The left intelligentsia’s myopic anti-Israel views are now everywhere in the Australian cultural scene. Artists James Nguyen and Tamsen Hopkinson recently protested against what they see as Israel’s ‘violent settler colonisation’. They painted over their own work with black paint and turned the lights off at an exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne.

The anti-Israel movement has also colonised other protest movements. Pride in Protest, an LGBT activist group, will march in the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade in early March under the banner ‘trans pride, not genocide’. The group says it will champion transgender rights while also ‘standing in solidarity with the people of Palestine against the colonial Zionist occupation, recognising the links between queer / trans struggle and the anti-colonial movements both in this country and abroad’.

The Australian media have similarly been gripped by anti-Israel fervour. More than 270 journalists signed a public letter in November declaring opposition to ‘both-sidesism’. Apparently, giving the Israeli point of view, or even just recognising that Hamas started the current conflict, ‘acts as a constraint on truth by shrouding the enormous scale of the human suffering currently being perpetrated by Israeli forces’. Journalists from the ABC, Guardian Australia and the Age were among the signatories.