Three young actors took their curtain call at the Sydney Theatre Company last Saturday night wearing keffiyehs — the scarves associated with Palestinians — around their shoulders.
What happened in the aftermath is a reflection of how the latest conflict in the Middle East has erupted into bitter and dangerous reductionism in political debates in Australia.
This trend, which has now visibly spread to the arts, has been supercharged in recent weeks by politicians who should know better and some media outlets who are fanning outrage and seem to be emphasising only a rise in anti-Semitism in Australia without equally acknowledging a rise in Islamophobia.
Nuance is dead.
The conflation of attempts at balanced commentary with the most divisive hardliners on both sides of the conflict sees arguments reduced to black and white.
Support for civilians caught up in the conflict — and a wish for the conflict to end — is taken as endorsement of Hamas, and hostility towards all Jewish people, including members of the Australian Jewish community.
Equally, members of the local Jewish community who do not agree with the actions of the government of Benjamin Netanyahu feel like they are being tarred with the same brush of the government in Tel Aviv.
Everyone can have their own opinion about whether it was a good idea for the three actors to don the keffiyehs in the current tense environment. But the actors weren't donning the colours of Hamas.
Arts organisations under pressure
It is hardly unprecedented for the theatrical world, or the arts generally, to note or even comment on world events. Consider how many times people dressed in Ukrainian colours, or the Ukrainian national anthem was played in theatres, in the early days of Ukraine's war with Russia.
There were similar shows of solidarity with Israel in the aftermath of the horrendous Hamas attack of October 7.
No one seemed to mind when Tim Minchin donned the keffiyeh to portray Judas a couple of years ago in Jesus Christ Superstar.
But in the wake of Saturday night, The Australian began a daily campaign of reporting outrage from patrons and donors to the STC over the "pro-Palestine protest" which it said "threatened to marginalise both Jewish staff at the theatre company and audience members".
This in turn reflected an aggressive campaign led by some of Australia's most senior business figures to insist that the STC, and the actors, apologise lest they take their funding away from the company.
Three young actors on one side of the equation. The full power of the media and arts funding establishment on the other.
The media campaign has run for days — and certainly seemed to receive a lot more attention, relatively speaking, than the appalling incident in Melbourne in which pro-Palestinian protesters, carrying two bloodied dolls, occupied the lobby of a hotel where family members of some of the Israelis who were killed or taken hostage by Hamas were staying.
The STC has made a number of grovelling apologies.
Other arts organisations are also under pressure over their program content and the actions of their artists, lest they also lose funding.
Artists in other parts of the world complain of similar pressure to stay silent with any form of support for Palestinian civilians.
Over 1,300 artists in the UK wrote this week of a "disturbing double standard" either stopping them speaking out or in the actual cancellation of arts events as a result of comments made by the artist in question in support of Palestinian rights.
At the beginning of last year, the Sydney Festival, and artists due to appear at it, faced outrageous threats and pressure because the Israeli Embassy was subsidising a production involving an Israeli choreographer.
It led to many artists withdrawing from the festival and threats of withdrawal of financial support from other donors.
Notably, Belvoir St Theatre held its ground.
It said at the time that "we understand that, in being open to one viewpoint, it can appear we're silencing others".
"That is not our intention. We want a wide array of viewpoints, even irreconcilable ones, to have a place in our city and on our stage. We apologise for any hurt or offence that our making this complex decision has caused."
Earlier this year, the organisers of Adelaide Writers Week and South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas also stared down objections — and threats and actual withdrawal of financial support — prompted by the presence on the program of two Palestinian writers.
But what has changed since these earlier episodes is that Australian communities of different backgrounds and faiths see so many people they know — on both sides — dying and in distress, and no apparent end in sight to what seems an intractable conflict.
LoadingA dangerous tipping point
These tensions only seem to be being supercharged by both News Corp and the federal Coalition repeatedly raising the alarm about anti-Semitism, while having much less to say about the knock-on effects for Australia's Arab and Muslim communities from the emotions stirred by a conflict overseas.
Cynics would note that the seats the Coalition wants to win back from the Teal Independents contain some of the biggest Jewish communities in Australia.
An already bitter and traumatised debate on both sides is being weaponised by political leaders and some of our biggest news outlets.
Threats of violence to journalists and others in the media are now part of the working landscape.
Critics on both sides attack the media, who they claim have taken the other side.
Somewhere along the way, it has become acceptable, as happened in late October, for a Liberal Senator to suggest to the ABC's managing director David Anderson in a Senate Estimates Committee:
"You seem to certainly attract anti-Semites to work for you".
The Israel-Gaza conflict since October 7 is playing out on the streets, in the home, and in the communities of millions of Australians, rather than simply being a political brawl watched on television.
As political commentator Bruce Wolpe observed this week, political campaigns are usually played "on the field". But now, he observes, "every day it looks like Question Time is coming to you".
It feels like a very dangerous tipping point.
Similarly weaponised discussions have indeed become the order of the day in Federal Parliament — on a range of issues — as the sittings for the year wind up.
The Coalition shamelessly exploited the government's perceived tardiness to act in the wake of the High Court decision on indefinite immigration detention, then this week accused it of moving too fast.
Politically wounded, some bright spark in the Labor ranks decided it would be a good idea to dish it back at Peter Dutton by suggesting he was a protector of paedophiles.
Like all wild overreach, it does nothing for those who make such charges or the underlying argument.
But how to drop the temperature on any of the bitter arguments on which we are ending 2023 is anyone's guess.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.