A thousand people rose to their feet in Sydney on 22 August 2026. They weren’t approving evidence. The applause was one of relief: the relief of hearing an unformed suspicion given shape and authority by a man fluent enough to turn it into prose.
That assembly was not the country. It was a ticketed, self-selected audience at an ideas festival, and the readers who would later nod along with Henry Ergas’s rebuttal formed another such group, equally small, each equally convinced they represented the whole country. Between them sits most of Australia, holding no fixed position on any of this, and unlikely to form one. What looks like a nation split in two is closer to two minor, intensely partisan publics mistaking the volume of their own argument for the temperature of the whole society, aided by outlets whose business rewards the sentence that confirms over the one that complicates.
Richard Flanagan’s address during the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, “The New McCarthyism: Gaza and Australia,” named an Israel lobby operating behind Australian public life, blamed it for the politicisation of the Bondi Hanukkah massacre, and cited a Committee to Protect Journalists figure on press deaths in Gaza to argue that Israel kills journalists as a matter of policy. Henry Ergas answered in the mainstream press with the tools of a trained economist: interrogate the mechanism, demand to see the funding trail, and separate a government’s crimes from a diaspora’s guilt. Much of what Ergas wrote was fair. Neither congregation was built to hear the other. Two verdicts, delivered before the evidence arrived, hardly amount to disagreement. It’s a failure of the apparatus on which dissent depends.
A nation state is not a sacrament, and Israel’s conduct in Gaza is open to the same scrutiny any government’s conduct is open to. So is Hamas’s. The problem lies elsewhere: in the drift from criticising a government to alleging a diffuse Jewish or Israeli power steering an entire society’s institutions from behind a curtain. That claim, if true, can be shown. Name the organisation. Trace the money. Publish the minutes. What Flanagan offered instead was a structure built to survive its own absence of proof: an institution that agrees with him is independent, one that disagrees has been captured; a challenge to his argument becomes evidence of the lobby’s reach; an accusation of antisemitism becomes further confirmation that the lobby is working exactly as described. Once suspicion replaces evidence as the operating method, nothing can falsify the theory, because everything has already been converted into confirmation of it.
The same instrument turns on the accusers just as easily. A statistic can close an argument as efficiently as a suspicion can, and for the same reason. Nobody behind the podium examines what sits beneath it. Ergas cites a share of journalists killed worldwide as though the number explained itself, when a share is only ever as honest as its denominator, and a denominator is a choice, not a fact. The historical parallel he leans on works the same way, since comparing a three-year war under near-total media access to a global war fought across continents with no consistent record-keeping is a comparison built to persuade rather than to measure. Historical analogy is not self-authenticating on either side of this argument, and moral outrage settles nothing, however sincerely felt. A civilisation that has lost the instinct to ask what the denominator is has lost something far more basic than manners. It has lost the discipline that separates a claim from a belief.
A second sleight of hand recurs on both platforms of this combat, and in almost every tribal contest that resembles it. Hamas disappears from accounts that want Israel to be the sole author of Gaza’s suffering, and Israeli fear disappears from accounts that want Hamas to be the sole author of October’s. Each omission produces a clean moral picture. But each clean picture is also a lie of selection rather than a lie of fact. A Palestinian child is not Hamas. A Jewish Australian bookseller is not the Israeli cabinet. A Muslim Australian marching for Gaza is not endorsing a hostage-taker’s ideology, and an accusation of antisemitism doesn’t automatically prove or disprove itself simply by being spoken. All of these distinctions are commonplace. But their disappearance from public argument, at scale, in a country that still imagines itself to be rational, is not at all normal.
Reasonableness of this kind is cheap when it costs nothing. Standing between the podium in Sydney and the funeral in Gaza costs a writer nothing but readers, whereas the Jewish shopkeeper in Bondi deciding whether an evening phone call was a genuine threat or an invented one, and the mother in Gaza counting how many of her children are still alive after the last strike, aren’t afforded the luxury of hovering above the argument admiring its eloquent complexity. They are already inside it. They have no choice. A third position that congratulates itself for refusing both tribes is still a tribe: the tribe of people for whom the outcome is purely optional.
What makes this particular collapse worth more than local comment is how well it fits the wider pattern of a culture organised around attention rather than accuracy. A newsroom, a festival, a comment thread on social media, a parliament, all reward the fast declarative sentence, the one that clips and travels, over the slow admission that a position has flaws in it. Certainty performs, whereas doubt does not. So institutions built to test claims against evidence increasingly behave like institutions built to circulate claims. The difference between those two drives turns out to be everything. This is not confined to Sydney, or to the Israel-Palestine argument, or even to this decade. It shows up wherever a population has been trained by its communications environment to treat conviction as a moral achievement in itself, and evidence as optional. Gaza and Bondi are simply where Australia’s version of the pattern happened to surface this year.
None of the distinctions offered here (government from people, criticism from hatred, grief from propaganda, doubt from cowardice) will survive an environment engineered to reward their collapse. Ergas was largely right about the facts. Flanagan was right that Australian public life polices some speech more nervously than others. Both men can be correct in fragments and still be feeding, with every fluent paragraph, the same appetite for tribal certainty that made the argument unbearable to referee in the first place. So, a thousand people stood to applaud one man’s account of who is to blame. Somewhere the same week, a smaller and quieter group agreed with the alternative explanation. Neither group appeared to ask what it would cost to be wrong. That’s what I find disturbing.