Censorship is not the answer to Bondi - Kenneth Roth

A democratic society should debate a broad range of views, the former Human Rights Watch executive director writes

Photo by Gama

By Kenneth Roth

Australia keeps getting wrong the response to the horrible Bondi massacre. First the Adelaide Festival board, egged on by South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas, uninvited Palestinian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah because of “cultural sensitivity.” After 180 writers (myself included) withdrew from this year’s Writers’ Week, it was cancelled.

Now, at the urging of antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal, the government has enacted hate speech laws that will impose criminal penalties if a designated hate group’s comments will “cause a reasonable person … to be intimidated, to fear harassment or violence, or fear for their safety”.

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Attorney-General Michelle Rowland said an organisation might be listed as a hate group, depending on other factors, for publicly stating that Israel committed genocide or apartheid, if those comments made Jewish Australians “feel harassed or intimidated”. Yet regardless of anyone’s feelings, Israel has committed genocide in Gaza and has imposed apartheid in the occupied territories.

Easy as it is to denounce this example of censorship from the right, the progressive community (of which I consider myself a part) should be honest with ourselves – many among us have also regularly used audience feelings to limit expression. In recent years, it has become common in universities to suppress speech that might make some students uncomfortable. Universities are supposed to teach how to consider and debate ideas, even challenging ones, but this preoccupation with “safe” spaces and student sensibilities laid the groundwork for the litmus test of cultural sensitivity that the Adelaide Festival board applied and the “feelings” of harassment or intimidation that are the basis of the new hate speech laws.

We should never go down that path. A democratic society should welcome, consider, probe, and debate a broad range of views. No one is compelled to listen. If a topic is too difficult, people can walk away or tune out, without depriving everyone else of the opportunity to hear an interesting or even provocative voice.

The Adelaide episode also shows how censorship often backfires. Those behind the exclusion of Abdel-Fattah evidently felt they would improve Israel’s reputation by keeping a Palestinian writer off the stage. Instead, Abdel-Fattah is now a household name, a beloved festival is the casualty, and many are left wondering whether Israel’s government is really so fragile that it cannot tolerate a critic as one voice among many in a festival. The new hate speech laws now raise questions about why discussion of what Israel actually does to Palestinians might be deemed too sensitive for certain Australians to hear.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu illustrated the Israeli government’s devaluing of criticism in his recent interview with the Economist. When probed about Israel’s shattered reputation after the Gaza war, he dismissed it as a problem of “propaganda”.

But even the best public relations campaign cannot erase the starving and killing of Palestinian civilians, the decimation of most of Gaza’s housing stock, or the deliberate creation of conditions of sufficient suffering to advance the government’s stated goal of mass deportation, albeit with a wink-and-not caveat of it being “voluntary”. A discussion about the reality of Gaza is of vital importance.

A good chunk of Australia’s Jewish community seems to have relatively conservative views on Israel. When I visit Australia, which I do regularly, I am struck by how different the Jewish community is from that of my hometown, New York City, where one-third of Jewish voters just cast ballots for Mayor Zohran Mamdani, an open critic of Israel.

Part of the reason may be the Australian Jewish community’s relatively small size; a tiny minority is likely to feel more insecure than in New York, where Judaism is part of the mainstream culture. Part of the reason may be that such a large percentage of Australia’s Jews came to the country after the Holocaust.

I am also a product of Nazi Germany. My father fled Frankfurt in July 1938 as a 12-year-old boy for refuge in New York. The Nazi experience was a big part of my Jewish upbringing. Yet I draw very different lessons from the Holocaust than that behind the censoring of Abdel-Fattah and the adoption of the new laws on hate speech.

For me, the Holocaust represents what happens when human beings are dehumanised, when they are considered unworthy of their rights. The antidote, in my upbringing, is to reinforce the system of rights to make it unthinkable that such atrocities ever recur – for Jews or anyone else. This is obviously a challenge, but I have devoted my life to it.

But for those who defend the Israeli government’s record despite its genocide and apartheid – those who would rather censor than discuss this ugly reality – the lesson of the Holocaust seems to be the importance of military might. By this account, the Jews were slaughtered because they were weak. Israel is understandably determined to be stronger than anyone else around, but it has used that strength to pummel not only a force like Hamas that attacks them – an appropriate goal – but also the civilian population around them.

That approach is antithetical to the rights that the more than half of the world’s Jews who live outside of Israel depend on for their safety, including those of Australia. It mirrors the misguided effort to equate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, often using the highly controversial IHRA definition promoted by the antisemitism envoy, because that cheapens the concept at a time when its real form is a genuine threat to Jews worldwide.

The best way to respect the victims at Bondi is not to censor uncomfortable views but to uphold the rights that the killers on the beach so brutally flouted – to life, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech. I hope Australians can learn that lesson.

Kenneth Roth is the former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022), is a visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. His book, Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments, is published by Knopf and Allen Lane.