The Other Cheek talks with mark Leach, founder of Nover Again is Now the campaigning body opposed to antisemitism. Questions in Italic. The conversation is edited for length.
Mark, what a day to talk to you on the eve of Simcha Torah, which means two years on the Jewish calendar since the Hamas attacks, on the eve of the hostages returning later this evening. Australian time.
Mark Leach: Yeah, anytime now, actually. So the first group should be back anytime.
Do you see Trump’s 20 point plan likely to come into effect beyond this return of the hostages?
For me, the key thing will be Hamas be completely disarmed and can they deradicalize Gaza and actually the West Bank. Peace will only come when the Palestinians decide that they actually want to give up fighting. And so I suspect the hostages will come back. But if I’m less optimistic, what I think will happen is Hamas refuses to disarm and the war will resume, and Israel will go in to finish them off. And who knows what that’ll look like, but it won’t be pretty.
Your mission for Never Again Is Now, primarily to combat antisemitism in Australia, will hinge on that outcome.
Well, I wish. No, I don’t think so, John. I think the reality is that the actions in the Middle East have given licence to the antisemitism here. What will end antisemitism in Australia is a wholesale rethinking of the role of the Jewish people within Theology of Islam. And so that’s the one source of antisemitism Australia is Islamic theology. And then the other source is the emerging racist. And I don’t know if Israel was suddenly become at peace with its neighbours. I’m not sure the racist right would go away. And I’m not sure what that would do to our own homegrown Islamic antisemitism.
There might be a third form of opposition to Israel, which is the suffering in Gaza. And this may be, some people might call that antisemitism. I wouldn’t. But that’s a breeding ground for people being hostile, if not to Jewish people, to Israeli politics, surely.
A hundred percent. Look, I think it would be amazing if peace broke out, but I guess I’m just less optimistic. Hatred of the Jewish people seems to have been with us for thousands of years.
I think the suffering of the people in Gaza is a tragedy. It’s awful, but it doesn’t give moral licence to hate Jewish people in Australia or try and divide us in Australia or hold the Jewish community in Australia accountable for what’s happening in Gaza. So even [with] the protests on Sunday: I was walking through the protest in Hyde Park, the pro-Palestinian gathering, and in the conversations I had, the people were clearly saying, ‘Well, it’s not just about Gaza, it’s about colonisation.’ “It’s about sanctioning Israel.’ ‘It’s about one nation, one Palestine, from the river to the sea.’ So I think peace in Gaza will remove one excuse for antisemitism, and that would be a good thing. It’d be amazing if the war stopped it, but I worry that it won’t end it.
As a person in touch with Australian Jewry, what’s the current mood in the Jewish community, especially tonight?
Speaker 2 (05:15):
Yeah, look, hopeful. It’s actually hard to capture. It’s at one level, unbelievable relief. Even the announcement of the signing of the peace plan, with just a sense of relief and this burden of the hostages being removed from them was huge. But it’s tinged with, I won’t believe it until it actually happens. So it’s hopeful, a little bit fearful, exhausted. I mean, the psychological impact of having so many people held captive in what we know are just horrendous conditions for so long after such a massacre has been exhausting. And I think the Jewish community feels isolated and marginalised and rejected by much of Australia, certainly by what they see on the streets. And so I think people are hopeful. Maybe just maybe this will change things in Australia.
My suspicion is that it will get tougher for the Australian Jewish community. As stories about the suffering in Gaza, if journalists are allowed to go in, those stories come out and the spectacle of millions of people living in tents becomes better known.
From people I know in the military who’ve gone in or embedded in with the IDF going in to Gaza, [i hear of] the extent of the devastation. 50% of the homes in these Gazan cities were booby trapped. There were tunnels everywhere. So the level of devastation that has happened as a result of Israel working to destroy Hamas and destroy its military capacity is huge. So yeah, when those pictures reach the west, it could be disturbing. On the other hand, what will become abundantly clear is there’s no famine in Gaza and there’s no genocide. So I think that’s the thing that I’m going to be interested to see how that plays out. Because already you see the footage coming out of Gaza. Hamas operatives are back above ground. They’re back in uniform, they’re out of their civilians. They’re holding victory parades. They’re launching an internal civil war against people. They label collaborators with Israel. So I don’t know what is going to happen and what’s going to be found and how it’s going to play out over the next weeks and months.
