Deborah Conway says she won’t be silenced by anti-Israel activists

Deborah Conway was preparing to play a song and talk about her music on ABC radio in Melbourne last week when news of the cancellation came through.

The ARIA award-winning Jewish singer, songwriter and ­author was told by her publicist that the ABC had abruptly withdrawn its invitation for her to ­appear that night on the ABC’s Victorian Evenings radio show because her outspoken support for Israel had made her too controversial.

“On the day of the interview, the publicist told me that the ABC producer had told him that I was a bit controversial right now, and they don’t want that,’’ Conway said.

“It’s not that kind of program and they don’t want a controversial segment in their program. And I’m like, ‘well hang on, I am there to promote a music show in Frankston, not to talk about the Middle East.’ I just looked at my husband Willy (Zygier) and went ‘wow, the ABC, even the ABC’.”

The moment made Conway realise how much traction anti-Israel activists were making in trying to scare others into cancelling her for voicing her belief in Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself by destroying the terror group Hamas after its October 7 massacre of 1200 Israelis.

The cancelled ABC gig was just one of a series of writer’s festival and theatre shows featuring Conway and her husband and music partner Zygier that have been scrapped after organisers got cold feet, often due to vicious online trolling and threats from anti-Israel activists.

But the feisty songwriter, best known for her platinum-selling 90s albums String of Pearls and Bitch Epic and as the front woman of the 80s band Do Re Mi, is fighting back.

She refuses to take a backward step on her public support for ­Israel and is calling out the anti-Semitic trolls who she says have twisted and distorted her words to misrepresent what she says are mainstream pro-Israeli views with which most ­Australians, both Jews and non-Jews, agree.

“I have to ask myself the ­question: do I stand idly by and watch myself being crushed ­openly in the public arena or do I stand up and risk more slings and arrows in order to say ‘no, you are wrong, you’re actually wrong’?” Conway says.

“I am not prepared to shut up and go away; I think that would be a shameful thing to do. I don’t want to give a pound of flesh to everyone who is asking for it until I disappear.”

Conway is speaking out now, not just on behalf of herself, but on behalf of other Australian Jews who she believes have been socially ostracised and racially vilified simply for supporting their homeland in its war against Hamas.

“It is perfectly legitimate to disagree with Israel’s government and its policies,” she says.

“But chanting ‘from the river to the sea’, implicitly calling for the end of the state of Israel, is not criticism, it’s Jew hatred.”

Conway believes activists have tried to “reclassify” the meaning of Zionist from being someone who advocates for an independent Jewish state where Jews can live in safety to being “something repugnant, akin to being a white supremacist or an advocate of apartheid”. She says they have tried to make being a Zionist “an impolite position to hold in polite society”.

But she says she is opposed to attempts to cancel voices and opinions on all sides of debate over the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza, including both pro-Israel voices and pro-Palestinian voices.

“Cancelling voices only makes Australian society more toxic, more resentful, more fragile,” she says. “It doesn’t serve our democracy in any way, it doesn’t help anyone in the Middle East and it doesn’t save lives or end conflict. I fear for Australia’s ability to discuss difficult topics, the bedrock of what makes this a fair, wonderful and desirable place to live.”

Conway believes the ABC revealed its bias in its decision to cancel her radio appearance.

“The ABC is taxpayer-funded and to de-platform mainstream Jewish opinion is egregious to say the least,” she says.

When the Weekend Australian questioned the ABC about the incident this week, the broadcaster did an immediate backflip. Within two hours, the ABC had invited Conway back onto the same show next week.

The ABC did not address written questions about why she had been deemed as too controversial and sought to downplay her cancellation as being the result of “confusion”.

“On the day of Deborah and Willy’s scheduled performance there was some confusion among the production team and the performance was postponed,” the ABC said.

It used the word “postponed” when no rescheduled appearance for Conway had ever been discussed until after The Weekend Australian questioned the broadcaster.

“We apologise to both Deborah and Willy and ABC Melbourne audiences for this confusion,” it said.

When the Hamas massacre of Israelis took place on October 7, neither Conway nor Zygier ever imagined they would become embroiled in the domestic fallout in Australia from the terror attack and from the subsequent Israel-Hamas war.

Their immediate concern was for the safety of their youngest daughter who was in Israel at the time of the attack and who contacted them to say she was sheltering in a stairwell but was safe. She returned to Melbourne within weeks as Conway and Zygier, along with all Australian Jews, tried to absorb the shock of what had just taken place in Israel.

After the hedonism of her rock ‘n’ roll years, Conway, who was raised in a non-religious but observant Jewish family in ­Melbourne, has progressively ­explored her own Jewishness in her music and her writing, as has Zygier.

Her father changed his name from Cohen to Conway to avoid anti-Semitism and in her recent memoir Book of Life, Conway, now 64, speaks of how she ­reconnected with her Jewish identity.

“After a period of debauched, godless years of indulgence, decadence … I found myself yearning for this foundational element to be back in my life,” she says.

She describes her Jewishness as “not fashionable” and not even based on “a fundamental belief” in God but “bound up in the ancient and compelling story with many facets, a story I was ignoring at my peril”.

For Zygier, his Jewish ancestry has a painful but familiar ring to it because, like many Jews in Melbourne, his grandparents, aunts and uncles were murdered in the Holocaust.

Conway and Zygier watched in horror as the pro-Palestinian protest at the Opera House just days after the Hamas attack when anti-Semitic chants rang out, even before Israel had launched its assault on Hamas in Gaza.

“Already you could feel it, this kind of anger that Israel had brought this upon herself … it felt like an echo of Berlin in the 1930,” Conway says. “I read a quote recently: ‘anti-Semitism is a light sleeper’.”

