In Paris at the moment is an exhibition about the so-called degenerate art that was banned by the Nazis. When you view the exhibits, there isn’t too much that would strike a rational person as being degenerate. But rationality of course didn’t have much in common with Nazism.
Alongside the degenerate artwork are descriptors of the dehumanisation that took place under Nazi rule.
As has been said, the concentration camps and the mass shootings didn’t just erupt overnight, but occurred after what you might term a softening up of the population. The Jews were cancelled before they were killed. In other words, it became acceptable to expel them from the professions, to exclude them from public life, to regard them as vermin who were poisoning not only the wells, as was claimed in medieval times, but also society as a whole. And who, after all, wants vermin around?
Once it became acceptable and irresistible, in the sense that resistance was so limited, their destruction was all but assured.
In a few days we will celebrate Pesach, the exodus from Egypt. It represents not only an actual liberation, but also a spiritual and metaphysical one as well. As Rousseau famously wrote, man is born free but is forever in chains.
Some of those chains are the chains of a humanised society, of fulfilling at the least the 10 commandments. But there are other chains as well, the chains of not being able to live autonomously and according to one’s free will due to the discrimination, bias, hatred and poisonous rhetoric of others.
Our society has become blinded and poisoned by anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda. The exhibition identifies the anti-Jewish nomenclature which today is the same as the 1930s, save that the word Zionist is substituted for Jew. Otherwise the language of then and the language of today is identical.
The demonisation and the softening up of the public by portraying Zionists as vermin who need to be cleansed from the earth is not just happening, but has happened. Witness the yelling in the streets of Melbourne that ‘all Zionists are terrorists’, a monstrous inversion of reality that barely goes challenged.
Witness the manhandling by police of an older Jewish woman wearing an Israeli flag and carrying an umbrella, put in a headlock and hauled off the street, whilst the anti-Zionist inciters walk scot-free amongst us.
Witness the social media agitators, whose names I will not use in order not to oxygenate them, who continuously accuse Israel of a non-existent genocide and who either deny the barbarity of October 7, and in particular the rapes of Israeli women, or justify it.
Witness too, the saintly denoting of anti-Zionist Jews as the ‘good Jews’ these days, who will do anything to make it abundantly clear that they are on the side of the Palestinians and who don’t miss an opportunity to disparage, demean and chastise the Zionists, and then claim victimhood when they are rightly criticised as not representing the community.
They are also very quick to proclaim that what is happening is not done ‘in their name’, which is such a narcissistic way of looking at the war. I can assure them that the Israeli Defence Force surely does not have them in mind when rooting out Hamas terrorists.
They think that their self-proclaimed intellectual and moral purity inoculates them from Jew-hatred. They think that by attacking their fellow Jews who are Zionist, and who represent around 90-95 per cent of Australia’s Jewish population, that they are and will be insulated from the venomous hatred that inevitably spews forth. They think they have a moral coat of armour. They do not. They think that by joining hands with the pro-Palestinian Jew-haters that they embark on a life of freedom. Freedom however isn’t derived from that. Freedom comes from standing up for what is right. Freedom comes from doing what is hard, not what is popular or gets you more likes on Insta or has you branded as saintly on LinkedIn.
Pesach offers us a way of thinking and a way of behaving that is not unique to us, but was initiated by us.
Freedom offers us hope, not by doing what is easy but by choosing what is hard.
When the Jews fled Egypt it wasn’t easy. When they wandered in the desert that wasn’t easy. Being Moses wasn’t easy. None of it was easy. None of it is easy. But freedom isn’t about what is easy.
The Pesach story and the seder night are about questions and answers, and about Jerusalem. For those anti-Zionists who think that the Jews were parachuted into Israel with no prior connection to the land, let them chew on this – for thousands of years the Jews have yearned for a return to Zion and at the end of the Pesach seder we sing ‘next year in Jerusalem’. Jerusalem, our eternal capital.
Walking in Jerusalem and being able to pray at the Western Wall, that is freedom. That is the Jewish story.
The Nazis tried to remove the Jews from the world but they failed. They tried to erase us, to remove our freedom. The social media activists, the protesters, and the campus useful idiots are trying as well. They will try to cancel us and remove us from societal acceptability. But ultimately they too will fail, because we have in our DNA the yearning for freedom, the ability to say ‘next year in Jeruslaem’. And so it has been and so it will be.
That is freedom. That is the Pesach story
