Social Cohesion, Gaza, Bondi, Adelaide

The Royal Commission established by the government in the wake of the Bondi massacre has been asked to explore the key drivers of antisemitism in Australian society. So it should: the micro environments of murderous hate that allowed for this event to happen cannot be investigated enough. But the Royal Commission has also been requested to examine ways of strengthening social cohesion, defined as a national consensus in support of democracy, freedom and the rule of law. The relation this has with the Bondi attack is less clear than it might first appear. In fact, as I want to argue here, there is no relation whatsoever between the two.

For many Indigenous and immigrant groups in Australia with a history of racialisation and marginalisation, calls for social cohesion, like calls for assimilation and integration, do not bode well.  They often signal that somebody is about to try and hurt them. The creation of social solidarity at the expense of a scapegoat is a phenomenon well-known to anthropologists. In Australia, the history of the symbolic and sometimes physical violence that such calls have helped unleash is well documented by researchers. That mainstream politicians act as if they are not aware of this history is, in itself, not reassuring as far as social cohesion goes. A certain political literacy in that domain would not go amiss. And even though I am not sure if we are dealing with politicians who don’t remember or who don’t want to remember, I will begin with a very short refresher of how calls for social cohesion have worked in the past.

Every time discourses of social cohesion, integration or assimilation start circulating, some groups who posit themselves as quintessentially and unproblematically ‘Australian’ claim, as if it went without saying, that they are the ones assigned with the role of policing the process of cohesion. In the process, other groups, portrayed as not Australian or not Australian enough, are invited to accept, also as if it went without saying, that they are the problem. These claims could be easily dismissed and shown to be incorrect if it wasn’t for the fact that dominant state and media institutions work on legitimising and institutionalising them. Importantly, the relation between the self-proclaimed ‘cohesion police’ and those classified as a ‘cohesion problem’ is always dressed in a racial garb that is part of the very fabric of Australian society. Thus we end up having endless variations on a common structure: White Australians versus First Nations people who, amazingly, are posited to not fit well atop the lands stolen from them, or, White Australians versus immigrants (usually of colour, or as I pointed out in White Nation, perceived as ‘Third-World-Looking’) who are assumed to not be attached enough to the nation. 

It is only superficially paradoxical that, historically, calls for social cohesion, rather than bringing society together, have played the opposite role of cementing the division of society between groups of assimilators and groups that are forever waiting in a purgatory of assimilation, never good enough to actually transition to the status of unproblematic and unproblematised Australians. Hardly ever do we hear the self-proclaimed cohesion police declaring that the problem group they have targeted has now successfully integrated into the nation and has ceased to be a problem. In fact, hardly ever do we hear that any call for social cohesion has been successful, full stop. If there ever is a hint of proclaimed success, it is when social cohesion is achieved as a result of the social and symbolic elimination (ie, disempowerment, effacing and silencing), and even sometimes the physical elimination, of the group posited as causing the problem (the Holocaust and the genocide of First Nations people in the process of colonisation being prime examples of such an exterminatory campaign for a social cohesion imagined in the form of racial purity).

Of course, not all imaginaries of social cohesion are imaginaries of racial purity. Social cohesion has been imagined in many ways. It is imagined as an easygoing ‘let’s all get on’ way, or as a strict adherence to common values. It is imagined as enforced from above or as the product of adherence from below. It is imagined as the obeying of laws and it is imagined as the fostering of a sense of belonging. It is nonetheless the case that most discourses of social cohesion, even when proposed in the kindest ways, have a dark side, a threat of exterminatory violence lurking between the legally and softly spoken words. Some well-meaning believers in social cohesion continue to find this hard to accept. As I have put it some time ago, in Australian history most of the people who have called on First Nations people, or on Asian or Muslim others, to ‘integrate,’ have wished them, secretly or not so secretly, to ‘disintegrate’. 

The Royal Commission’s proposed investigation of ways of strengthening social cohesion defined as commitment to democracy, freedom of speech and the rule of law does not explicitly invite an imaginary of racial purity, but it will not escape circulating in social space in the way described above. It has a dark side written all over it. It will encourage, indeed it has already encouraged, some White people to see their commitment to democracy, freedom of speech and the rule of law as going without saying, and using the Bondi massacre to construct Arab/Muslim others as a cohesion problem since they can’t keep their hatred towards Jewish Australians in check. This is a false and unsubstantiated claim, but it is the kind of racist generalisation that the government’s problematisation of social cohesion in relation to Bondi will necessarily invite.

