Across Australia, the political, media and cultural establishment is attempting to demonize, censor and persecute those who stand up for Palestine. After initial attempts to restrict the right to demonstrate were brushed off by rallies that drew record-breaking numbers, the focus has turned to clamping down on expressions of solidarity with Palestine by people who work in the public eye.
It began after the first pro-Palestine march crossed Sydney’s city center towards the famed Opera House in the days immediately following Israeli retaliation in Gaza. NSW Premiere, Chris Minns, defamed pro-Palestinian protesters by claiming they’ve “proven they’re not peaceful” and vowed to stop future action. Minns’ attempts to restrict demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine are only one part of a continuing effort among institutional elites to clamp down on criticism of Israel.
The Concerted Effort to Silence Criticism of Israel
Since Israel’s siege on Gaza, institutions and state representatives across Australia have joined in concert with those around the world delegitimizing support for Palestinian justice. In France, Germany, and the UK, pro-Palestine protests have been banned, Palestinian authors checked, and eminent historians silenced. And, in the most blatant political gesture to suppress criticism of Israel, in the United States, the House of Representatives passed a resolution that “clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”
Meanwhile in Australia, Leader of the Opposition Peter Dutton called for the deportation of so-called “antisemitic protesters.” And Liberal Leader of New South Wales Mark Speakerman demanded that multiculturalism secretary, Mark Buttegieg, be sacked due to his son attending a pro-Palestinain rally. Indeed, Speakerman went so far as to suggest that Buttegieg disown his son.
In Melbourne, powerful law firm Arnold Bloch Leibler rescinded financial commitments to not-for-profit arts precinct Collingwood Yards and the National Association of Visual Artists (NAVA). Their sins? Collingwood Yards Indigenous artists crafted signs critical of Israeli colonization, while NAVA supported Overland’s open letter to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Minister for the Arts Tony Burke for refusing to condemn Israeli war crimes.
Further, after a group of prominent journalists signed an open petition condemning Israel’s suppression of “newsgathering and press freedom in an unprecedented fashion,” calling journalists to cover Israel’s bombardment of Gaza without bias, management removed the signees from reporting on the incursion any further. Sensationalizing what the journalists explicitly claimed is a bulwark “holding the powerful to account,” news outlet The Australian branded this media call for impartiality and journalistic integrity an “anti-Israel letter.”
And in one of the most fiery hotbed media stories, Sydney Theatre Company (STC), publicly censured three of their actors after they donned keffiyehs in resistance to Zionist militarism during the opening night ovation of the STC flagship production of Chekhov’s The Seagull. STC is a cultural juggernaut and Australia’s leading theater company, as well as one of the world’s most prestigious. Thus, with “the full power of the media and arts funding establishment” against the actors’ sign of Palestinian solidarity, STC revealed their allegiance to the small but powerful minority of voices who have banded together to stifle any substantive pro-Palestinian expressions in politics, the media, and the arts.
Which bears asking: why is this the issue creating these fault lines? With growing fears within the United Nations that “the maintenance of international peace and security” is threatened by unchecked Israeli aggression, and with polls across Australia showing definitive support for a ceasefire across political parties, why is the establishment shirking consensus demands? We can look to the STC case as a microcosm of the combined efforts to outright castigate any support for Palestinians, which reveals novel political and economic braids in the long-standing interwoven efforts to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism within the liberal democratic order.
The STC Affair is a Microcosm of a Larger Trend
The three actors, Harry Greenwood, Megan Wilding, and Mabel Li, wore keffiyehs to express solidarity with Gazans. They were gifted the traditional Palestinian scarves by Violette Ayad, an STC-affiliated Palestinian artist whose family has been displaced and killed during the crisis. Immediately following the ovation, an image of the keffiyeh-garbed actors went viral. Since then, emails and phone calls have flooded the STC Box Office, Philanthropy/Donor and Artistic teams, bombarding staff with accusations of institution-wide antisemitism. Many of these patrons have filed ticket, subscription and donation refunds.
Online, a viral open letter from a director of the Sydney Jewish Museum, Daniel Grynberg, wrote that he was a “patron, subscriber, supporter and fellow traveler of the Sydney Theatre Company for over 35 years.” He further accused STC of ignoring “Israeli suffering” and of doing “PRECISELY NOTHING” to make Jews “feel supported.” Shadow Arts Minister Paul Fletcher fanned the flames further on Sky News, decrying Greenwood, Wilding and Li’s gesture as “expressing support for the murderous, terrorist thugs of Hamas.”
