RUTHFULLY YOURS

Anti-Semitism has exploded in Australia since Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. Synagogues have been set alight. The offices of pro-Israel politicians have been ransacked. Even a Jewish childcare centre was set on fire and covered in racist graffiti. Perhaps most infamously, two Australian nurses openly boasted on camera about wanting to kill Israeli patients.

Alex Ryvchin, CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, was caught up in this wave of hate. In January, the house where he and his family used to live was attacked by anti-Semitic thugs. Alex joined the latest episode of The Brendan O’Neill Show to discuss what has gone wrong in Australia. What follows is an edited extract from that conversation. Listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: What happened when your old family home was attacked?

Alex Ryvchin: My wife woke me up at about five in the morning and told me that our old house was hit. She showed me this footage, which was taken by our old neighbours across the street, showing an inferno right in front of our old house.

We lived there for five years and it was a really beloved family home. We bought that house because of my grandfather. He had been an engineer in Kyiv, but couldn’t find work when we first migrated to Australia, because he had health issues and couldn’t speak English. The only useful thing he could do was drive a bus for a Jewish social club of Holocaust survivors. The club would give him $5 a day, and that’s all he was able to earn at that time. I would go with him before and after school, and we would drive up and down this beautiful winding road in the eastern suburbs of Sydney. On one side, you can see views of Sydney Harbor, and on the other side you’ve got the Pacific Ocean. I remember how my grandfather would look at the houses on that road. To him, it was like a utopia. It was everything that he knew he personally would never have, but that he thought he could create for his family in Australia. So when I saw a house on that street for sale, we had to buy it. That house represented a great deal to me.

When more CCTV footage of the attack came out, you could see two guys get out of a car. They had a can of petrol, which they poured like a fuse across the width of the street, leading up to cars parked in the driveway. They lit it and these cars just ignited. They targeted one car in the driveway of the adjoining property, which was still owned by a Jewish couple in their 80s. They daubed it with ‘Fuck Jews’ on one side and ‘Fuck Israel’ on the other. I thought that was very poetic. It’s like two sides of the same coin.

I still don’t think I’ve fully grasped how personal this was and what it means. I’m not a person who frets about security. But when I do pause and contemplate it, it’s a horrible thing to know that I was targeted. My family was targeted. Our former home was targeted, in a residential street where the houses are close to each other. A fire at that scale could have incinerated people in their beds. This is the reality of life in Australia right now.

O’Neill: Did you imagine things ever getting this bad?

Ryvchin: There was an incident on 8 October that showed us that things could get really nasty. It took place when the full news of what had transpired in Israel hadn’t even really come out yet. Hamas was still in southern Israel in some of the kibbutzim. It was known that something horrendous and unprecedented had happened. We’d seen the footage of the Bibas family being taken hostage. We’d seen the footage of Shani Louk and her broken body being paraded through the streets of Gaza. We saw images of Naama Levy being dragged by her hair in her bloody pants into captivity. We’d seen images of a Thai worker getting his head lopped off with a shovel.

A gathering took place in west Sydney, where a mob gathered and chanted and screamed with great elation about how this was a day of joy. This was a day of pride. Convoys of cars drove through the streets letting off fireworks. This was the greatest day of their lives. This day of rape and killing and looting and destruction was the greatest thing they’d ever experienced.

The following day, there was another pro-Palestinian gathering in Sydney. A part of it peeled off and there were about 50 or 100 youths, with their faces covered so they couldn’t be identified. They stood on the steps of Sydney Opera House and chanted ‘From the river to the sea’ and ‘Fuck the Jews’. It was such an outrage for this to occur at all, but for it to occur at the Opera House was a national disgrace. It was broadcast throughout the world. We thought it would stop there, but several things happened that showed us that things were going to get really nasty.

The first issue was that the police were paralysed. They didn’t know what to do. One Jewish man defied police and government recommendations to not go anywhere near the protests – which in itself is a travesty, the fact that Jews were locked out of parts of the city. But he went there with an Israeli flag and was quickly detained by officers and hauled away. From a policing point of view, I understand why. When you have a mob like that, anything can happen. It’s easier to remove the one Jew who will be the victim of the mob, rather than the mob itself. But it also sent a signal that the mob will be left alone.

The second thing that really disturbed me about that whole incident was the things that were chanted. Originally, it was reported that the protesters were chanting ‘Gas the Jews’. They were definitely chanting ‘Fuck the Jews’. No one questioned that. And they were chanting the medieval battle cry of ‘Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews, the army of Muhammad will return’. But part of the press got deliberately bogged down on whether ‘Gas the Jews’ was actually chanted. It was a way to sow doubt, to tell people not to trust the claims of the Jewish community about anti-Semitism.

Every time there’s been an attack since, including the attack on my former home, you see even relatively mainstream characters talk about things potentially being a false flag or an inside job. It’s the same sort of pathology that causes people to question the Holocaust, or to say that Israel killed its own people on 7 October to justify ‘genocide’ in Gaza. That same psyche is on display all the time here in Australia.

Obviously, this goes well beyond anti-Zionism or criticism of Israel. More people are beginning to see this now. We had another shocking incident a few weeks ago, when two nurses at a public hospital told an Israeli man on camera that they wanted to murder Israeli patients. The interesting thing about that was the reaction to it. This was reported across the board as being an anti-Semitic incident. Almost no one questioned it, even though the word ‘Jew’ wasn’t used.

I think people have woken up to the reality that this psychotic, consumptive hatred of Israel is very distinct from a critique of Israeli politics and politicians, which is normal and reasonable. When you have this frenzied hatred that compels you to burn things and threaten to kill people, that is not a political critique anymore. It’s something more sinister and more deeply held than that.

Really, these psychopaths have done our job for us. They’ve revealed that, when people are burning synagogues and cars and planning to kill people, that’s clearly driven by a hatred for Jewish people.

Alex Ryvchin was talking to Brendan O’Neill on The Brendan O’Neill Show. Listen to the full conversation here: