The Racial State's 'National Day of Mourning': and how the whites become Jews

The australian racial state has decreed a ‘National Day of Mourning for the Victims of the Bondi Terrorist Attack’ on 22 January 2026. The theme for the day was chosen by the Chabad of Bondi and is ‘Light will win, a gathering of unity and remembrance.’ The theme of light versus darkness is central to Zionist supremacy. On 16 October 2023 Benjamin Netanyahu described the accelerated genocide he had just instigated against the Palestinian people of Gaza as ‘a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.’

Invasion Day comes every year on 26 January. Many Indigenous people have already spoken out about the proximity of the Day of Mourning for Bondi and the yearly commemoration and protest of now 238 years of bloody white rule over this continent. In New South Wales, the first colony, the Invasion Day protest risks being made illegal under the protest bans instituted by the State Premier, Chris Minns.

Long before the day of colonial invasion was perversely designated ‘Australia Day’, Indigenous people marked 26 January as a day of mourning. As documented by AIATSIS, the first day of mourning was held in 1938. The people led by the Australian Aborigines League (AAL) and the Aborigines Progressive Association (APA) resolved that:

‘WE, representing THE ABORIGINES OF AUSTRALIA, assembled in conference at the Australian Hall, Sydney, on the 26th day of January, 1938, this being the 150th Anniversary of the Whiteman’s seizure of our country, HEREBY MAKE PROTEST against the callous treatment of our people by the whitemen during the past 150 years, AND WE APPEAL to the Australian nation of today to make new laws for the education and care of Aborigines, we ask for a new policy which will raise our people TO FULL CITIZEN STATUS and EQUALITY WITHIN THE COMMUNITY.’

Despite 238 years of uninterrupted colonial rule and the paving of the way for white domination by the blood of Indigenous people massacred in sites many of which have been revealed but many of which remain to be uncovered, the mantra continues to be repeated that the attack on the Chabad Hannukah by the Sea was the ‘worst terrorist attack’ to have ever been committed ‘on home soil’. The words ‘home soil’ conveniently side-step australian Brenton Tarrant’s murder of 51 Muslim people in Christchurch, Aotearoa. The more significant message however is that the massacres of Indigenous people were not terrorism. But I know with great certainty that those people were terrorised by their white killers as they came for them, not once but time and time again. The last known attempted massacre of Indigenous people happened in 1981.

Making Whites into Jews

The government has provided a webpage for the National Day of Mourning and encourages each of us to ‘undertake one of more of the 15 suggested Mitzvah (sic) for Bondi.’

In my latest book, The New Racial Regime: Recalibrations of White Supremacy, I argue that antisemitism is ‘always already in service of the European state, and by extension, the west and white supremacy’ (Lentin 2025: 224). Further,

Jews themselves become a proxy for the western subject – homo europaeus – in need of saving from the marauding other. The presence of Jews and the need to defend them from harm become a means to enact punitive policies and violent action while protecting the state and institutions from criticism.

ibid: 226

Matt Serif-Cullick further argues that in the US context the trope of Black antisemitism long claimed by Zionists, who view the Black alignment with the Palestinian struggle as inherently antisemitic, enables white people’s identification with Jews such that – per the title of his paper – ‘white folks become Jews’. This coheres with and extends my argument that Jews act chimerically as a shield in the defence of ‘western civilisation’. Seriff-Cullick proposes that Jews serve whiteness not only as a shield but rather white people take the place of Jews as the actual victims of attack by Black people, and as is clear in Trump’s United States today, all those constituted as non-white.

As he argues patently,

White liberal narratives have never taken seriously Black radicals’ documentation of fascism’s continuity with colonial and anti-Black genocide, so the extermination of European Jews in the Nazi holocaust has continued to be described as fascism’s singular apotheosis. Given this, the absorption of antisemitism into a narrative of white grievance—instead of white supremacist violence—serves as a uniquely powerful maneuver for rehabilitating fascism.