Days later, one of STC’s key donors and board members, Judi Hausmann, resigned, writing that she was “beyond disappointed” that STC had not censured the cast members, declaring her resignation to be “necessary because I’m a Jew.” A second influential donor and board member, Alex Schuman, followed with his own resignation. In response, STC canceled the show’s midweek performance, issued a public apology and demanded that its actors leave their politics off the stage for the remainder of the show’s run.
What’s notable in the STC apology is when they claim that “when our audiences attend a production, they come to experience the content in that play and that play only.” This is a hollow conception of live theater. Filled with missed lighting queues, flubbed lines, costume tears, broken props, faulty set mechanics, and performance-by-performance variation, live theater walks the precipice between the fictional world of the show and the real world of the creatives producing it in real time. This is seen most directly during the ovation, when the sign of solidarity occurred. The ovation is not epilogue or addendum to the performance. It is the moment when the wall between actor and spectator falls, and the actors reveal their unvarnished autobiographies as integral components of the night’s event. Thus, despite STC’s claim, when the audience goes to the theater, they do not go to experience the content in that play only. They venture to the theater to give themselves to artistic inspiration, possibility, and risk. This is what frees creatives to place fresh varnish on well-trodden theatrical material. As evidence, this very version of The Seagull is an updated one, promoted by STC as a “contemporary, gutsy and darkly funny new adaptation.” The audience journey to the theater to experience these “gutsy” possibilities that the performance might offer. And this includes more than content bookended by the playwright.
In one of the few public statements supporting the actors, longtime arts advocate and current Director of Adelaide Writer’s Week, Louise Adler, defended the artists’ “right to have an opinion” during the curtain call by bringing their entire worlds into the art they make. She listed a litany of instances at the intersection of politics and art, from Picasso’s Guernica and Goya’s The Disasters of War, to the many writers who took sides during the Spanish Civil War. She speaks from a concrete and intimate connection to the situation in Palestine. Her grandfather, Simon Adlersztejn, died at Auschwitz, leading her own father, Jacques, to join the French Resistance during WWII. Her mother’s entire extended family were killed during the Holocaust. This connection, Adler declares, makes it incumbent upon international witnesses to the horrors in Gaza “to not look away,” as the world did during the Holocaust.
This plea echoes Auschwitz survivor and celebrated memoirist Primo Levi, whose opposition to Israeli occupation grew after witnessing Israel’s increasing treatment of Palestinians in the manner that Jews were treated by the Nazis. “Everybody is somebody’s Jew. And today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis.” Jewish theorist Judith Butler appeals to Levi’s example, imploring that we stay “alive to the possibility of knowing and opposing the suffering of others.” This is why when ABC’s Laura Tingle asked if the STC audience’s concerns need to be centered, Adler’s retort was simple: why are they taking offense? A group of actors were standing against genocide, while wealthy “captains of industry” felt bold enough to cry offense from the comfort of their air-conditioned seats.
Adler’s reply is worth considering. The uproar and STC’s response were not driven by popular will, but by “captains of industry” whose disproportionate power over the reputational value and operational activities of cultural institutions is increasingly one-sided. Insinuated within board rooms, mastheads, and executive suites, these decision-makers apply pressure for the benefit of a liberal order that is perpetually grasping for legitimacy while facing direct social, political and economic challenges.
So, yes, why indeed are certain STC patrons claiming offense? And why were STC so quick to coddle donors’ feelings by censuring their actors with a public declaration?
There’s a Market to Consider
For one, STC has a market to consider. It’s impossible to separate STC’s actions apart from the breakdown in negotiations over playwright and actor pay in recent months. In what is being called “a rare case of collective action in the arts sector,” The Australian Writer’s Guild is pursuing the reinstatement of pre-COVID minimum payments that lapsed after lockdowns. In the interim, theater companies have been using a modified agreement that does not honor previous commission or royalty arrangements. Parallel to this, the actor’s union, Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), has been rebutted by the producer’s union, Live Performance Australia (LPA), over MEAA demands for a 3% annual salary increase. This amounts to $34/wk. LPA reps claim that it is up to individual agents and producers to negotiate rate increases above the existing minimum.
