Australia does not have a Jewish problem. It has a problem with how a confident society protects its citizens when social pressure rises and moral clarity wavers.
Jews have been part of Australian civic life since its earliest days, arriving with the First Fleet and contributing to the country’s legal, commercial, cultural, and military institutions for more than two centuries. For most of that history, Jewish Australians lived openly and securely, without the expectation that schools, synagogues, or community centres would require extraordinary protection. Their presence was unremarkable in the best sense of the word: integrated, loyal, and civic.
Something has changed.
In recent years, Jewish Australians have faced a rise in harassment, intimidation, and public hostility that has made security an unavoidable feature of daily life. This is not merely a matter of statistics or isolated incidents. It is a change in atmosphere. Ordinary public spaces no longer feel neutral. Visibility feels conditional. Confidence in institutional protection has weakened.
At the centre of this shift lies a foundational question of political order: What does a state owe its citizens?
The first obligation of any government is to protect those under its authority from harm. This duty is not ideological; it precedes politics. It does not depend on popularity, international events, or the sensitivities of the moment. When protection becomes hesitant, uneven, or ambiguous, the consequences extend far beyond physical safety.
One of the first casualties is trust.
When citizens experience intimidation and observe a lack of clear, consistent enforcement, a sense of abandonment can take hold. The feeling is not simply fear, but uncertainty – about whether the protections of citizenship apply equally, or only selectively. For Jewish Australians, whose families have contributed to the nation for generations, this erosion of confidence cuts especially deep. Citizenship begins to feel conditional, subject to the tolerance of forces beyond the state’s control.
Over time, abandonment gives way to isolation. Allies grow quieter. Institutions become less visible. Public solidarity weakens. The target finds themselves increasingly alone – not because others endorse aggression, but because authority has failed to speak clearly. Silence, in such circumstances, is not neutral. It reshapes the moral landscape.
A subtler harm follows. When concerns are repeatedly minimised, reframed, or contextualised away, psychological disorientation sets in. Individuals begin to question not only whether they will be protected, but whether their perceptions are even valid. This is the gaslighting effect at a societal level: when lived experience is quietly delegitimised, confidence in both institutions and one’s own judgment erodes.
Carl Jung warned that when projection becomes collective, societies risk losing contact with objective reality. Under sustained social pressure, misperceptions can harden – beliefs reinforced not by evidence, but by repetition and emotional coherence. In contemporary language, this resembles a kind of reality distortion field, in which denial and moral signalling combine to obscure what is plainly occurring.
The psychological consequences are real and predictable. There is an important distinction between responding to a threat the mind can name and living under conditions of persistent targeting. When danger is specific, the individual can assess it, respond to it, and eventually stand down. When hostility is diffuse and identity-based, the body never receives an all-clear. Vigilance becomes constant. Stress is internalised. Even in the absence of daily violence, physical effects accumulate – disrupted sleep, heightened alertness, a sense that ordinary environments are no longer neutral.
In such conditions, individuals experience heightened visibility. Public presence feels asymmetrical, as though scrutiny applies unevenly and unpredictably. It is not a sense of constant pursuit, but of being marked in ways only some can see. Safety becomes conditional. Over time, this produces a further injury: the erosion of agency. Nothing the individual does seems to make a difference. Caution offers no reassurance; restraint brings no relief. Behaviour was never the cause, and so behaviour cannot be the solution.
This is where psychology clarifies what politics often obscures.
Jung observed that ‘a man’s hatred is always concentrated upon that which makes him conscious of his bad qualities’. In other words, hostility is frequently less about the behaviour of the target than about what the target reflects back to the accuser. From a Jungian perspective, projection reverses moral logic: the aggression directed at the victim has little to do with the victim at all, and everything to do with what the projector cannot face within themselves.
Antisemitism fits this pattern with striking consistency. Across time and place, Jews have been accused of radically different – and often contradictory – charges. The emotional intensity remains constant even as the content shifts, suggesting that the animating force is projection rather than observation. The victim becomes a mirror, blamed not because of guilt, but because of symbolic utility.
There is a tragic irony here. Once a false narrative takes hold, the normal avenues of self-defence collapse. The more the victim explains, denies, or defends themselves, the more suspicious they appear – not because the defence is flawed, but because the accusation was never grounded in evidence to begin with. Innocence is recast as evasiveness; clarification as manipulation. It becomes a closed loop, a psychological Catch-22 in which nothing the victim does can resolve the charge, because the charge was never about truth.
When such misperceptions are left unchallenged by authority, they harden into social reality. At that point, the failure is no longer individual, but institutional.
This is where governments face an uncomfortable truth. Restraint is not always kindness. Shakespeare captured the paradox succinctly when Hamlet observed, ‘I must be cruel, only to be kind.’ Firmness exercised early and humanely prevents far greater harm later. The enforcement of civic norms may feel uncomfortable in the moment, but hesitation allows intimidation to normalise and misperceptions to metastasise.
A liberal democracy cannot assume that shared standards enforce themselves. When a state admits newcomers, it assumes responsibility not only for their welfare, but for ensuring that imported conflicts and hatreds are not reproduced domestically. Multiculturalism does not mean the suspension of civic norms; it means their equal application. Expectations must be stated clearly, enforced consistently, and defended unapologetically.
Protecting Jewish Australians is not special pleading. It is a test of whether citizenship still means security, whether public life remains neutral, and whether the state understands its most basic function. When authority acts decisively, predictability returns. When predictability returns, agency is restored. And when agency is restored, trust can follow.
Australia’s challenge is not to manage perceptions, but to correct misperceptions through clarity and action. In doing so, it will not only protect a minority that has long been part of its national fabric. It will reaffirm the conditions that allow a plural society to remain confident, cohesive, and free.
Aaron J. Shuster is an award-winning cinematist, writer, and analyst who examines Middle Eastern politics, strategic culture, and the civilisational forces shaping modern conflict.
