Reckoning, Pre-emption, and the Politics of Moral Cover

Jeremy Liebler has written an opinion piece for the ABC critiquing a piece by Josh Bornstein. It needs a counter-critique.

Jeremy Liebler opens his defence of President Isaac Herzog’s visit to Australia by invoking reckoning. The Bondi attack, he argues, “has forced a reckoning about the kind of country we are, and the society we want to be.” This framing is not accidental. It immediately places dissent outside the moral circle: if you object to the visit, you are resisting the reckoning.

But Australia is not new to reckoning. We reckoned after Port Arthur, and we did so decisively—without importing foreign leaders, without collapsing national grief into partisan identity politics, and without pre-assigning blame before the facts were known. We are entirely capable of moral seriousness. What we cannot do—what we should refuse to do—is reckon on behalf of someone else’s political project.

That refusal matters because Liebler does not merely welcome the forthcoming Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion; he pre-loads its conclusions. He asserts, as if already established, that an “environment of rising antisemitism and its normalisation” contributed to Bondi. This is precisely the opposite of due process. A Royal Commission exists to determine causes, not to ratify political narratives in advance. It may well find other contributing factors—radicalisation dynamics, copycat terrorism, or even the moral shockwaves of an unfolding mass atrocity in Gaza. To declare the verdict before the inquiry begins is not prudence; it is advocacy disguised as concern.

This habit of inversion runs throughout Liebler’s argument. He claims that critics of Herzog’s visit risk “blurring the distinction between Jewish Australians and the state of Israel.” In fact, the blurring is not performed by critics at all. It is foundational to Zionism itself. Zionism has always relied on the fusion of Jewish identity, Jewish safety, and the political legitimacy of a militarised ethno-state. That fusion is not accidental; it is strategic. The result is that ordinary Australians are left navigating a deliberate ambiguity: is “Jewish” a religious community, a cultural inheritance, or a geopolitical allegiance? When critics insist on separating Jewish people from the actions of the Israeli state, they are not erasing Jewish identity—they are attempting to restore clarity that Zionism has actively dismantled.

Liebler insists that Jewish connection to Israel is “intrinsic” and that questioning it treats Jews as “uniquely illegitimate.” But this claim collapses under the slightest historical comparison. Opposition to South African apartheid did not hinge on hostility to Afrikaner culture or identity. It was opposition to an ideology and a system. Likewise, today’s opposition to Israel’s actions is not an attack on Jewishness; it is a response to a state engaged in prolonged occupation, apartheid-like legal structures, and—now—mass civilian slaughter. To pretend otherwise is to erase decades of anti-colonial moral reasoning.

Liebler further claims that protest against Israel is “qualitatively different” from protest against other conflicts. This is simply false. Australia has a long and honourable tradition of protesting war and imperial violence—from Vietnam to Iraq. Protests against the Iraq War absolutely questioned the legitimacy of US power, including its role as a unipolar global force. What they did not do was confuse criticism of empire with hatred of Americans as a people. That distinction is precisely what critics of Israel are trying to maintain today.

When Liebler claims that protests now call for “Israel’s destruction,” he again relies on rhetorical inflation. The dominant demands are not for the annihilation of Israel, but for the dismantling of its apartheid structures and the abandonment of genocidal security doctrine. Even the most incendiary chants—such as “death to the IDF”—are explicitly directed at a military institution accused, with substantial evidentiary support, of war crimes. Condemn the language if you wish, but do not pretend it is equivalent to ethnic hatred. Political institutions are not protected classes.

Liebler asserts that when Zionism is framed as immoral, or when Jews are targeted for their connection to Israel, we are confronting “antisemitism in its modern form.” But Zionism is not being framed as a moral crime because it is Jewish; it is being framed as dangerous because it reproduces the worst ideologies of the 20th century: militarism, settler colonialism, and ethno-national supremacy. Many object not because Israel is Jewish, but because no state should be organised around ethnicity. That is a universal principle, not a discriminatory one.

The Bondi attack is then weaponised to seal the argument. Liebler notes that the perpetrators claimed to be targeting “Zionists” and then attacked a Jewish Chanukah celebration. This is tragic—and it must be confronted honestly. But extremists always appropriate ideologies to rationalise violence. Brenton Tarrant used “replacement theory.” Islamist terrorists invoke theology. This does not mean climate activists are responsible for eco-terrorism, nor that Christianity causes far-right massacres. What produces violence is radicalisation, not criticism. And radicalisation cuts both ways—including the radicalisation of young Jews taught that they possess a God-given right to kill civilians by serving in the IDF.

Liebler’s appeal to the Monash Crossroads 23 survey—claiming 86 per cent of Australian Jews see Israel’s existence as essential—is methodologically weak. The respondents were self-selected, disproportionately Zionist, and even within that cohort expressed deep criticism of Israel’s conduct. The unanswered question is not whether some Israel is important to identity, but which Israel: an ethnocratic fortress state, or a democratic polity with equal rights? Identity claims cannot be used as moral shields indefinitely. Many white South Africans once claimed apartheid was intrinsic to their identity. History did not indulge them.

The suggestion that critics are “amplifying a minority of anti-Zionist Jewish voices” also misfires. Political position is not experience. Liebler cannot plausibly claim to arbitrate what constitutes “mainstream Jewish experience,” nor can any commentator. Jewish communities are diverse, contested, and internally plural. To suggest otherwise is itself a form of erasure.

Liebler’s defence of Herzog personally—that he is centre-left, ceremonial, and not responsible for policy—is beside the point. Herzog has made statements since October 7 that are contestable at best and dehumanising at worst. More importantly, symbolism matters. Inviting Israel’s head of state during an active campaign of mass killing is not neutral. It is not merely “engagement.” It is political cover.

This makes Liebler’s appeal to legal process ring hollow. He insists that allegations of genocide remain before the ICJ and that judgment has not been rendered. Yet he has already pronounced on the causes of Bondi and the nature of antisemitism in Australia—before a Royal Commission has even convened. More fundamentally, genocide is not paused while lawyers deliberate. The moral imperative is not to wait politely for a verdict while children are buried under rubble.

In the end, Liebler’s claim is not that Herzog’s visit is misunderstood, but that opposition to it threatens social cohesion. This is backwards. Australians are not recoiling from Jewish connection to Israel; most barely comment on it. What they are reacting to is the radical escalation of Israeli repression in Gaza—and the attempt to reframe outrage at mass killing as bigotry.

The Albanese government may believe it is modelling tolerance by inviting Herzog while maintaining policy disagreements. But tolerance of atrocity, wrapped in the language of pluralism, is still tolerance of atrocity. History is not kind to those who “maintained dialogue” while mass death unfolded. Germans who did nothing also believed themselves moderate.

President Herzog’s visit is not a threat to social cohesion. Nor is opposition to it. The real threat is the normalisation of genocide—and the insistence that naming it is the problem.

Liebler's piece: https://www.abc.net.au/religion/jeremy-leibler-israel-isaac-herzog-measure-social-cohesion/106294246