ECAJ President Jillian Segal AO addressed the crowd at NSW’s Rally for Peace and Solid­ar­ity with Israel on Sunday.

Watch Jillian’s address below or on YouTube here.

Below is a tran­script of her speech.

Friends, I wish to echo the sen­ti­ments of Lesli and I am sure Rodney in express­ing solid­ar­ity with the people of Israel. The Aus­trali­an Jewish community and its rep­res­ent­at­ive bodies stand with Israel and will always stand with Israel. We are a Zionist community, we believe in the right of the Jewish people to determine our own future in our own State in our historic homeland, and we feel a col­lect­ive sentiment as well as duty to support our fellow Jews in their times of peril: “Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh” – we are respons­ible for each other and Israel.

We mourn the loss of  innocent life on both sides and we abhor any attempts to either minimise the crimes and culp­ab­il­ity of Hamas or to draw false equi­val­ences between the acts of a terrorist organ­isa­tion and the measured response of a sovereign and demo­crat­ic state.

Jewish people around the world are exper­i­en­cing their own trauma – in the UK, France and across Europe, in LA and New York. We have felt outraged here by so much ignorant, mis­lead­ing and plainly false reporting and com­ment­ary by a wide range of outlets and organ­isa­tions. We have felt over­whelmed by the relent­less abuse and hatred directed at us on social media and, on occasions, on the streets. We have witnessed the flags of terrorist organ­isa­tions displayed in public,  and vicious attacks on Jews in cities in other parts of the world.

We have seen journ­al­ists and civil society organ­isa­tions  shed any pretence of fairness and impar­ti­al­ity and essen­tially become mouth­pieces for an organ­isa­tion that Australia des­ig­nates as terrorist. We have been drowning in dis­in­form­a­tion and false­hoods spread by certain celebrit­ies and other influ­en­cers.

And we have felt shocked and betrayed by a public discourse that seems to remove Israelis from the human family – which portrays Israel as an abstract entity and not a nation of real, flesh and blood people, including so many of our own family members and friends.

This has left many of us feeling des­pond­ent and bewildered. But today I remind you that we are not alone. We have each other, we have Am Yisrael – the people of Israel – both in the Land and every­where around the world. We have people of principle like those friends here with us today who are standing up for truth.

You will have seen, displayed on the screens, the very long list of local and inter­na­tion­al figures who have voiced their support for Israel, including our Prime Minister.  We are grateful to them, and take heart from their courage in standing up to be counted. There have been spon­tan­eous personal expres­sions of support from countless other Aus­trali­ans who see the truth for what it is and are appalled by Hamas’s genocidal Charter and its indis­crim­in­ate rocket attacks.   However, it must also be said that we have felt let down  by the deafening silence from other public figures from whom we expected better.

We are a proud and determ­ined people. We are used to being self-reliant and we are resilient. Israel will emerge strong from this latest conflict ( and we pray that the ceasefire will hold and) and Israelis and Jewish people every­where will also remain strong and return to all the work we do building social cohesion with our neigh­bours.

This war has shown us how great the chal­lenges are. But I want to assure each of you that the lead­er­ship of this community is working tire­lessly with great passion and ded­ic­a­tion to ensure that our voice is and will be heard – in the media, online, in gov­ern­ment and in every sector of society. The current violence may end but our hard work will continue and we will ensure that as a community we remain organised and committed par­tic­u­larly to con­tinu­ing to provide our youth with the knowledge, training and tools to speak up.

On behalf of the Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry and the nearly 200 communal organ­isa­tions around the country that fall within our structure, I proudly re-affirm  that we stand with the people of Israel and with diaspora Jewry every­where, and we stand together with a renewed determ­in­a­tion to drive anti-Zionism and antisemitism back into the darkest and most dis­rep­ut­able corners of our society from where they emerged.