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.
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