Anti-Semitism has been monetised, criminalised, and weaponised. This isn’t a fringe conspiracy theory. It is a calculated strategy—one that has proven effective in silencing criticism of Israel, chilling political debate, and protecting a settler-colonial state as it commits atrocities in real time.
Israel’s very existence, its foundational narrative, rests on the premise that Jews are always in danger, and that only a militarised ethnostate can protect them.
But what happens when that state becomes the perpetrator of the very horrors it claims to guard against?
What happens when the world watches a genocide unfold—starving children, bulldozed civilians, mass graves—and the institutions that claim to speak for the Jewish community remain silent, or worse, cheer it on?
Recently, I had two conversations that refuse to leave me. One was with a woman currently facing legal action from a Zionist organisation for speaking out. She is part of a growing group of Australians targeted by lawfare—not for promoting hate, but for condemning it.
Her case is not about law or justice. It is about silencing dissent, about bankrupting resistance. She is deeply aware of the risks, not just legal but physical. In being cast as a symbol of resistance, she fears she’s also been marked.
The other conversation was with my Jewish friend of 45 years, someone I consider closer than a brother. He’s a cultural, not religious Jew—part of the tradition, the tribe, but not the temple.
And he is sickened. Not just by the carnage in Gaza, but by the complicity of those who share his identity. “The majority of my people support genocide,” he told me. “I can’t live with that.”
Support for Zionism varies by geography, age, religiosity, and politics. In Australia, the 2023 Crossroads23 Survey found that 77% of Australian Jews identified as Zionist. That was before October 2023.
No such surveys have been conducted since—and perhaps for good reason. What would they reveal now? How many still believe Israel is the refuge of the Jewish people, even as it becomes a byword for unspeakable violence?
There is a tendency—often a deliberate tactic—to call these questions antisemitic. To ask why so many Jews support Zionism, even in its most militarised and supremacist forms, is labelled hate.
But that is not hate. That is accountability. To say it is antisemitic to ask why someone supports ethnic cleansing is like saying it is Teutophobic to criticise Nazis.
Yes, most Zionists are Christian. Yes, Zionism is not Judaism.
But that doesn’t answer the urgent question: who are the Jews supporting the starvation of children, the rape and torture of detainees, the demolition of homes over people’s heads? How did they come to believe that Jewish safety depends on Palestinian erasure?
Figures like Alex Ryvchin, the Leiblers, and Colin Rubenstein have played their part. Their media saturation campaigns repeated one line: “My people are afraid.”
And fear works. It justifies everything. But fear cannot explain away bulldozers over zip-tied hostages or a million starving children. Fear cannot be used as a moral blank cheque.
As this genocide approaches its peak and politics intensify, we will all carry emotional baggage into every conversation. Some will only hear what confirms their beliefs. Others will refuse to hear anything at all.
But those of us who see what is happening—and are willing to name it—must not be silenced. Not by accusations of hate, not by lawsuits, not by fear.
Silence is not neutrality. In the face of genocide, silence is complicity. It is time to speak the unspeakable.
Thank you Shayne Bilal for expressing exactly how we feel and comprehend the actual truth of this horrific situation.
Antisemitism, Holocaust, existential threat, terrorism, and Iran are words that pop up so that Israel can do anything without consequence. Sinwar legacy if anything is the complete exposure of the lies that Israel has successfully sold to the World, being the victim, very moral, and the only Democracy in the Middle East. Social media unlike the beholden Western mainstream media has blown the cover and the discerning people of the World are shocked. Most Western leaders and elites have maintained a radio silence about this exposure for self-interest reasons. However, what people see cannot be unseen. The zionist insistence that TikTok be banned is for this very reason, the daily, living room visuals of Israel’s atrocities laid bare. The deportation of students from American universities for their Genocide protest is the multiple checklist they have to suppress the Truth. During the calamitous days of anti-Vietnam war protests in America and the campus, the freedom of speech was not trampled, unlike today, a supposedly more enlightened era.