In the weeks that followed, Conway became increasingly horrified by the rising incidence of anti-Semitism in Australia and, as the civilian death toll in Gaza mounted, by the calls of many protesters to wipe Israel off the map. In early November she posted a full-throated defence of Israel on her and Zygier’s Facebook.

“We address this to the people who believe ‘from the river to the sea’ is a legitimate solution to Israel’s stubborn determination to continue to exist,” Conway wrote.

“We know you think Israel is an illegitimate state, born in original sin … the archetype of the settler colonial project … but what you need to know is that Israel doesn’t see itself that way, rather it sees itself as the only hope for the Jew.’

Her comments triggered a wave of hate mail that only increased later that month when Conway performed at Mushroom Records 50th anniversary wearing a T-shirt in the blue and white colours of the Israeli flag with a Star of David on it, while Zygier wore a yarmulke.

Conway again responded to the critics online, saying: “We wore what we wore as an act of solidarity, of defiance, of kinship. To say in public, we are who we are. You might hate us but we are who we are.”

In early December Conway performed at a vigil held in Elsternwick by hundreds of Jewish women to condemn the selective silence of women’s rights organisations about the rape, murder and kidnapping of Israeli women and children by Hamas on October 7.

She told The Weekend Australian then that the fact it took woman’s rights group UN Women almost two months to recognise the sexual violence of Hamas was “utterly shocking and a wake-up call to Jews, particularly Jewish women”.

But the moment when pro-Palestinian activists really placed a target on Conway’s back was after an interview with ABC’s Radio National in mid-December when she was talking about Hamas using Palestinians as human shields and, in what Conway admits was a “clumsy” use of words, she appeared at one point to downplay the deaths of so many Palestinian children.

“Kids, lots of kids, they are not Hamas right?” asked RN host Patricia Karvelas.

“Well it depends on what you call kids. But young people, 16, 17-year old-young boys toting rifles,” Conway replied.

When pro-Palestinian activists portrayed her comments as supporting the murder of children. Conway quickly moved to clarify that this was not what she meant.

“I was trying to tell listeners, in the cut and thrust of a live interview situation, that when Hamas puts guns in the hands of their adolescent sons to point at the enemy, Hamas steals their childhood,” she posted.

“I wasn’t talking about babies or little children. It goes without saying that the deaths of innocents are always tragic.”

Her critics ignored this explanation and stepped up their campaign to cancel her appearances at a time when she was touring the country with a new musical show and had just released her memoir. Conway says activists sent her pictures of dead babies with the caption “Do you call these kids?”

At the Perth Festival in February hundreds of members of the creative community signed a letter protesting about Conway’s appearance, claiming that her comments on the ABC were a “dehumanising refusal to acknowledge Palestinian children as innocent victims” and that “to platform Conway in light of these comments facilitates the insidious effect of making the genocide of Palestinian people appear acceptable”.

A furious Conway came out swinging on social media, saying the accusation amounted to a “blood libel, a bit of classic, time-honoured anti-Semitism in a long line of blood libels, aimed at Jews over the centuries”.

To Conway’s relief, the Perth Festival stood up and defended her appearance, which went ahead despite a short-lived attempt by around a dozen protesters to interrupt a panel on which she appeared.

But not all festival or music organisers have been so brave. One of Conway’s theatre shows scheduled in Melbourne later this month was cancelled after the theatre got cold feet when the promoter’s social media ad campaign was repeatedly attacked by online trolling.

Conway was also cancelled from a charity event in NSW to raise funds for a children’s home after organisers received pushback.

Another writer’s festival in NSW recently made “an elaborate excuse” about having to cancel Conway’s event, but in some cases she admits she cannot be sure whether such excuses are genuine or reflect her perceived contentious status.

More recently, Conway was one of those who were doxxed for being part of a WhatsApp group of Jewish creatives that had been formed in response to the anti-Semitism in the arts community. She says many in the left-leaning and mostly pro-Palestinian arts community have struggled with her stance on Israel and that she and Zygier have lost some friends as a result.

“As far as the cancellations go, it is disappointing, especially for writer’s festivals to cave into anti-Israel activists,” she says. “A writer’s festival is where the notion or the word or the argument should be prime. I am a free speech absolutist and even though I find the Hamas fetishisation deplorable, misguided and shocking, I’m still not happy to ban the voices of people who want to prosecute for Hamas. On social media pages I have allowed people to have their say.”

So what, for the record, is Conway’s position on the conflict?

“Hamas started this war on October 7 regardless of whether you think they were justified or not,” Conway says during our interview this week in her Melbourne home.

“Hamas has the power to end it by returning the hostages or laying down their arms. Israel has been attacked and has to respond in a way that ensures they won’t be vulnerable to that kind of attack again. That is their duty to their citizens.

“War is atrocious. There are lots of innocent people, particularly young people who are dying. But the reason this is happening is because Hamas has embedded itself beneath its civilian population knowing, cynically and horribly, that high civilian casualty figures will be part of the conflict. It is an attempt to undermine Israel’s ability to defend itself and it’s ugly – every which way it’s ugly.”

When Conway falls silent, Zygier says: “These are mainstream views in the Jewish community and they are probably mainstream views in the larger community too. The repugnance (for Conway’s critics) is based on taking Deborah’s words out of context.”

Conway is far more interested in playing her and Zygier’s current musical theatre show Songs From the Book of Life than she is talking about Israel or the Middle East.

But Conway is adamant that she will not stop calling out anti-Semitism and what she calls the current “f. k the Jews mindset” of anti-Israel activists in this country.

“You are kind of scared of saying something because you’re gonna get slammed,” she says. “But it’s much worse not saying something because it festers inside you like an ache.”