Multicultural societies such as Australia inevitably include communities whose home countries are at war with each other. There is little doubt that Australians of immigrant backgrounds who are politically, emotionally and existentially implicated in international conflicts that pit them against other Australians, have a duty of care towards Australian space. They should valorise the social peace that Australia offers and not endanger it. No one can be asked to treat their enemies as friends, but at the same time it is the duty of Australians to curb their animosity and chill out a bit when inhabiting Australian space, no matter what is at stake. Likewise, Australians of immigrant background cannot expect the Australian state to take their side in a conflict involving the place they have migrated from. At the same time, such communities are free to disagree with the government’s foreign policy without this disagreement being considered a threat to social cohesion. This should not be the cause of lack of commitment to Australia. 

It may be necessary to point out that the right to oppose a foreign policy does not mean the right of each community to pursue its own foreign policy. It means that communities can organise protests and work democratically so that, come election day, they have tried their best to ensure the political party with the foreign policy they agree with most wins. But once a government is elected, it is important to recognise that it alone can conduct foreign policy. Perhaps I am highlighting this because, born and raised in Lebanon, I am particularly sensitive to the destructiveness of a national space where various groups pursue different foreign policy at the expense of the state. I wish this on no one, and I certainly want to work hard on protecting Australia, my children and my grandchildren, from such a potential destructiveness. But having written the above using a normative language, I would nonetheless say that the overwhelming majority of people are like me in this regard. They don’t need people to give them lectures about it.

There is no doubt that a form of antisemitic radical Islamicist politics has manifested itself in an extremely ugly and murderous way in Bondi. There is also little doubt that everyone should welcome the state’s desire to investigate and work towards eradicating any such tendencies towards inter-communal violence. But why does this extremist and violent act require a royal commission into social cohesion as if the latter represents a widespread social phenomenon? Is the government not aware that by doing so it is inviting an unwarranted link between the generalised Arab/Muslim anti-colonial opposition to Israel and an isolated extremist event? That this Royal Commission will encourage such an unwarranted leap is so obvious that people have the right to ask the question: is the government really unaware of this, or is this precisely what it is aiming for? Australian governments always celebrate multiculturalism by portraying it as the product of exceptional statecraft. Where is the statecraft in starting an investigation with so many pitfalls without worrying about it taking us into yet another White festival of generalised Arab/Muslim bashing? Isn’t the government causing the very lack of social cohesion it professes to want to address by doing so?

This last question is not rhetorical. A magical trick performed by calls for social cohesion is that they never target those who are calling for them, even though, as I argued earlier, calls for social cohesion have often played a key role in causing social fragmentation. Thus, questions such as ‘in what way does the racism engrained in Australia’s mainstream culture foster social fragmentation’ are never asked? Nor is that question asked in relation to dominant political institutions though politicians often conduct politics in ways that create social fragmentation. Raising this issue is especially important in this era of belligerent right wing politics that treats social space as a war zone and would literally do anything, including tearing apart society, for the sake of winning. We are seeing this unfolding before our eyes in Trump’s America. Trumpism perceives those who oppose it, not as adversaries who share a commitment to the same society, but as enemies with whom one shares nothing. They must be destroyed no matter how this affects the social fabric. How can state institutions be trusted with asking the right questions about the causes of social fragmentation today when they can be invested in the generation of so much social fragmentation?

This is also true when it comes to foreign policy. I noted above that multicultural societies inevitably bring together communities whose home countries might be at war against each other. I argued that such communities cannot expect the Australian government to have a foreign policy that is in line with the foreign policy of their home countries. Nonetheless, and while a government cannot conceive of its international interests according to the desires of this or that community, it has to care about the effect of its partisanship on the communities that it governs. This is certainly part of multicultural statecraft. If a state cannot have a foreign policy that pleases all communities it should at least try and temper and curb the way it expresses it’s partisanship so as to minimise a sense of alienation among the community against whose home country they have positioned themselves. This is where, it seems to me, if anyone is failing to perform what should be expected of them to foster social cohesion with regards to the conflict between Israel and Palestinians, it is the Australian state itself.