For STC, this means two things: 1) maintaining measures that reduce theater and production costs, which consume 87% of revenues (not including administrative costs, depreciation, or interest payments, which together push STC well into the red) and, more importantly, 2) securing continued government and donor support. This comes after near insolvency during the COVID-19 recession, during which STC relied on over $23 million in government funding. What is more, STC receives nearly 30% of its total financial support from donors, the majority of which is managed by the Sydney Theatre Company Foundation. STC Foundation is run by a directorate of powerful corporate executives and entertainment professionals, including, but not limited to, Hugo Weaving, Mia Wasikowska, Tim Minchin and, until The STC Affair, Judi Hausman and Andy Schuman, the two board members who resigned.
The end of the ‘22/’23 financial year saw STC post its first surplus in five years – $44,000. The catch is that even this meager surplus was reliant on $10 million from government funds and $3.8 million from donors. Without it, STC would have reported a $13.87 million deficit. In STC’s ‘22 end of year Financial Statement, the Board of Directors acknowledged the Company’s reliance on external support and vowed that “this trend of support should continue.” This confirms Adler’s contention that STC was kowtowing to donor power. While the STC apology claimed that “theatre is a place for exploring ideas with complexity and context,” as soon as they enforced the mandate imposed by institutional elites in the name of “our duty of care,” they revealed their primary concern is not, in fact, exploring ideas with complexity. Their real duty of care is to preserve the flow of “high-level support” by nurturing the feelings of government funders, donors and influential board members.
Liberal ‘Protectors of Last Resort’ Against Antisemitism
But from where does this need to nurture the feelings of the elite derive? The most commonly stated reason is in the fight against antisemitism. Liberal institutions have assumed the role of protector of last resort. They are clearly out of step with popular opinion, yet are positioning themselves as paternalists protecting a society run amok with resurgent antisemitism.
The same day of the STC apology, STC director and former Chair, Ian Narev, wrote an op-ed praising a signed statement against hate that included over 600 of Australia’s business, political, sporting and community leaders. What is notably absent in the statement, and in Narev’s commentary, is any condemnation of Israeli occupation. The statement was a mealy-mouthed platitude to guard society from “racism in all its forms.” Unsurprisingly, the statement focused on a “482 per cent rise in antisemitic incidents [that] has swept Australia’s shores.” Of course, antisemitism is horrid and must be unabashedly contested. But with the continuing efforts to conflate any opposition to Israel with antisemitism, this statement from Australia’s “captains of industry” must be seen as a renewed commitment to wield a discretionary moralism in their sociopolitical decision- and economic market-making endeavors. This gives institutional elites the power to deem any sign of support for Palestinian justice as antisemitic, creating a built-in blackmail lever that can be triggered at an instant.
There is a perversity in this that is internal to the liberal order itself. David Frum gave up the game on X when he claimed that antisemitism is “baked into the ideology” of those who make up Western universities. Beyond universities, however, Frum’s assertion applies to all liberal social and cultural institutions. That is, antisemitism is putatively intrinsic to the liberal democratic order and its institutional deputies tout court, revealing just how fraught the relationship between liberal institutions and Israel’s supporters has always been.
For their part, Israel’s supporters have always presumed this fragility and have sought to preemptively curb its potential consequences. Irving Howe wrote that “In the warmest of hearts there’s a cold spot for the Jews.” Former Executive Director of the Anti-Defamation League, Nathan Perlmutter, defined Palestinian solidarity and calls for peace as a more dangerous and more “real anti-semitism” than old outright virulent forms. And Abba Eban, the first Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations, asserted that one of the “chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world” is to prove that criticism of Israeli politics is antisemitism. He founded this claim on the assumption that critics of Israel have a “basic complex… of guilt about Jewish survival.”
All of this pathologizing of the liberal order is what mandates the turn to moralism. If citizens can self-police their basic complexes, then soft power perpetually provides cover for Israeli actions. But as soon as that cover becomes indefensible, the pageantry is revealed for what it is, necessitating new forms of surveillance and control to ensure the ‘baked in’ antisemitism isn’t released in its full horror, as it was previously. Standing before this paternalistic moralism, everyone is equally already guilty. This is what drives the obsessive overreach in opposing Palestinian justice among elite institutions and its cultural deputies. The frantic and knee-jerk opposition to Palestinian solidarity by liberal institutions is deemed necessary because the antisemite in our midst must be stamped out before the antisemitism in our social fabric is free to terrorize once again. Even if that means supporting a terror campaign against Palestinians.