‘Australia has become a … how you say … shit-show, no?’

This was my first interaction upon arriving in Slovakia for a meeting of the CEOs of more than 100 Jewish communities from around the world.

And so it went. One after another, Jewish leaders cautiously approached me, as one approaches the recently bereaved, and asked if the reports were true, and if things were really as bad as they seemed.

It was a difficult question to answer. My pride in Australia is undiminished. I wouldn’t live anywhere else. Nor would I swap jobs with any of my counterparts from around the world and represent any other community.

Yet the reports were true. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps orchestrated attacks on our soil, violating our national sovereignty and terrorising the Jewish community. An elaborate enterprise of organised crime, implicating outlaw bikie gangs, drug smugglers and a collection of low-life thugs, zeroed in on our places of worship, our childcare centres and what they believed to be my own home. Jewish schoolkids as young as ten were being called ‘filthy Jews’ on school excursions, LGBT Jews faced a campaign to bar them from marching in the Mardi Gras; Jewish writers, musicians and artists are losing their livelihoods and their place in Australian culture, despite working in industries that pride themselves on inclusivity, and on it goes.

It had become apparent to everyone that the Australian Jewish community has experienced the single greatest decline in physical security of any Jewish community in the world.

How had this happened? How did countries which were pockmarked with sites where Jews had been massacred over the centuries, now warmly embrace Israeli tourism, meticulously restore Jewish heritage sites and ensure their Jewish communities live free from persecution and harassment? How could it be that the Jews of Britain, Belgium and Australia envied the communities in Dubai, Bucharest and Buenos Aires?

For one, the countries of eastern and central Europe and South America do not romanticise hard-left ideology or harbour a fetish for the keffiyeh and other symbols of anti-Westernism. They lived through communism. They know it doesn’t mean a fairer distribution of capital, abundant public housing and a soaring national spirit in which the people toil together and share in the spoils. They know it is sloth, corruption, absurdity and absolute control of everything by a ruling elite. In other words, take the worst accusations slung at capitalism and you have the most benign form of communism.

So when these populations see students identifying as Trotskyite or Maoist, they don’t join their rallies for Palestine, they pity them. They don’t shout their slogans about ‘intifada’ and freedom for Palestinians ‘from the river to the sea’, because in these words they hear the notes of Leninist permanent revolution, and the conquest and destruction of nation-states, and they want no part of the hypocrisy or the bloodshed.

The other common quality of these newly pro-Jewish nations is that they have been ravaged by war. They saw their national identities, the things that make a people unique – language, traditions, clothing and music, swallowed up by internationalism, that drudgery that crushes the spirit of the individual and the nation, and coerces the hapless masses to pray to idols entombed in faraway squares. The Ukrainians, the Poles and the Czechs once lost everything and just like the Jews, they will never relinquish their homelands or their national pride. They secure their borders, enforce the law, and make no apologies. They respect Israel, they do not judge it.

Perhaps the clearest quality I could detect in these post-antisemitic countries is a quiet self-confidence. Their history gives them insight and perspective and this in turn wards off the fragility and insecurity that engulfs the West. They can spot charlatans and villains. They look at an image of Bin Laden or Sinwar and don’t descend into contortions of misplaced guilt and angst and end up thinking that maybe the terrorists had a point. They look at the image of Noa Argamani, the beautiful young woman whose face was stricken with terror as two hideous brutes dragged her from the Nova Festival into captivity in Gaza, and sympathise, like any humane individual would, with the captured and not the captors.

We, Australians, are victims of our success. We don’t know what it means to be invaded. We don’t know what it means to have tyrants calling for our destruction and developing the means to make it happen. And we don’t know what it means to experience the full ruin of antisemitism, that collection of conspiracies that rots the mind and corrodes the soul. That elixir that promises to cure society of every ill, but just brings on madness. ‘Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil,’ said the Prophet Isaiah. We are truly the lucky country. But the two years since 7 October, have shown that we’re fast becoming a blind one too.