The placement of the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people as the sine qua non signifier of racism and fascism to the erasure of all else – particularly as the recency of colonial massacres in australia remind us, those in which we are directly complicit – facilitates white people to occupy the place of Jews. Through the hegemonic status granted it the Holocaust becomes not only the only legitimate tragedy but one in which ‘we all’ (Europe/the West) suffered and are thus all legitimate victims of. When murderous acts like the attack on the Bondi Chabad Huannukah by the Sea take place and are given the imprimatur of national mourning, the australian settler population is invited to identify with, and indeed become, the body grieving. This literally erases, by its proximity to the day of invasion and Indigenous mourning, the events of 1788 that by declaring the continent terra nullius enabled and legitimated the ongoing colonial occupation of Indigenous lands and the uninterrupted violence against its peoples.

We haven’t quite reached the level of philosemitism structured into German public life wherein non-Jewish public figures take on the role of adjudicating the authenticity of Jews, gauged as to their level of commitment to Zionism. The intimation is that only the inheritors of nazis can really know a Jew. The desire to become the Jew has led to quite a number of well-known cases of people having successfully presented themselves as Jews being found out to in fact have no Jewish ancestry. From our vantage point in so-called australia (and other settler colonies too) we can identify the desire to become Jewish as consistent with the settler wish to replace ‘the native’ by becoming Indigenous. (For a good account of the phenomenon of ‘white claims to Indigenous identity’ I recommend Daryl Leroux’s book, Distorted Descent.)

And so, with the government’s declaration of the National Day of Mourning, australians are encouraged to perform as Jews by carrying out ‘Fifteen suggested Mitzvah (sic) for the 15 people lost in the Bondi attack’.

According to Brittanica, which concurs with what I learned at my religious Jewish school, a mitzvah is ‘any commandment, ordinance, law, or statute contained in the Torah (first five books of the Bible) and, for that reason, to be observed by all practicing Jews.’ But according to the government’s website, a mitzvah is

‘an act of kindness, compassion, and a moral responsibility. It is about taking practical action to help others, through simple everyday acts of kindness that together create a powerful wave of goodwill. This can be as simple as checking in on a neighbour, volunteering time, offering support to local businesses, or donating to those in need.’

While the 613 mitzvot of varying importance are constituted in Judaism as commandments of Jewish law, incumbent upon Jews to perform (or aspire to), the government in its colloquialisation of mitzvot secularises them. It therefore makes it universally available thus enabling white people to become Jews, as per Seriff-Cullick’s critique.

Absent the use of Judaism in the service of Zionism, we might say why not? Is it not a nice ecumenical thing for everyone to take a leaf out of Judaism’s book and ‘do something nice for your neighbour’ or some such? However, directing the australian citizenry to identify with a version of judaism that only exists in service of mandatory zionism and that relies on that which is specifically jewish about mitzvot – practices that tie Jews directly to G-d through which we are supposed to be reminded of the covenant at all times – is deeply problematic. This is not because of any wish I (a non-observant jew) have about gatekeeping Judaism, but because the secularisation of jewishness is a zionist endeavour, one that serves to expand and expand the boundaries of who zionism interpellates to identify with it.

Moreover, given the institutionalisation of zionism via instruments like the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism, this is becoming less of an invitation and more of a command. And lest anyone might be led to believe that this is the work of a ‘shadowy zionist cabal’, I hope that it is clear that mandatory zionism today is a crucial tool for settler colonialism and imperialism writ large. As I argued last week, zionism is australianism.

But we are being invoked to carry out 15 mitzvot and so I have selected a few of the government’s suggestions and below the official narrative make my own.

Give to others – donate to organisations in service of others.

Donate to my monthly fundraiser for 10 families in Deir Al-Balah

If you subscribe to my SubStack every cent will go to this fund.

Donate to Mob Strong or the Black Peoples Union

Uplift the sick – visit someone who is unwell and offer support.

Donate to the Palestinian Children Relief Fund and its project to help support the care for children in Gaza suffering from congenital or traumatic limb amputations.

Help those who have helped you – perform one small task to help your parent or older relative.

Follow mutual aid groups on social media who are often trying to raise funds for Indigenous elders to receive healthcare or travel for sorry business or for other important matters.

Open your home – offer hospitality to someone you may not have thought to.

If you are able, offer a room to someone who needs housing, for example asylum seekers who are facing high levels of homelessness.

Teach children – read children stories that show them all the good in the world.

Teach children to stand up to racism, sexism, transphobia, and zionism. Teach non-indigenous children that we live in a colony and that we all have a role in dismantling it.