As I have argued again and again, it is not a question of being pro-Palestinian. If the Australian state sees its interests to be in line with the interest of Israel its unfortunate for many of us. We’ll democratically oppose it, but so be it.  However, does this pro-Zionism have to be done in such an extreme partisan way? Well before October 2023 the Australian state, like most western states, has dismissed the Palestinian narrative that Zionists are European colonists no different from the French who settled Algeria or the English who settled Australia. Instead they have accepted the Zionist fantasy of a people returning to their ancestral land. Since October 2023, however, this bias has become so complete it has taken tragicomic tones in its denial of anything that challenges Zionism. We have the empirical evidence and we know all too well about the continuous oppression, imprisonment, humiliation and killing of Palestinians over the last eighty years, but we’re asked to believe that the history of violence began on October 7 2023. We see the mass killing and the destruction of everything in Gaza on our screens but this is not genocide, it is a country defending itself. We see the teenage American Zionist settlers treating elderly Palestinian people like shit and kicking them out of their ancestral houses but this is not colonialism, its Jewish people returning to their biblical lands. We see the racist arrogance of the supremacist Jewish ethno-nationalists strutting the streets of Tel Aviv and abusing Arabs but there is no fascism here, it is our ally, the only western democracy in the region. Then, on top of all this, we have the obsession with Zionist ‘feelings’ and ‘sensitivities’ over Palestinian, and indeed over any other, sensitivity. The unspeakable violence Zionists are perpetrating in Gaza has to be looked at through a large telescope with blurry lenses: it is far away from us and it is not really clear what is going on there. But how we speak about this genocidal violence here in Australia has to be looked at with a sharp semiotic microscope that captures every nuance and every tone of every word uttered lest what is being said offends Zionist sensitivities.

There was a consensus in Australia that the Bondi attack should be condemned as antisemitic because it targeted Jews as Jews. Everyone including Palestinian and Arab/Muslim Australians were mourning the victims as Jews. But suddenly, everyone realised that the government was asking of everyone is to mourn them as Zionists before all else. This took all the Arab/Muslims who wanted to mourn them as Jewish Australians out of the picture. The treatment of Randa Abdel-Fattah by the Premier of South Australia and the board of the Adelaide Festival is a symptom of this unspeakably outrageous affective bias. What strikes one most about the statements of the Premier and of the board is how gauche and confused they sound. They come across as if written by amateurs out of their depth: We are not suggesting but we are suggesting. We are so sensitive, sorry to be so insensitive. What we are saying is not what we really mean though we don’t really know what we are saying or what we really mean. And so on. The fact is that this is not the case of gaucheness at all. The confusion is the product of the unwillingness to explicitly lay out the Zionist-biased premises from which these utterances are made. If this is the kind of Zionist social cohesion that the Royal Commission is supposed to help consolidate, Palestinian and Arab/Muslim and indeed all non-Zionist Australians have every reason of being weary of what kind of consolidation is being imagined here.

Luckily, we have an alternative imaginary of collective social cohesion we can embrace. One that is not built on hyper Zionism and Islamophobic exclusion. It is an imaginary that forefronts the togetherness built around an opposition to the degradation of human life that was paraded on the Harbour Bridge on the 3rd of August 2025. I am willing to bet that most Australians would be happy to call that date Social Cohesion Day and to parade every year in support of the Australia that it embodies.

Christmas and the adoration of children in the Shadow of Gaza

At our beach house south of Sydney, two days after Christmas, I was walking to fetch myself a coffee from the café near me. I thought I’ll take with me my 8 month-old grandson,Taka, in his pram. A minute or so into our stroll we encountered a local woman I vaguely know. After a lot of oohing and aahing she looks at me and says, ‘he’s adorable.’

The fact that it was Christmas and her usage of the word ‘adorable’ sent me remembering another Christmas period many years ago, like some 35 years ago, when people’s usage of the word ‘adorable’ when meeting my baby daughters, and the fact that Christmas is structured around the adoration of Christ as a child, made me curious as to what kind of imaginary lies behind the concept of adoration. I started reading and taking notes about what philosophers and theologians had to say about ‘adoration.’

I couldn’t stop thinking about those notes trying to remember what was in them. I recalled that it was where I started reading the work of the Catholic philosopher, and Derrida’s student, Jean Luc Marion, who left a lasting impression on me. I wanted to re-read what I had written about him. Remembering the notes also took me to a time when I became more open to the idea that religious thought in general had important things to say about the world, and can help me think through certain issues I wanted to explore. I no longer saw it, as I did in my radical student days, as that which needs to be opposed before all else.

No sooner did I get back home to Sydney than I immediately went looking for my notes. Miraculously (a Christmas miracle?), I found them very quickly, in a box where I kept a number of summaries of texts and notes that I have taken while working at the University of Western Sydney between 1988 and 1994. They were only about ten pages and I read them the next day, on the plane, on my way from Sydney to Hobart where I was heading to spend the rest of the Christmas/New Year holiday period with my other, equally ‘adorable,’ 2 year-old grandson, Luca. 