For there to be a international force that stabilises Gaza is [surely] in the best interests of Israel. Moving towards reconstruction as quickly as possible, surely would be better for Israel, than years and years and years of uncertainty, which seems to me to be the alternative.
There is no doubt that the best for everyone would be a totally demilitarised Gaza, which can be rebuilt. And instead of pouring countless billions of dollars into turning it into a military staging point for terror attacks against Israel, it was turned into a thriving Dubai like hub of peace and prosperity, which it should be. I mean, it’s an ancient city, beautiful beaches, many beautiful people. It has all the potential to be a beautiful place, and the quicker that can happen, the better. But RA’s got to be removed, or at least totally, the education system has to be completely changed. So they stop indoctrinating the kids to hate Jews from birth, and they have to remove all the weapons from Hamas and actually prevent an outbreak of covil war… What happens after the first group of, I don’t know, Indonesian peacekeepers are attacked by a group of Hamas militants or killed in an IED explosion. Like what happens then? So I think there’s a lot of water to go under the bridge, but everyone I know longs for the establishment of a peaceful, prosperous, and totally demilitarised and deradicalized Gaza.
Now, a few months ago, the Knesset voted almost unanimously against the Palestinian state, yet if the Trump plan goes ahead, that’s exactly what we’ll get at least in part of Gaza, isn’t it?
Well, gosh, it depends what you define as a state. I would say the idea of an fully autonomous nation state, a fully autonomous Palestinian nation state with full kind of military autonomy is exceptionally unlikely given the situation on the ground, for a generation. I think most Israelis, pre October seven wanted that. And I mean, history shows that the unilateral withdrawal of Israel from Gaza in 2005 was this desperate attempt, not this deep, sincere attempt on Ariel Sharon and the Israelis to say, we’ll trade away land for peace. And that’s been such an unmitigated disaster for Israel and for the Palestinians. I think it’s going to be a long time before anything remotely like that happens. And even on the Trump plan, there’s so much water to go under the bridge before anything like a Palestinian state is established. I think that’s a long way in the future.
Self-government, a defined boundary, a defined people. That’s three out of four of the characteristics of a state.
Yeah.
It is more than I suspect the Netanyahu cabinet really would like. And to some extent, Trump is getting the Israelis to accept some things they would prefer not to. In the same way that Hamas is accepting things that they would not want to if this goes ahead.
Look, that’s probably right. Unlike many pundits, I don’t pretend to know the inner workings of the Israeli cabinet or Israeli politics. Every time I think I understand it, I go, actually, there’s layers and levels here I don’t get. But look, you’re probably right, but Israel is a democracy. So I mean, the government can change. It’s a very, very robust democracy. So who knows what will happen once the fighting ceases after the next election, what government will come into power. But I don’t dunno what option Israel had to be honest. I mean, I think if they could come about a state that was genuinely content to live at peace with Israel, most Israelis would welcome that.
The difficulty is surely on the other side of the country [the West Bank] where there is so much settlement, so much the building of new towns by Israelis, that it’s going to be very difficult to work out a solution, a peaceable solution that gives both Jewish and Arab citizens a fair go.
Well look, the interesting assumption there, John, is that a Palestinian state has to be free of any Jewish citizens. We know this to be the case like in the West Bank or Judean, Samaria, the Jew, where the Palestinian authority are in complete control in area A, there are no Jews. They’ve been driven out. And we know from 1948, from 1967, where the Arabs, when Jordan took control of East Jerusalem, they drove all the Jews out, drove the Jews out of the West Bank in 67. So what I find difficult is the world is quite content condemns us. Israel is an apartheid state when 20% of their population are Arabs, but quite happy to go on the West Bank. No Israeli, no Jew can live anywhere in the West Bank. Most of the land in the West Bank where the settlers have been since 67 that’s been purchased legally. Why do they not have a right to live on their ancestral homeland?
