What violence taught me about violence.
The recycling, trivialisation, and moralisation of mankind's worst attribute.
There is something deeply unserious about calling for an intifada in the morning and decrying police violence in the afternoon.
On Monday night, a movement that justifies violence found itself confronted with violence.
This is not a defence of police behaviour. This is about the duplicitous moralisation of violence in Australia’s antizionist movement.
Intifada only exists as a metaphor between the ears of those who feel safe from its effects. Australians calling for an intifada may represent the nexus of the world’s most privileged, most selfish, and most disturbed. This recklessness is as much a testament to the safety we enjoy as Australians, as it is the ignorance that this safety can cultivate.
Violence is corrosive, corrupting, and contagious. There is no good violence. There is no fixing violence with better violence. Those who have experienced violence should understand this.
Most Australians’ entire relationship with violence is theoretical, groomed by myth and multimedia to consider violence as a moralised dance between good and bad. Marvel movies. Fairytales. Computer games. News crammed into infographics. History lessons on Instagram carousels. This has resulted in terrible carelessness.
These are the circumstances in which calls to “globalise the intifada” are rendered permissible. People whose closest brush with violence is a classroom-based defence of anticolonial bombings in Algeria see violence as a solution, as opposed to an escalation of a problem. People who’ve never tasted violence beyond their own imagined, cartoonish renditions of come-uppance are trivialising mankind’s worst attributes.
“Intifada” celebrates indiscriminate terror against civilians. To pretend otherwise is to indulge in a quickly dissolvingplausible deniability. Yes, intifada translates to “shaking off”. Yes, sieg heil means “hail victory.”
In a perfect world, the violent among the crowd would not be tolerated by the peaceful majority. But this is not a perfect world, and the antizionist movement doesn’t just harbour violence on its fringes. It covets the right to incite.
The issue of moralisation is crucial, scattered through the rhetoric of the antizionist movement. This is a movement that refers to the tens of thousands killed in an unwinnable, eliminationist crusade as “martyrs.”
The use of the word “martyr” moralises the pointless deaths of civilians. Propagandising violence as divinely inspired is oxymoronic. One who denounces violence weeps for its victims and seeks to de-escalate. One who moralises violence weaponises the dead.
Armchair generals in Australia are reproducing the rhetoric of armchair generals in the Middle East. Years of pestilence have been poured into the ears of hundreds of thousands of Australian antizionist foot soldiers.
On Monday, encouraged by Australian of the Year Grace Tame, violent words manifested in actual violence, again, not two months since Bondi.
I spent my late teens and 20s radicalised. A confusing, unfair adult world was explained to me in black and white on university campuses. Resentments felt like serious, academic responses to the tyranny of global capital and Western supremacy. I believed myself to be an agent of purity fighting for justice in a malevolent police state.
Cultivating radicalisation and violent antipathy towards those we feel represent “oppression” has become not only fashionable, but institutionalised across Australia’s universities, arts, and cultural spaces. The repercussions of this radicalisation are severe.
Too many of us never escape. I got lucky, notwithstanding serious trouble with the police and a few well-earned tune-ups along the way. To have had the experience of so carelessly, arrogantly recycling the violence of my childhood into young adulthood, and to have reckoned with my own role in the black eyes and broken bones I accrued, is to know that all violence is self-moralising, hopeless, and obscene.
But it’s never the Randa Abdel-Fattahs and the Nick Riemers of the world who end up experiencing the repercussions of radicalisation. While they turn courtrooms into stage plays, the same violence they incite is ruining lives across continents.
We live in a world where one can don a keffiyeh, incite violence, bite a cop, and receive the nation’s sympathies.
The inciters of violence do not get to choreograph where it lands. You can light a fire, but you can’t control the wind.
Our inexperience with violence beyond its ideation sees Australians blaming what happened on Monday on the wind.
For most antizionist protesters, violence is a performance. Intifada in Australia is a theatre for the frustrated and impotent. I indulged in this theatre as a young man, not because I understood the world, but because I didn’t. And most importantly, because I was justifiably angry, and I turned that anger outward.
When people treat violent confrontation as a form of political theatre, they should not be surprised when police break the fourth wall. Again, to draw attention to foreseeability and agency is not to excuse police behaviour.
On Monday night, Jews were locked inside venues and warned against leaving. They missed trains to avoid walking through groups of people chanting intifada.
This is not an evaluation of whether police used excessive force. It is a deliberation on the moralisation of violence itself. The relationship between Western privilege and the fetishisation of the violence of intifada is unmissable here.
If we take issue with police violence, perhaps we should also do something about a movement whose celebration of violence causes violence.
To not have a relationship with violence is a blessing that we should be proud to protect. To foster a relationship with violence is as naïve as it is dangerous.
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Some relevant published work:
2026 We treat Nazism as a threat, but ignore terror of antizionism
Op-ed published by The Australian
Published in print and online here2026 What’s missing from conversations on safety?
Op-ed published by The Australian Financial Review
Published in print and online here2026 Adelaide Writers Festival and artistic freedom
Radio interview on SBS with Mariel Olenski
Aired on national radio and online here2026 How are young Jews responding post-Bondi?
Radio interview on JJJ with Arianna LucenteAired on national radio and online here
2025 The Corruption of Australian Cultural Institutions
Op-ed published by The Australian
Published in print and online here
2025 Grave Uncertainty For Jewish Australians at Federal Election
Op-ed published election day in The Australian Financial Review
Published in print and available online here
2025 Antisemitic Bias at The ABC
Op-ed published by The Australian Jewish News
Published in print and online here
2025 Glastonbury 2025: Fast Fashion
Op-ed published by The Australian Financial Review
Published in print and available online here
2025 Censorship in the Australian arts
Op-ed published by The Australian
Published in print and available online here
2025 Holocaust Inversion
Op-ed published by The Big Smoke
Published online here
2025 Australia Day’s moral complications
Op-ed published by ABC Religion and Ethics Report
Published online here
 | A guest post by
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Very thoughtful observations.
Your quote "yes Intifada means shaking off, yes sieg heil means hail victory" is a gotcha.
A very clear explanation of the dark side of pro-Palestinian frenzy, I think those who have some space in their minds for progress, will like this.