The notes related to the specificity of Christian adoration as a relation to the divine and how it is manifested in the adoration of children. I am keeping them below in their unconnected dot point state and will only feature the bits of writing that I have managed to make coherent enough to share with others. I have therefore added words and changed sentences here and there that give further clarity to the text

• The philosophical and theological issues raised around the adoration of Christ take us straight to the heart of the Christian belief in the dual, human and divine, physical and metaphysical, finite and infinite, nature of Christ. But it also raises the question of how the divine, the metaphysical and infinite can be adored via the worship of the physical and the finite.
• Unlike, admiration or respect, adoration, as far as Christians are concerned, is a form of worship that can only be offered to God as a divine being. Thus the adoration of Christ is an affirmation of the belief that Christ despite being wholly human is also, and at the same time, wholly divine. I need to go back to those texts that debate the way adoration is similar and different from devotion as it figures in Greek philosophy (…)
• There are special forms of worship that can be directed at saintly people, like Mary the mother of Christ. I can’t believe myself remembering the teachings of father Chahine (the priest who taught me Maronite religious studies in my early teens)! He’d be very proud given that he thought I was a lost cause, or perhaps not. If I recall (!), there is a difference between ’ibadat and tabjeel, adoration and veneration. Mary can be and is an extremely loved and venerated figure for us Maronites. One can paradoxically express love towards her more than to Jesus himself. Nonetheless, it would be blasphemous to adore her. For though she is indeed greatly loved, and immensely loving, such love and such immensity were within our human capacity to imagine and understand even as we classify them as ‘immense’. What is beyond our capacity to understand was God himself, because not only was he immensely loving, he was the very source of love. That is what constitutes, to use an anthropological term for what is beyond our comprehension, the radical otherness of God. And it was that divine radical otherness that made Him worthy of absolute reverence: adorable.
• Unsurprisingly, the above links very neatly with Jean-Luc Marion’s differentiation between Idole and Icône (Finally, since coming across his work in Derrida’s Donner la Mort, I have now read more carefully some select passages from L’Idole et la distance (1977) and Dieu sans l’être (1982).)
• For Marion the idol embodies the divine in so far as the divine remains within the intellectual grasp of the believer. Idolatry is not so much a blasphemous worship as a limited one. The idol captivates us and ‘saturates’ our field of vision and comprehension such as it does not leave room for anything beyond it and beyond ourselves. Conversely, there is something that is always mysterious, in excess of our field of vision and comprehension, in the icon. This is why it invites adoration. It mediates the existence of that which cannot be grasped about the divine: the fact that it cannot be fully comprehended, and the fact that its existence cannot be cognitively demonstrated. If I understood this correctly, this makes Jesus Christ the most absolute iconic figure.
•  Another important dimension of Marion’s treatment of adoration, and that takes us closer to understanding the relation between the adoration of Christ and the adoration of children, is his association of adoration with giftedness. This makes him particularly interesting from an anthropological perspective. Against the traditional critiques of religion that see in adoration a relation of domination, where the adoring subject submits to the adored God, Marion sees adoration as residing primarily in the appreciation of the divine as a gift. Rather than the order of domination and submission, adoration belongs to the order of receptivity to the divinity of what is being offered. To adore is not to say I obey and submit but to say: wow I can’t believe I am receiving such a wonder-full, in the literal sense of the word, gift. And nothing exemplifies that wonder-full gift as God’s ultimate gift to humans: baby Jesus. 
• There’s a lot of Christian philosophical and theological gymnastics that goes into explaining this divine gift, that is also a gifting of the divine. I don’t know if it is the same for all Christians now but this ‘dual nature of Christ’ used to cause wars between Christians in the past. The Maronites escaped the Syrian interior to Lebanon because of this. Their Catholicism entailed an insistence that Jesus is born as fully human and fully divine. Not sometimes this and sometimes that. Not as half-half. Not human in form but essentially divine. He is both human in form and essence and divine in form and essence. In this sense, the divine gift that is Jesus, is a divine-human converter: through his existence he makes the human divine and the divine human. This is most exemplified in the experience of vulnerability.
• In gifting the divine to become subjected to the human condition, God is agreeing to something paradoxical: making the divine experience vulnerability. But, and this is what I find interesting, this gift also entails making vulnerability divine. Hence lies the iconic adorability of baby Jesus: he, like all babies, is ‘passively sitting there’ innocent, helpless and vulnerable. We adore the fact that God, the all powerful divine, is presenting himself to us in such a human way. But in the process we also adore the fact that this human mode of existence of the divine transforms this vulnerability into something divine. 
• Associated with the above, though I am not sure I fully understand the nature of the association, is the idea that, more generally, children’s state of innocence and vulnerability is the condition of openness to those dimensions of the divine that cannot be captured cognitively, what Marion (noted above) sees as the radical otherness of the divine. Most importantly, this innocence and vulnerability is also seen as the condition of receptivity to ‘grace.’ It seems that it is here that resides the original Christmas experience of every child as ‘deserving’ a gift. There also seem to be a Christian argument that the above makes every child, not just Christian children, receptive to and partaking in the divine?
• Note: This idea that the child’s innocence and vulnerability makes them inhabit a pre-symbolic and pre-cognitive reality is also echoed in Levi-Strauss’s argument concerning children’s ability to exist in a mythical reality rather than ‘interpret’ myths. It is also echoed in Benjamin’s argument concerning children’s access to a form of meaning that is outside functional language. 
• Some possible concluding points: 
• In adoring the beauty, helplessness and vulnerability of any child we are adoring it as a portal to something which religious people refer to as the divine and that those of us who are not religious still experience as something sublime beyond rationality and cognition.
• The Christian experience of vulnerability as divine gift subverts the opposition between strength and vulnerability. It turns vulnerability into strength. It defines, scholastically rather than practically though, a radically other horizon for politics and ethics where innocence is knowledge, helplessness is power, vulnerability is strength.

