Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP
In response to the news that a challenge has been mounted against Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s eligibility to sit in the Australian parliament under section 44 of the constitution, “the rules” have been cited, as have double standards.
One of the arguments goes if Labor and Greens parliamentarians were forced to resign their seats because they were found to be dual nationals, it is hypocritical of the government to shield “their man”.
I have long been critical of the tendency of both sides of Australian politics to mobilise the history of the Holocaust as a defence against criticism of its racist migration policies, the punitive asylum detention regime in particular.
It is not lost on me that Josh Frydenberg happily defends his government’s policy of locking up those who seek asylum by boat on Manus Island and Nauru and keeping countless others in limbo “on shore” while claiming special status because his mother fled the Nazis and the Hungarian fascists to come to Australia.
As Malcolm Turnbull put it when he was prime minister, to legally challenge Frydenberg over his eligibility represents a failure to think “a little deeper about the history of the Holocaust”.
In response, the anti-LNP Twitterati, which has made Josh Frydenberg its bete noir, retorts that “making it about religion” is cynical, the mounting of a #strawman. Nevertheless, the facts are, as Turnbull put it, that Frydenberg’s mother, Erica Strauss, was born in the Budapest Ghetto in 1943, and although she herself survived the Holocaust, coming to Australia as a refugee in 1950, other family members did not.
Neglecting this, the case in favour of stripping Frydenberg of his parliamentary seat rests on the narrow legality: the fact that his mother possessed a Hungarian passport between 1943 and 1948.
The rules cannot be broken, even if – some acquiesce – they may need to be revisited.
But what are the rules in the case of Josh Frydenberg’s eligibility under section 44, and what does the insistence on applying them to him “fairly” mean for how white, self-defined “progressives” in Australia understand antisemitism?
It is curious that some of those welcoming Frydenberg’s potential demise have accused me of picking and choosing to whom the rules apply depending on who “I like”.
In the liberal mind, racism is not about systemic discrimination enacted by the state and perpetuated by the dominant culture, but something nebulously to do with in-groups and out-groups.
In Australia, the same cult of fairness that insists 200 years of colonial domination can be redressed by giving everyone a “fair go”, upholds “the rules” as the ultimate arbiters of that fair treatment. The rules, from this perspective, are not seen as the nationalist instruments that they are in practice, used not to distribute fairness but to delineate those who understand them from those who do not, for whom they were not written.
Antisemitism against white European Jews, undoubtedly a form of racism, nevertheless differs from that experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, black and brown people, migrants and refugees. While these groups are racialised as powerless and invisible within white dominated societies, antisemitism is a racism that envisions itself as “punching up”.
No matter the actual power held by individual Jews, antisemitism construes Jews as having the upper hand over the “ordinary” person.
The interests of Jews are equated with the interests of capital and the state. Since the birth of the Zionist project and the construction of the State of Israel on land belonging to indigenous Palestinians, Jewishness has also been associated with violent ethno-nationalism and colonialism. The interests of Jews and those of Israel are often conflated, thus erasing anti-Zionist Jews such as myself and countless others acting among Jews both to undo Zionism and expose racism in all its forms, as the Never Again is Now movement in the United States amply demonstrates.
Conveniently putting this aside, the dominant message regarding Frydenberg’s section 44 dispute is, as one Twitter user put it to me, that one cannot have “two masters”, or a dual allegiance to more than one state.
It is clear that Frydenberg’s “master” has never been nor will it ever be Hungary, the state which so nearly ended the life of his mother as an infant and from which she was forced to flee, a state which is currently enacting fascistic anti-migrant and anti-Roma policies, and in which antisemitism is rampant again.
The unspoken “other master” then is Israel.
Indeed, it has been stated that Israel’s right of return for Jews also contributes to Frydenberg’s ineligibility, although neither he nor his parents have ever been citizens.
Yet, the belief that Jews always hold the interests of other Jews, and by association the Jewish state, over those of their country of citizenship is an evergreen trope of antisemitism. Anti-nationalist, diaspora Jews are not helped in combatting this by Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu, who claims to be the leader of world Jewry, despite the fact that greater numbers of young Jews outside of Israel are openly eschewing the Zionist project.
But these facts are ignored by those for whom antisemitism trips so easily off the tongue. To mention antisemitism is always to weaponise, to mobilise strawmen, and to align with the 1%.
There is one thing that those determined to nail Frydenberg have understood about me and other leftwing Jews. We are anti-nationalist; we have no master, never mind two.
Mobilising old antisemitic tropes to bring down a political enemy by using rules established by a white colonial nation-state does not contribute to the fight against racism, no matter what we think about Frydenberg’s role in maintaining Australia’s border regime.
The long fight against racism and fascism may do well to remember the lesson taught to Frantz Fanon by his teacher: ‘“When you hear someone insulting the Jews pay attention; he is talking about you.”
Those fighting to unseat Josh Frydenberg are not our allies in the fight to undo racial-colonial nationalism in Australia.
Alana Lentin is an associate professor in cultural and social analysis at Western Sydney University
