It is an indictment on where we have arrived and perhaps, who we have become, that for both the Victorian government of Jacinta Allan and the NSW government of Chris Minns, the most important business of state this week is keeping people apart.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog is coming to Melbourne today to meet Jews for whom Israel, as a place, a people and an idea, is intrinsic to their identity. He wants to console people for whom being Jewish in this city has meant being hassled, hated and vilified over the past two years.
The details of his visit cannot be published ahead of time for fear that protesters will direct their anger and frustration not just at the president, but the people he has come here to support.
Melbourne’s Jews, including school children wide-eyed at meeting a president, will learn at the last minute where they are gathering to reduce the risk of times and locations finding their way to Pro-Palestinian activists. They don’t want mums and their kids being heckled by an agitated mob – or worse – on their way into a community event.
If you are offended by what this implies, don’t blame the messenger. The Victorian government, Victoria Police, the Australian Federal Police, Israeli security personnel and Jewish community organisations are seriously worried about how the day could end.
As Allan said this week, the primary purpose of Herzog coming to Australia is to extend sympathy and support to Jewish Australians who, just six weeks ago, watched in horror as Jew-hating assassins murdered 15 people celebrating Hanukkah on Bondi Beach.
“No one should be adding to that hurt,” Allan said. “No one should be turning up this week, on any street in this nation, with a view to add to that pain and hurt.”
No reasonable person wants a repeat in Melbourne of what happened in Sydney three days ago, when protesters and police came to blows in the middle of the CBD.
There is debate about whether the NSW permit system intended to regulate protests – laws the Allan government has refused to adopt – aggravated the situation. But as Minns observed, the ugly scenes, including any gratuitous force used by police, would have been avoided had protesters followed a police directive to move their demonstrations a few blocks over.
This directive was issued to keep them separated from Jewish people meeting with Herzog in another part of the city. “We couldn’t have a choose-your-own-adventure situation where protesters and mourners clashed on Sydney streets,” Minns told ABC TV.
Allan has different laws at her disposal but her priority on Thursday is the same – to keep protesters away from Melbourne’s Jews.
That is an awful sentence to type about a city that, for the best part of a century, was a Jewish haven largely free of antisemitism. It may offer some consolation that, away from the television cameras and radio mics and duelling press releases, there is good work being done here to bring people together.
On Wednesday night, 15 Jewish and Palestinian nurses and allied health professionals visiting from Israel and the West Bank had dinner with a group of emerging Jewish and Palestinian leaders in Melbourne. The dinner was held at the home of Mikaela Stafrace, the chairwoman of Rozana Australia.
Rozana is a charitable, health diplomacy project founded in Australia that operates in Israel and the Occupied Territories. It facilitates better understanding and co-operation between Israeli and Palestinian doctors and nurses to improve their quality of care and bridge social and professional segregations entrenched in Israel’s health system.
One of the Rozana delegates is Yerant Saryan, a 38-year-old, Christian Palestinian nurse who specialises in sexual health, lives in the West Bank town of Beit Jala and crosses a border checkpoint every day to start his shift at a Jerusalem hospital. He has always felt squeezed by Israel’s unique ethnic tensions but says that after October 7, life has gotten a lot harder. “I have to hold the suffering and pain of both sides,” he says.
Saryan is sitting with Diklah Barak, a 49-year-old, Jewish occupational therapist and lactation consultant from Tel Aviv who helps infants and young children with feeding difficulties. She doesn’t think of herself as politically active, but chafes at injustices towards Arabs in Israel. She was disturbed to learn, not that long ago, of fresh atrocities uncovered from the 1947-48 Nakba – a defining history for Palestinians which, she says, was not taught in her Jewish school.
Barak is opposed to the war in Gaza and Israel’s occupation of territories long reserved for a Palestinian state. She also questions why people with no connection to the conflict are protesting it in Melbourne and Sydney. “I’m hearing demonstrators shouting from the river to the sea, so where am I standing” she asks rhetorically. “We are all there together – let us figure it out.”
Saryan and Barak, when talking about work and life in Israel, frequently reference “the other side.” For them, travelling together to Australia and taking part in an intensive program of seminars tailored for registered nurses working in multi-ethnic hospitals offers an opportunity to share conversations difficult to have at home. “When I come and see Israelis in our group, it gives me hope,” Saryan says.
In Israel, there is a strong tradition of political protest. A catchphrase of anti-government demonstrators in Tel Aviv is “despair is not a plan.” On the streets of Sydney and Melbourne, we can all see the despair.
Away from the chanting and raised fists, there are people with a plan.
Chip Le Grand is state political editor.
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