects call for more immigration controls, border policing, deportations and the rest of the traditional xenophobic agenda.

None of this will make Australians safer. It will, instead, boost the far right, at a moment in which One Nation is already soaring in the polls. The fascists of the NSN have begun gloating about the likely size of their next march. Does it really need to be argued that a response to an antisemitic massacre should not bolster National Socialists?  Does anyone truly think a crackdown on universities (another old idea receiving a fresh lick of paint in the last days) will affect ISIS, an organisation innately hostile to secular education? Albanese now says he plans to crack down on “hate speech”. But, over the last two years, the political class has consistently and wilfully treated anti-Zionism as antisemitism, even though their tacit claim that Israel represents all Jews is itself an antisemitic trope.

If we’re to emerge from this awful spiral, in which one form of identitarian chauvinism spurs the next, we’ll only do so on the basis of a very different politics: one that takes for granted the ability of ordinary people — of any race, gender or creed — to unite against racism and violence. That’s why the Palestine solidarity movement matters more than ever.

Image: Terence Faircloth