This covers the core and most coherent part of my notes. There was nothing particularly political behind my interest in adoration when I wrote them. I was only driven by intellectual curiosity. And I remember experiencing a certain pleasure writing them. I was at a relatively early stage in my academic career, and I had just began to realise that there were convergences and possibilities of dialogue between theological thought and certain secular moral and ethical issues such that I can develop arguments grounded in both. This was liberating because, as a student, when thinking radical philosophical and ethical questions, I imagined religious thought as what I needed to escape at all cost. Part of the pleasure came from a certain form of reconnection and reconciliation with some of the religious sentiments that have shaped me as a kid. Though I did so without becoming religious again or at least not in the sense of a born-again Christian.

Reading the notes was an ambivalent experience. Rereading what certain philosophical and theological texts say about ‘adoration’ and the kind of thinking it generated in me about the relation between Christmas, children and adoration. This was as enlightening and pleasurable as it was thirty five years ago. And I like reading the way the question of ‘adoration’ brought out to me some of the more politically and ethically radical dimensions of Christian thought. I could see my interest in ‘alter-politics’ even though I did not begin thinking and writing about this until twenty years later.

What was unpleasant was the gap between these thoughts and the reality we are living in today. How can one read about Christmas and the adoration of children without thinking of the more than twenty thousand children massacred by Zionists in Gaza? Furthermore, particularly for those of us living in the Western world: how can we stomach the West’s extraordinary hypocritical ability to celebrate the birth of Christ, and the adoration of children seen as an extension of Christ himself, while being complicit in the mass murdering of Palestinian children, and the banalisation of their death. By the time I finished reading the notes, the plane was landing in Hobart and I was genuinely depressed.

Let me be clear that I am not so naive as to believe that, before Gaza, the West or any other place for that matter, allowed its national and international politics to be guided by Christian or any other moral values. At the same time though, I have never thought of the nations’ upholding of their ‘moral values’ as an empirical descriptive statement. Even when the colonial West continuously proclaimed ‘Western Values’ while doing the exact opposite of what it proclaimed, I always believed that there was something positive to the proclamation in that it worked as a ‘causal horizon’: an aspiration whose mere statement, even when everything happening was contrary to what it states, still had the effect of limiting the damage, no matter how minimal that effect was. But this is no longer the case.

Along with the disgusting governmental acquiescence to the killing of children, I could not help thinking about how far we are from that wonderful Christian idea I described above as ‘innocence is knowledge, helplessness is power, vulnerability is strength.’ In Israel and the United States we have two states where governments, supported by large sections of the population, are busy instituting themselves as cults of hyper-militarised power and strength that celebrate the unhinged enactment of killing, destruction and domination in a way we have not seen before. Vulnerability, if anything, is the enemy. ‘Weak’ seems to be one of Netanyahu’s favourite insults, directed among others at our Prime Minister.

What was depressing about those notes was that they highlighted to me how far we have gone from a mere disparity between ‘moral values’ and politics. We are now witnessing the way those values, even as aspirations, have been, along with all the dead and everything that has been destroyed, massacred before our very eyes. Gaza has been the abattoir of ‘Western Values.’ In this sense, my notes on adoration made me confront the way the Gaza genocide has obliterated the idea that the world we live in had any moral foundations left at all.