When my friend Dina gave evidence to the royal commission into antisemitism and social cohesion on Tuesday, she made a striking observation. A few weeks earlier, her youngest daughter burst into tears when the family were heading to Bondi Beach for dinner. When Dina asked her what was wrong, her daughter replied, “now when I go to Bondi I think about dying”. Dina realised, in that moment, that her daughter had every reason to think that. “They came to kill all of us, we just weren’t there,” Dina told commissioner Virginia Bell.
The only reason it wasn’t her daughter, or mine, on that day in December is because Dina and her family were with me at the bat mitzvah of a mutual family friend. When my friend and colleague rang me from the Bondi Beach Chanukah event to tell me he’d been shot in the back and thigh, Dina was standing with me. We had just spoken about how sad we were to be missing the Chanukah event, the first since the end of the Israel-Hamas war and the release of the Israeli hostages.
This is why this royal commission is so deeply personal to us. Not only did virtually every member of the small and close-knit Sydney Jewish community lose someone they knew, or take a bullet, or flee for their lives, or lie prostrate peering over corpses hearing shot after ghastly shot, they know that, had their plans been different, they or their children may have been killed too. And they know well that if there is to be another such attack, who’s to say we’ll be there to give evidence in the aftermath?
Dina was one of the courageous Australians who agreed to appear, tell her story and share her fears and hopes. To every Jewish Australian, Dina’s story is unremarkable. She spoke of survivors of the Holocaust, arriving in Australia with nothing but the realisation that they were spared while others died and we’ll never truly comprehend why. If it wasn’t the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, it was the child of Iraqi-Jewish refugees who fled the plunder of Iraq’s Jews in 1941, or they were the children of refugees from the Soviet Union, where in the egalitarian bliss of communism Jews were classed somewhere between peasants and livestock.
They all ended up here and made their way as new migrants do. Some entered the professions or public service, as my mother did, others drove cabs, as my father did; some tried their hand at business. Some stumbled, some excelled. All they asked for and all they received was an even playing field. The opportunity to show who they were and be judged on their merits and the substance of their character and not the race stamped on identity papers.
In the opening days of the commission, witness after witness spoke in a sort of dreamy lament. They longed for a time when Jews weren’t labelled baby-killers and “Zios” who deserve everything they get unless they held the Jewish homeland in contempt. They longed to see an end to the terrorism drills in schools, the militarisation of our temples and the latest essential absurdity, gunboats in the sea and police snipers on roofs around open-air gatherings of Jewish Australians.
The witnesses had every right to flash rage for the patent unfairness, years of warnings ignored, of claims mocked and bodies buried.
Instead, we saw humility and depth of character. A community of survivors upon survivors upon survivors who seek only to restore that level playing field so that we can lead peaceful and meaningful lives, as is the right of every Australian.