We could get into the weeds about what has been purchased legally and the tenure questions about land in the state of Israel. That’s a long discussion.
It is.
But it seems to me that a situation where you have one side being able to build and develop new property with strong support from the government, but the other group of people are restrained from doing so, is a real difficulty in West Bank to dear some area, whatever you want you want to call it.
Look, again, I don’t have an answer. I think the [Israeli] strategy has been to kick that can down the road for many, many years. And I suspect that will continue. I would say the situation on the ground makes the emergence of a two-state solution where one of the states is a Palestinian state that is via a fully functioning Palestinian state on the west side of the Jordan River, extremely unlikely now. Now I’m not saying I agree or disagree with that. I’m just saying talking and I’m going to be in Israel at the end of the month, so I’ll have a better idea. But I would say when I look at the maps and when I talk to friends over there, 500,000 people now live in these areas and they’re not going to move. And I also would say, when I read and talk to people, I would say on the Arab side, there is a desire now for no desire for a two-state solution, either it’s all or nothing. It’s from the river to the sea or nothing. So I dunno what the answer is, quite frankly.
There’s anInteresting comment by [Israeli commentator] Yossi Klein Halevy reported in The New York Times this morning where he said, political polarisation has left two views of Israel. One is a liberal Israeli story of a post holocaust creation of a liberal democratic state. And the other one is the Israeli government story of how Israel is America’s bullwark against the Muslim world, which resonates for the American right. So are we condemned to having a progressive view of Israel Palestine or a Christian nationalist view of Israel Palestine? Or is there a reasonable middle?
Speaker 2 (20:54):
I’m not sure I see the distinction. I would say I see from my perspective and from visiting Israel, I see Israel’s fundamental civilizational architecture as Western as in Judeo-Christian. So aligned with modernity, built on the values of the Torahm of the scriptures, with a democratic system of government, separation of powers. It’s an enlightenment culture, apart from the ultra Orthodox. It’s a society that values science and technology thoroughly, modern human rights, feminism, LGBT rights and so on. And in that very real sense, it is up against, certainly in Hama, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran, the Syrian leader Julani and Syrian isis, it is up against a pre-modern Islamic civilization. So I think at one level that the fault line or the clash of civilizations is being played out there, which isn’t to say they’re an outpost of the American religious right at all. I think that’s not true at all, but I think they are broadly part of the same civilizational entity as us. Does that make sense?
Yes, that is the question I’m asking. So that leads onto the question of as has Israel lost the confidence of the Western world? Megyn Kelly was recently quoted as saying ‘anybody under 30 doesn’t support Israel.’ She’s hardly a lefty.
Well, I think she’s overstating the case, but probably not by much. I think in large part that’s because that generation have been brought up with a worldview of basically the whole world’s divided into oppressed and oppressor. Israel’s the oppressor, the Palestinians are the oppressed. It’s a generation being brought up to believe themselves, to be illegitimate products of a settler colonial state where they live on unceded stolen land full of guilt and self-loathing because they’re also the people who are destroying the environment and we’re hurtling towards existential death rows of climate change. But they can’t do anything about that here. So they continue to live their lives on unseated land full of self-loathing and hatred and believe that somehow if Israel is overturned, all the problems of the world will be resolved. So it’s complicated. There’s this complex sort of scapegoating projection, hatred of Western civilization, and they rightly see Israel as that. Yeah, I think the under thirties are very complicated political group to deal with.
Well, as an over 70 person who is not particularly keen on settler colonialism, which I think is a real thing, but doesn’t necessarily fit well with the true story of the Jewish people, and certainly concerned about climate change, I think the Gaza War has been a brought about another Vietnam generation. because if Hamas got one thing right, it was that a FLN Algerian type uprising would cause consternation in the West because of an Israeli overreaction.
Oh look, I think, yeah, yeah, a hundred percent.
I think I’ve heard it described that Hamas had three bets. One was that Hezbollah and Iran would join into their uprising. They lost that bet, that second bet that Israel at that stage was hopelessly divided because there were mass demonstrations going on, and they lost that bet because Israel has become united during the war. But the third bet that the west would see an overreaction by Israel, they may well have won that bet. And of course, president Trump did say to Netanya recently, you can’t fight the whole world, which I think was a reflection that he realised that Israel had lost the confidence of the young generation.
