The organised massacres of Jews in 19th-century Russia were called pogroms. Here’s a description from the New York Times in 1903.

The mob was led by priests, and the general cry, ‘Kill the Jews’, was taken up all over the city. The Jews were taken wholly unaware and were slaughtered like sheep. The dead number 120 and the injured about 500. The scenes of horror attending this massacre are beyond description. Babies were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob. The local police made no attempt to check the reign of terror. At sunset, the streets were piled with corpses and wounded. Those who could make their escape fled in terror, and the city is now practically deserted of Jews.

To get around censors, Jews referred to pogroms as Storms in the Negev because Negev means south in Biblical Hebrew and the pogroms started in the southwestern part of the Russian Empire. The phrase also referred to a prophecy in the Book of Isaiah, ‘Like whirlwinds sweeping through the Negev, an invader comes from the desert, from a land of terror.’

The words of Isaiah seem prophetic in the wake of last weekend. What the world witnessed in the Israeli villages and kibbutzim of the Negev desert was a 21st-century pogrom, filmed on iPhones and shared on social media. In the kibbutz of Kfar Aza, 40 babies and children were slaughtered, some beheaded, and entire families were burnt alive in their homes, or shot dead.

The barbarism was broadcast around the world and met by barbarians with orgiastic exaltation. On Sunday, in Lakemba, a Sydney suburb where the population is more than 60-per-cent Muslim, Sheikh Ibrahim Dadoun, a former director of public relations at the Australian National Imams Council, addressed an elated crowd calling the massacre ‘a day of happiness… a day of pride… a day of victory’. On Monday evening, throngs of supporters of the terrorists marched to the Sydney Opera House illuminated in the colours of the Israeli flag and chanted, ’Gas the Jews’, ‘F–k Israel’, ‘F–k the Jews’.

Jewish Australians were warned by the police that they should stay away as the police could not guarantee their safety. As it turned out the police went one better. In NSW it is a crime to incite violence or to incite racial hatred yet the only person arrested was a Jewish Australian holding an Israeli flag who was told he was breaching the peace.

Mostly, those who hate Israel and/or Jews congregated online, aired their grievances and blamed their favourite scapegoat.

An award-winning poet from Lakemba who sees writing as ‘an act of resistance’, was angry that governments were sympathetic to Israel and had condemned Hamas tweeting, ‘Palestinian resistance has, by and large, shown considerable restraint in the face of a merciless, relentless settler colonial project that is maintained through brutal occupation and apartheid with nuclear capabilities’.

An author and public intellectual was angry that Palestinians were ‘framed as the aggressors & Zionists as victims’ and when she was interviewed on television her comments were edited ‘to make it seem I was condemning the protest’ when she was ‘disgusted by the lighting in blue/white of iconic buildings in support of a violent, apartheid, settler colony’ and stood ‘by the protest’.

It’s a common critique. According to this warped logic Arab states and Islamist terrorists can be as violent as they wish while claiming a perpetual mantle of victimhood. These individuals steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that it is not Israel – a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society, where 20 per cent of the population are Arabs – that practises apartheid but Gaza, which is Judenrein, and where human rights, particularly of women and gays, are honoured in the breach. It never acknowledges that Jews have lived in the land of Israel for thousands of years and that the vast majority who have settled in Israel were either stateless Holocaust victims or Jews fleeing persecution, in particular almost a million who were forcibly expelled from Arab and Muslim countries when the state of Israel was created.

Labor, which courts votes in suburbs like Lakemba as well as in the inner city where vaunting anti-Israel views is a mark of virtue, appeases its Jeremy Corbyn faction. Its leading light is former foreign minister and NSW premier Bob Carr who tweeted not one word of sympathy for Israel and slandered it in advance for a ‘disproportionately huge retaliation directed at civilians and indifferent to children’. In the world according to Carr, it is Israel that targets civilians and is indifferent to the deaths of children even when Hamas has just slaughtered more than 1,200 Israeli men, women, and children and wounded more than 2,700. And who was responsible? Not Hamas or its financiers Iran and Qatar or the Biden administration that has unfrozen billions of dollars that Iran is now using to turbo-charge terrorism in the Shia crescent that surrounds Israel, and throughout the world. No, Carr blamed Israel’s Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu whose policies ‘helped create the conditions that led to the bloodiest few days in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’.

It was in this spirit that Foreign Minister Penny Wong recognised Israel’s right to defend itself but urged ‘the exercise of restraint and protection of civilian lives’. How does Israel defend itself and protect civilian lives when Hamas locates its offices in the basement of hospitals and schools? The people of Gaza are human shields as much as the Israelis taken hostage. Wong and Carr are silent on this conundrum.

Senator Lidia Thorpe was the victim of despicable threats by neo-Nazis last week but seems unaware that Mein Kampf is a best-seller in ‘Palestine’. While the butchery was still in progress she tweeted ‘I stand with Palestine’.

Thorpe is one of the few apologists for the massacre who doesn’t support the Voice to parliament but only because she takes a maximalist position that it doesn’t go far enough. Indeed, she claims the referendum itself is an act of ‘genocide’. The more common view is that there is a direct parallel between the settlement of Australia and the establishment of the state of Israel. Sheikh Dadoun welcomed the Voice while the Lakemba-based Lebanese Muslim Association ‘sees the trials and tribulations suffered by Australia’s First Nations people in the 235 years since British settlement commenced as being similar to the more than 75 years of persecution inflicted on the people of Palestine by Israel, its army, and its police’. Regardless of whether there is a parallel, the language of ‘decolonisation’ that clothes the Voice is used to justify the horrific massacre of Jews in Israel. As a writer for Teen Vogue tweeted on Saturday in a post shared more than 100,000 times including by the opinion editor of the Washington Post, ‘What did y’all think decolonisation meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.’ Rejecting the blind hatred and violence concealed within the Voice is one of the most important reasons to vote No. Let’s hope Australians agree.