Mick Hartley

Howard Jacobson lectured at Sydney University back in the Sixties, and loved it. 

I felt accepted. I didn’t tell my mother this in case she worried I’d never return, but to friends I wrote: “Time will tell, but this could be one of the greatest places on earth to be a Jew.”

But times, and Australia, have changed. After October 7th there were chants of "Gas the Jews" by the Sydney Opera House.

So what happened? I have my own explanation. The left happened. Australia is a political country, by which I mean it wears its party allegiances openly. As a student at an English university, I hadn’t known or cared about my fellow-students’ politics. As a teacher at an Australian university, I knew how my students’ parents voted. Such overtness should not have surprised me, given how the country was settled. Hatred of the cruelties and condescension of colonialism still simmered close to the surface. So of course Jews, who had been pushed around and talked down to for centuries, felt at home here. We had a special understanding, too, of what Australians called the “cultural cringe”, that strange inferiority complex that was part envy of what you didn’t have, part rage that you didn’t have it, and part belief that what you did have was something better. We were in it together, Australians and Jews. We were equally thin-skinned, tried equally hard not to be, and shared edgy jokes. But then came the Six Day War.

I left Australia just as the conflict broke out. Every Australian I knew had been on the side of “brave little Israel”. By the time I got back to England, Israel had made the lethal mistake of winning. I heard nothing from my Australian left-wing friends. A few years later, I went back and discovered why. I had no left-wing friends. On the orders of the Soviet Union they had given up on Israel and, since I hadn’t, they had no choice but to give up on me. Those I had laughed with over a beer had stopped laughing and those I had talked literature to had stopped talking about literature. Post-colonialism, they called it now.

Before the Six Day War, Jews had been paradigmatic victims of colonialism. After the Six Day War, they were its paradigmatic proponents. Australia ceased to be the greatest place to be a Jew….