When Jews are hunted, history repeats and the media asks the wrong question

There’s an old folk song I listen to sometimes, when I hear news of an atrocity committed against the Jewish people. Der Milner’s Trern, the Miller’s Tears, is a Yiddish lament about the expulsion of Jews from their homes in Tsarist Russia. 

The song was made famous again by the Coen Brothers’ 2009 film A Serious Man, where it haunts the woebegotten protagonist like an old country dybbuk. (They used Sidor Berlasky’s recording, though I actually prefer the slightly richer version recorded by Zupfgeigenhansel, a 1970s German folk duo.)

“I have heard tell,” the miller sings, “they are going to drive me out of the village and away from the mill.”

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“Where will I live?” the old goat wonders. “Who will take care of me? The wheels turn, the years pass, and along with them, the Jew passes on.”

On Sunday morning, we heard tell once more. They are trying to drive us out of our villages. As news of the massacre in Sydney dawned, it felt like a miniature 7 October. Texts flew in from Jewish friends. “I wonder if this is what it was like when the pogroms happened,” observed one. “News filters through from the next oblast or whatever. Damn, they got Anatevka too.”

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They got Bondi too. It seems the age of the Jew hunt has returned. Angry, violent, homicidal men stalk our festivals and our holy places. They want us to feel powerless and afraid. And however much we express proud defiance, in truth, whatever our apparent privilege, we do feel powerless and afraid in these moments.

These cultural scripts are buried deep in the Jewish mind. The enemy changes – sadistic Inquisitors, feral Cossacks, merciless Nazis, now jihadist Muslims – but the result is the same. In every generation they rise up to destroy us.

As news of the massacre in Sydney dawned, it felt like a miniature 7 October. Texts flew in from Jewish friends. “I wonder if this is what it was like when the pogroms happened,” observed one. “News filters through from the next oblast or whatever. Damn, they got Anatevka too.

And yet every generation’s story is also different. Amid the swirl of atavistic emotions and half-buried neurosis provoked by these events, we must continue to analyse our own circumstances as rationally as possible. Perhaps most importantly, let’s be very clear about what is causing this violence and who bears responsibility for it.

In recent days, there has been considerable frustration towards broadcasters asking a particular question of Jewish contributors speaking about the massacre in Australia. It goes something like this: yes we are all appalled by events in Bondi and condemn them unequivocally, but did Israel go too far? Is this a kind of twisted payback for the deaths of tens of thousands of Gazans? Might Bibi Netanyahu and his brutal war strategy bear some of the blame here?

To which my answer is in some sense yes, but also really really not. Yes, it is true that but for the war in Gaza, particularly its duration and lethality, these Jew hunts wouldn’t be taking place, at least not in their current form, at this present moment. It would be odd to suggest otherwise.

Antisemitism always spikes around the world when there is war between Israel and the Palestinians and certainly this past two years has been no different. Israel has made new enemies and activated old ones and Jews around the world are becoming collateral in this fight, whether they want to or not.

But this question is also reductive and historically illiterate.

First off, it denies moral agency to the perpetrators, men apparently unable to distinguish between a group of Australian Jewish families gathering to celebrate Hanukkah and their anger at events in Gaza. This moral agency is often denied to the perpetrators of 7 October and so many other terror attacks on civilians in Israel. There is something profoundly wrong with men who set out to deliberately massacre as many innocents as possible and it is ultimately within the souls of these men that the reasons for such slaughter can be found.

Second, this suggestion inverts the chain of causation. Israel’s war was launched in response to a jihadi massacre on 7 October. Yes, there is a huge amount of context to that massacre, but none that remotely justifies it. Even if you think Israel’s prosecution of the war is utterly reprehensible, it is not reasonable to pin this one on them. The rather warped logic here appears to be: 1) start a war by enacting a brutal massacre of Israeli civilians and take hundreds hostage 2) be furious that Israel visits immense pain upon you in response to that massacre. And so then 3) encourage your fellow travellers to brutally massacre some more civilians, even if they are in Australia, as long as they are also Jews.

Third, it forgets the miller’s tears. Murderous antisemitism was not invented on Sunday and it wasn’t invented on 7 October. It is an ancient cultural force and has also been an integral part of the Palestinian and wider Arab response to the Zionist project from the beginning. It was there in Hebron in 1929 and in Baghdad in 1941. Violently dismantling the Jewish state was the defining mission of the armies that fought Israel in 1948, 1967 and 1973.

This fanatic ideology of annihilation was triggered by Israel’s costly and successful attempt to will itself into existence and flourishes to this day

In character and ambition these impulses differ somewhat to the passions of Bohdan Khmelnytsky or the Black Hundreds or whoever hounded Sidor Berlasky’s poor cereal grater out of Uman or Berdychiv. But they are also the metastasisation of old antisemitic impulses, some western European, some Russian, some native to the Middle East. They are new, but evolved from something very old.

This fanatic ideology of annihilation was triggered by Israel’s costly and successful attempt to will itself into existence and flourishes to this day. Hamas are the torch-bearers of this tradition and it is written into their charter. The Akrams in Sydney, father and son, were working firmly within it.

The Jews and then Israel have committed their own sins on their journey, many of them recent. But this inflamed and homicidal response to the very idea of Israel, then to its reality, has been there all along. And that is the root cause of Bondi, not Bibi Netanyahu’s war.

• Josh Glancy is associate editor of the Sunday Times