Yes. And I think of course, what’s so interesting is that more Arabs in the Middle East and the Gulf states are supportive of Israel than their young Western counterparts. So that is, they want peace with Israel, they want to trade with Israel, they want the prosperity of Israel. So I think you’re right. I think it’s extremely concerning for Israel. I think Hamas knew what they were doing. I think in every other war – when Israel was in Lebanon [for example] – approval for Israel plummeted. I don’t know where this will end. I think it’s deeply concerning. I don’t think Israel had any other option. And I think I would say to all my friends, well, okay, so what else was Netanyahu to do? What was Israel to do? It’s like young people in the West have forgotten what October seven is.
The propaganda that frames it all as just Israel responding just to October seven, which was justified resistance isn’t losing the fact that Israel was fighting an existential war on seven fronts, against a group of people who were committed to killing themliterally. That is what they say they want to do. So what do you do as an Israeli? I’d rather be alive and unpopular than dead and popular.
So economically well, militarily Israel and geopolitically Israel is in the best position in the Middle East than it has been in decades. We’ve quickly forgotten what they accomplished against Hezbollah, against Iran, against the Houthis and in Syria. I mean, it’s utterly remarkable where Israel is actually at. The other thing I think people don’t realise is there are two places in the world that have been laboratories for future warfare, that’s Ukraine and Israel and the western world. And Trump knows this well, is dependent on Israeli defence tech. So Australia, by the way, if you talk everything from drones, from anti drones, from ai, from iron dome, from the laser defence, they’re building from the tactics on how to combat, how to fight urban warfare at almost every level. We in the West need Israeli tech.
I’m a little sceptical of that claim because it strikes me as quite convenient. But I’m not a weapons expert, so I’m not going to say a lot about that.
I’m quoting from friends in the military. I’m not an expert either, so that’s right. I’m just quoting friends, particularly in the Australian military.
Maybe I need more friends in the military. I do wonder whether the downside for Israel is that it could become even more isolated, somewhat like South Africa, and ignoring the debate whether apartheid applies or not. But the presence of boycotts is a real possibility, maybe starting with soccer, maybe starting with Eurovision. Not that that’s terribly important, but Israel’s major trading partner is the EU, not the United States. If free trade dries up, that is a real problem for Israel.
Yeah, I agree. I think BDS is the most antisemitic movement in existence, and they’ve been working for 60 years to isolate delegitimize and destroy Israel. And I think you’re exactly right. It concerns me greatly and it concerns the Israelis. And I just think at a global, I think it’s just the same as Germans boycotting Jewish shops in the 1930s. In my view, it’s as simple as that.
I would put it a different way. I would say the impetus for the rather large pro-Palestinian marches and possible flow onto supporting BDS in Australia is a simple fact. And that is that Israel has killed an awful lot of people in GazaAnd when you ask what alternative did Israel have, I think it’s a good question, but I don’t think an answer is ‘we had to kill whatever tens of thousands of people you accept’. If you look at the Israeli estimates and the Hamas health ministry estimates, they’re pretty close. Israel says they’ve killed 23,000 Hamas operatives or militants, whatever you call them, and they accept a 1.5 ratio of civilians killed to combatants. That gets you awfully close to Hamas health ministry numbers. So that’s a lot of people.
Yeah, it’s a lot. But it’s a fraction of the people who have been killed in Syria, in Sudan, in the Congo, in the DRC. You’re right. And every death is a tragedy. All of that is correct. I think where the problem behind the BDS movement is it is a movement that has been going on for 50 years with links back to jihadist terrorists who’s documented across the us, across the college campuses, inspired and funded by the Muslim Brotherhood and the left and the empathetic. And Gaza has given them the greatest boost imaginable because they’ve been able to propagandise these deaths and harness that energy of dismayed the deaths and say, well, the answer is to destroy Israel. You go, okay, so what does that look like? You’ve then got to kill 7 million Jews or expel them from the land. So we have a lot of work to do to show the hypocrisy and the lethality of this movement. It’s antisemitic to its core.
