As I watched Israel's Eurovision contestant Noam Bettan belt his way to second place in Vienna last week, I found myself thinking about the gulf between the real person on that stage and the avatar of an invented Israel he represents to some. After a week of lies and libels even more outrageous and numerous than usual, I want to offer a reality check to those who booed and boycotted him.

Start with who Bettan actually is. He is a 28-year-old whose family immigrated to Israel from France. Which raises a question his booers and boycotters never think to ask: why would Jews leave France?

The story of Ilan Halimi may be instructive. In 2006, the 23-year-old Jewish cellphone salesman was abducted by a gang who called themselves the 'Gang of Barbarians.' They believed the antisemitic trope that all Jews are rich, and attempted to extort a ransom from his family, who were not rich and could not pay. After 24 days of hideous torture, his burned and naked body was dumped in a field. He died on the way to hospital.

That was not an isolated incident. It marked the beginning of what has become a sustained campaign of Islamist violence against Jews in France: the murders of a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012; the rape of a Jewish woman in Créteil in 2014, carried out by men who believed Jews were rich and wanted revenge for Palestine; the Bataclan and Charlie Hebdo massacres and a hostage-taking at a kosher supermarket in 2015; the murders in their homes of elderly Jewish women Sarah Halimi and Mireille Knoll in 2017 and 2018; a gang rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl in 2024; assaults on a 13-year-old Jewish boy and a 14-year-old Jewish girl in 2026. The list is not exhaustive. It is merely representative.

Bettan's family, like many French Jews, is of Algerian origin. Others trace their roots to Morocco and Tunisia. And here is where the historical ignorance of the boycotters becomes most glaring—because they would not even know to ask why there are Jews from North Africa in the first place.

The first exile of Jews from their homeland occurred in the sixth century BCE, when the Babylonian Empire conquered Jerusalem, then capital of the land called Judah, destroyed the Temple, and took most of its inhabitants into captivity. That is the origin of the biblical verse: "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, there we wept when we remembered Zion." Over the following centuries, some of those exiled Jews moved from Babylon—modern-day Iraq—down the Arabian Peninsula and across North Africa. Their descendants built communities that endured for millennia.

Then, in 1948, following the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the ancient homeland, almost a million of those descendants were expelled by Arab governments. Two thirds of them settled as refugees in the new state of Israel—returning, after a 2,500-year exile, to the land their ancestors had been driven from. My parents-in-law, born in Yemen, were among them.

This is the history that the booers in the Eurovision arena do not know, and show no interest in learning. Their tunnel vision excludes not centuries but millennia of context.

Noam Bettan lives in Ra'anana, a town north of Tel Aviv. He went to school there with my oldest nephew and served in the same army unit as my middle one. I mention this not merely as a personal aside, but because it matters to what comes next.

Like every town in Israel, Ra'anana bore a tragically unfair share of the catastrophe of October 7, 2023. Among those murdered, taken hostage, or raped that day and in the weeks that followed were people Bettan knew, people my nephews knew, people whose names I now carry with me.

Laurie Vardi, 24, and Uriel Baruch, 35, were murdered while fleeing the Nova music festival. Guy Illouz, a 26-year-old musician, was abducted and died in captivity from wounds sustained during his kidnapping. Almog Sarusi, a 27-year-old engineering student and friend of my oldest nephew, was one of the six hostages—the so-called 'Beautiful Six'—who were starved and then murdered in the tunnels beneath Gaza.

And then there is Na'ama Levy.

Na'ama was 19 years old when most of the world saw her being shoved into a jeep by Hamas terrorists. The backs of her ankles had been slashed to prevent her from escaping. The back of her pyjama pants was soaked in blood. She is now 22. She went to school with my nephew who served alongside Noam Bettan. Two degrees of separation—from me, and probably from many Jewish Australians.

If Hamas's own bodycam footage was not enough to tell us what that blood signified; if their videoed confessions were not; if the UN investigator Premila Patten's report was not; if Sheryl Sandberg's documentary Screams Before Silence was not—then the Civil Commission's recent report, Silenced No More: Sexual Terror Unveiled, tells us in excruciating detail. I read it cover to cover. It is not easy reading. It is necessary reading.

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As I watched Noam Bettan sing in Vienna, and as I read that report, and as I scrolled through the comments beneath Eurovision posts— the sneering, the lies, the calls for intifada—I held all of this context in my mind simultaneously. The rivers of Babylon. The Jews of North Africa. The body in the field. The murdered children at a French school. Na'ama Levy's pyjamas.

The booers hold none of it. Their ignorance—whether innocent or wilful—is not merely offensive. It is dangerous. It is the kind of ignorance that has consequences.

In Australia, those consequences arrived on December 15, 2025, at Bondi Beach.

In my testimony to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, I spoke about what I called "incredible historical illiteracy in Australia—a country with a white history of 250 years, and a corresponding lack of context or understanding of the sweep of history that my people, and all the people of the Middle East, carry front and centre in our understanding of the world."

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I ended my testimony with hope, expressing my belief that the Commission could help prevent Australia from travelling the path France has taken, and my desire to see Australian Jews return to building and contributing to this country, as we have always done and want to continue to do.

What one person took away from my half-hour of testimony, as she later made clear on social media, was a complaint about taxpayer money being spent listening to "a 70 year old woman complaining about something that happened when she was 8 years old at brownie camp."

I will leave that comment to speak for itself—and to illustrate, more economically than I can, exactly what we are up against.

From Babylon to Vienna, from Ra'anana to Bondi Beach: the thread is unbroken, and the stakes could not be higher. Noam Bettan sang beautifully. The crowd that booed him understood nothing.