The murder of more than 1,200 people by Hamas terrorists on 7 October was a crime against humanity, but many progressives are determined to deny it.

It was Israel’s 11 September and Pearl Harbour, but also much more. For that country’s people and Jews everywhere, that day’s scenes of torture, slaughter and sadism (shared so gleefully by the criminals themselves) resonated particularly deeply given the Jewish people’s tragic history. As traumatic as these horrors were, what we have seen in Australia and other Western countries since has been deeply shocking.

Anti-Semitism has shown its ugly face again. Not just in certain mosques and university common rooms (where it never died) but as a mainstream, even popular phenomenon both in Australia and throughout the developed world. Anti-Jewish rhetoric is no longer confined to sermons or obscure lecture theatres, but has gained a new legitimacy and currency. Perhaps worst of all has been the response (with a few honourable exceptions) of our political, professional and academic elites. Many in this group, who were only too willing to deliver homilies on the Voice, have failed the moral test. Not only by offering excuses and even justifications for Hamas’s brutality, but by denying or seeking to minimise the explosion of anti-Semitism that 7 October has given rise to.

As many have pointed out, the Holocaust did not close the book on this social pathology. For Jews, and indeed anyone acquainted with their story, recent events have an awful familiarity about them.

They call to mind the long history of crimes against the Jews. St Augustine’s teaching that Jews should be segregated from Christian society, confined to their own quarters and treated with suspicion. The chronic insecurity of Jews throughout the medieval world, including their mass expulsions from England, France (in around 1300 in each) and Spain (in 1492). The pogroms and the ghettos in Russia and Eastern Europe. The blood libels and conspiracy theories. And the second-class status accorded to Jews in Western Europe before their ‘emancipation’ in the 19th century.

Jews hoped that the Enlightenment would change everything. This era’s celebration of reason and science, its humanist values and great civilising ambitions would, it was thought, banish ancient superstitions and hatreds for all time. This faith is apparent even today as we try to make sense of 7 October and its repercussions. In the media, commentator after commentator has appealed to Enlightenment values and ideals when defending Israel and appealing to the conscience of that country’s critics.

Even Israel’s President, Isaac Hertzog, has made this connection, telling US college presidents (in a 7 November letter) that its war ‘is far more than a clash between Israel and Hamas’. ‘At stake’, he continued, ‘is whether the enlightened world will defend the basic norms of humanity, or choose to accept, even support, their violation.’

But how many of Israel’s critics subscribe to these norms? What moral philosophy guides them today?

The Enlightenment, as we know, did not put an end to anti-Semitism. And nor, sadly, have appeals to Enlightenment values since 7 October had much impact. The powerful arguments put by Hertzog and others have fallen on deaf ears. Hamas’s mainstream apologists, including leaders and foreign ministers in many Western countries, have not seen fit, it seems, to even respond to them. The question is, why? Are they guilty, as many claim, of moral confusion or ignorance? Have they, perhaps in the fog of the early stages of this war, temporarily lost sight of the Enlightenment values that would otherwise guide them? Or are they, by their lights, acting entirely rationally and morally, being instead guided by an entirely different, anti-Enlightenment, moral frame and world-view?

A great deal turns on this question. If we all subscribe to Enlightenment values, however imperfectly, disagreements can be resolved by rational debate and common respect for the facts. The better angels of our natures can be appealed to. If, however, our opponents hold an entirely different, and indeed incompatible, set of beliefs, this hope – this faith in reasoned argument – fades.

This brings us to the elites. In the early 20th century, many Western intellectuals and professionals rejected Enlightenment values and 19th-century liberalism, rallying instead to the communist cause (and in Germany, fascism). They celebrated these creeds as modern, progressive and scientific – blueprints for earthly utopias. In truth, as we now know, they appealed to ancient, pre-rational instincts: tribalism, a Manichean division of the world into good and evil and the worship of power over everything else – even morality and truth.

Today, as we know, progressives have embraced another anti-Enlightenment creed: the doctrine of the social ‘other’. First articulated by the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss in the mid-1950s, this divides the world into two moral categories: the bad – the industrial, environmentally destructive, imperialist and hegemonic West – and the good – all groups, including women, colonised peoples and everyone else – who are victims of the former’s hegemony. This world-view, which forms the basis of identity politics, underpins elite views on a range of economic and social matters. Tragically, it has provided a new home for anti-Semitism, branding the Jews of Israel, and by extension all Jews, as oppressors. In doing so, it has invested this ancient hatred with a dangerous respectability, providing fertile ground for it to fester and grow.

While we should continue to counter the lies being peddled by anti-Semites, whether in our politics or the media, there is a broader ideological battle to be waged. The anti-Enlightenment world view, that siren song so many of our elites find irresistible, must be squarely challenged as well. Not only for our Jewish community, but for the sake of our entire community and shared humanity. The Voice referendum result, perhaps, is grounds for optimism. In voting No, average Australians were not, I believe, making a specific judgment about our indigenous co-citizens. They were rejecting, if only instinctively, the divisive ideology they sensed was behind it. In that case, ‘all of us’ won out over ‘us and them’. My hope is that, before it is too late, we embrace our Jewish community in the same way.