I would say that while I support the right of self-determination for the Jewish people, I certainly would say that in that the Vietnam War was a disaster for the Americans. It turned out there’s potential disaster for Israel in the aftermath of the Gaza incursion. I think Trump has done a great favour to Israel by stopping Netanyahu taking over Gaza city and losing the hostages. I think the hostage families should be very grateful to President Trump. And he has done what appears that the Israeli government had given up on in rescuing those hostages.
So there’s two parts to that, and I think you’re exactly right. We should be very grateful to President Trump. And it’s remarkable that he’s got to release the hostages, and that is what Israel has said all along. ‘Release the hostages and surrender and there will be peace.’ And I think you are right. I think the Israelis, and I mean, I was of the view that Hamas would never give up the hostages. It is their last point of their greatest leverage. As Nasser Mashni said on Piers Morgan [Uncensored], he talked about the hostages as leverage and didn’t think that Hamas should give them up. He also thought that October seven was justified resistance and refused to call it a terror attack. So I think Trump, what Trump has done is remarkable, and he’s leveraged and who knows how planned and how coordinated all this was with Netanyahu. The strike on Qatar that I think was critical in shaking up the Qataris, Trump going to Qatar and going, ‘man, maybe you’ve got to choose between us or Hamas.’ And Qatar went, ‘Well, I think we’ll go with the US on this one.’ Yeah, I think it’s the greatest hope for peace that we have, and thank God that it’s happening. And when the hostages are all released, it’ll be a new day. And then please God, the Hamas actually disarms and surrenders and they can be peace.
One of the things that puzzles me is that Israel is holding onto bodies of Palestinian people. They’re saying they’ll release one body of 15 bodies for everybody released from Hamas. But I can’t see the point. It seems to be a real darkness in the actions of the Israeli government. I suspect that we are looking at people who are so traumatised that maybe they’re incapable of behaving rationally. And I think that’s certainly true of the other side, that we have two traumatised communities. And it is very interesting that President Trump turns out to be the adult in the room.
Look, I think I agree. Both sides are traumatised. I think the characterization of both sides as children with Trump being the adult is probably unfair to que who are adult rational actors acting rationally within their jihadist ideology. I mean, they are imminently rational. I don’t understand the Israeli government’s reasons for keeping the bodies of Jihadists that they’ve killed except to keep them as negotiating leverage. I don’t understand. So I don’t think it’s irrational though. And I don’t think it’s just a trauma response. But I would say that at a government level, and I would say both sides are deeply traumatised. I mean, every person I speak to from Israel, the level of trauma they’ve gone through is huge as a society.
And you are able to speak to people from Israel, but we haven’t yet quite heard the stories of the people who’ve lived in Gaza through this.
Yeak it’s going to be awful.
[Yet] they’re still alive to tell their story. War is awful, but the civilian to combatant casualty ratio is extraordinary. In the circumstances, nearly a thousand Israeli soldiers have died. Just the fact they drop leaflets, they warn people when they’re coming. They give up the element of surprise. They have relocated the population when Egypt could have opened their border. This is the other thing that annoys me or frustrates me. Egypt could have opened their border. We could have had a million and a half women and children in refugee camps in Egypt with a guarantee of return when the wars over. And then the IDF could just have gone in and fought, could have saved all the civilian lives.
And to that, I say Netanyahu could have walked into the Knesset at any time and passed the motion guaranteeing return of Palestinians to Gaza if Egypt, Egypt would left them in. And it seemed to me that that would never have passed the Knesset, that it probably wouldn’t have passed his cabinet.
Well, no, that’s an entirely hypothetical view, because Egypt were never going to take refugees from Palestine. No matter what Israel said they were implacably opposed to that. So I think the world has been very happy to go along with Hama sacrificing Palestinian civilians on the altar of their jihadist ideology. And it’s a tragedy for the Palestinians. I mean, it’s the biggest losers in this. We all talk about Israel being delegitimized, man. The biggest losers in this are the inhabitants of Gaza.
Absolutely. Right. And I think on that is a good place to close out our discussion.
Image: Mark Leach