Silence on the Palestinian plight is complicity

Australian Financial Review, “Letters to the Editor”, 5 May 2024 

As an anti-racist Jewish Australian scientist, secular humanist and humanitarian writer, I applaud the student protests at many Australian universities for Palestinian human rights, and particularly the Palestinian right to life. Thus Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor estimated (April 23, 2024) that taking into account the dead under rubble, 42,510 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza, including 15,780 children, 10,091 women, 38,621 civilians, and 137 journalists, with 79,240 injured, and 2 million out of 2.3 million displaced.

The indignant but peaceful protests for Palestinian human rights by anti-racist non-Jewish and Jewish Australian university students have been falsely condemned as “social cohesion”-threatening and “antisemitism” by Labor and Coalition politicians and by mainstream media, this being faithfully reported by the taxpayer-funded ABC.

There is real and damaging anti-Jewish antisemitism in Australia that is directed against the very best of Jews, the anti-racist Jews who believe in all human rights for all, “never again to anyone”, and are utterly opposed to the unforgivable mass murder of children by US- and US alliance-backed apartheid Israel. Silence is complicity.

Gideon Polya, Macleod, Vic

https://www.afr.com/world/middle-east/albanese-needs-to-get-off-the-fence-on-antisemitism-20240505-p5fozx