On Tuesday morning a memory popped into my brain: at my niece’s baby naming at a synagogue in Sydney, on a Friday night three and a half years ago, there was also a family who had come because they were sitting shiva for their mother/grandmother. We witnessed their mourning as they witnessed our new life and I’ll never know if they remember our baby but for me, their lost relative made the evening all that more poignant. this is the (Jewish) lifecycle.

Seeing that a Holocaust survivor and a ten-year-old girl were amongst those murdered last Sunday has remained seared in my brain. It is unbearable that someone could survive the Holocaust and then be murdered like this here. It is unbearable that our old people in the Jewish community, in Palestine, in Sudan, across this continent, in so many places — that any of them are not able to live and die with the dignity that our elders should have.

And in this moment, as we stretch our brains and our hearts and our memories to bring together our knowledge of all of these spaces where violence flourishes — to consciously and deliberately hold in both hands the similarities and the differences between these spaces and these histories — we’re also all reminding ourselves that these are heavy and difficult times and we need to care for our grief. But it’s also that this land, this beautiful Aboriginal land, was not made to hold such grief. It can, and it does, but it shouldn’t have this burden thrust upon itself.

What are we doing.

I have found myself saying this repeatedly over the last two years. What are we doing.

And since Sunday night I’ve received so many messages from friends, colleagues and community that I can’t keep up with replying to them. But I find myself repeating the words that this is “horrid” and “unbelievable”. However, when I send the messages I keep the word horrid but delete the unbelievable. This is believable.

And this violence is not senseless.

Because this is what Australia is. And because Australia is also built on being delusional and trying to cover over the violence that is perpetrated and pretending that the truth is not the truth.

And so, we knew that this was going to happen. Not because Jews will always be killed, but because when genocide and patriarchal racist violence is normalised, more violence will always come. And my god is it incessantly normalised.

For my PhD research into Holocaust education in Jewish schools, I interviewed people who taught about the Holocaust in Melbourne and New York. One of the things that recurred in what they told me was that they felt like another Holocaust could happen again at any moment.

So, when Jewish people today talk about feeling like Jews here were about to be attacked for the last two years, they are being disingenuous. This has long been a current in Jewish Zionist thinking in Melbourne. Indeed, it’s so dominant as to be constitutive in many ways of post-Holocaust Jewishness in so-called Australia. (What have we done, how have we allowed this to be so.)

And in my work I made the argument — that I think holds — that this fear was legitimate, but for reasons other than what they are asserting. It is legitimate not because Jews are forever inevitably going to face violence and extermination. Not because we are eternal victims. There is nothing inherent to us or to the whole world and its mutable structures that brings that about or makes that true. But because settler-colonialism is the governing logic of this nation-state and it is based on an eradication of difference. Jews — like many others, we are not unique — get in the way because we are different. (And we differ from one another, too: it is not just that some are Zionists while others of us repudiate that; but also that our approach to religion changes — that is, the Chanukah event on Sunday was organised by Chabad, a movement which offers a form of Judaism which has long held absolutely no attraction to me. What is a Jew, I’ve been asked many times recently, and the true answer is that there is no one definition, and anyone who tells you there is is just trying to sell you something — some kind of hegemonic and repressive idea of a group formation.)

And so this means, I really want to say, that the problem that we face is settler-colonialism. Whether we are amongst those subjected to it or amongst those who embrace it (and Zionism, we have to always remember, is a form of settler colonialism), it is bad for us. and it is bad for us not just directly because of the harms it causes to Jews and other migrants to this country, but of course more significantly because of its disastrous harms to First Nations peoples.

This is one of the reasons why the responses to this massacre immediately tend as we knew they would: to more racism, directed at Muslims and Palestinians and refugees and migrants and First Nations people and Jews.

That we knew this was coming, that we all braced our bodies and our minds immediately for it, does not make it any less horrid.

Imagine though the possibility of a response which was not horrid. Which did not demand more violence be piled up. Which led us to other ways of being together, other horizons of possible futures. Imagine a way of interacting which flowed from our shared vulnerability and shared strength and shared need to be protected by each other. Maybe we need to learn how to brace ourselves for that, my loves.

Image: Rory McLeod