There was one moment that fundamentally shifted how Gamel Kheir felt about being Australian.

It was 11 December 2005, when Kheir, then 35, saw crowds of people waving flags and shouting “Fuck off Lebs” at Sydney’s Cronulla beach, a place he had gone to regularly with his cousins for years.

“That was the first time I felt like an alien within my own country,” he says.

The events of that day – when some men in a group of about 5,000 who had congregated at Cronulla beach yelled abuse at and physically assaulted anyone of Middle Eastern appearance – entered into public knowledge and the history books as the Cronulla riots.

The days of violence and revenge attacks that followed became a pivotal moment in Australian race relations. For many Muslim and Arab Australians, such as Kheir, the riots are among the key defining incidents that have shaped their sense of what it means to exist in white Australia.

But a new book by two of those who led the response to the violence – Carl Scully, who was minister for police, and Mark Goodwin, then assistant police commissioner – has attempted to rewrite the narrative.

The Cronulla Riots: the Inside Story attempts to “challenge the notion that [the riots] were solely driven by Caucasian xenophobia … [and provide] a more nuanced account of the events, examining the complex dynamics that led to the unrest”.

Among the book’s most controversial claims is that the riots were “not racially inspired”.

“The brush of racism has been applied so liberally and so often, that it has writ large both an image and an imagined reality, across the memory and consciousness of what happened,” Scully and Goodwin write.

In another passage they claim: “It is way too simplistic to suggest, as many academics and social commentators have, that racist behaviour was driven by racists!”

Instead, the men argue, “the central causes of the conflict at Cronulla were incivility, disrespect, tribalism, territory and an ‘intolerance of difference’ towards the ‘Other’”. They argue that commentators and the broader community have committed “reverse racism … in maligning a white part of Sydney but not an Arabic one”.

“You can’t just point to the racist text [messages], the racist memes, the racist taunts and the racist [tattoos] and say it was just racist,” Scully said in October, promoting the book on the National Conservative Institute of Australia podcast.

Alana Lentin, a professor in cultural and social analysis at Western Sydney University, says Scully and Goodwin are “completely confused about all of this”, citing their claim that rioters were motivated not by racism but by “tribalism” or a fear of “the other”.

“That’s racial theory, right there,” she says. “It’s just that you’re calling it something else.”

Lentin is scathing about the book’s chapters on race, which she says contain “classical rightwing tropes”. “The least well-equipped of my undergraduates would not come out with that kind of stuff,” she says.

Several academics and researchers declined to comment on the book on the grounds that it might give credence to its claims.

“To be honest, I don’t think it is worth the effort,” said Prof Gregory Noble from Western Sydney University. “[I] feel that it is really just a self-justification of their actions at the time and based on a deep resentment to the way they were treated.”

Both Scully and Goodwin left their jobs after an inquiry into the police response to the riots.

The authors did not respond to detailed questions about the book. But they told an audience at the Sydney Institute on 4 November: “We did get contacted by the Guardian with a list of things that academics and so-called leaders had said and we’ve not responded to that.”

‘Every generation gets an event that shapes it’

“Books like this only perpetuate the myths that we live in fairyland,” says Kheir, now the secretary of Australia’s Lebanese Muslim Association, who says racism and Islamophobia surged in the wake of the riots.

He says he avoided the beach for seven years, but faced racism again when he returned in 2012 with his teenage daughter.

“We got looked at, stared at in the most uncomfortable ways. And then my daughter actually got racially vilified in her face, and she comes out crying. And I thought, ‘OK, yeah, maybe my lesson for coming here.’”

Shakira Hussein, a writer and researcher at the National Centre for Contemporary Islamic Studies, says persistent anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia has kept the riots at the forefront of community memories.

“People who were either not alive at the time or were very young children, certainly among Muslims and Arabs, have this geological memory,” she says. “People who don’t live in Sydney still are aware of it having happened.”

She points to surging reports of discrimination after the 11 September 2001 attacks, the emergence of Isis, the 2019 Christchurch massacre and now with war in Gaza and the invasion of Lebanon.

“Every generation gets an event that shapes it,” says Dr Yassir Morsi, a lecturer at La Trobe University. “September 11 was mine. I can guarantee Gaza is, for all the kids at the school I work in, it’s theirs.”

Kheir says that while the book’s denial of xenophobia is offensive, more worrying is the way Scully and Goodwin encourage a narrative that Lebanese Australians were to blame for the riots.

The authors argue the violence was the result of territoriality over the beach and cultural or “tribal” differences between locals and young Lebanese men who “came to the beach in packs in their hotted up cars … in designer tracksuits, with buzz-cut hairstyles, dripping with jewellery”.

“A lot were gang members, a great number of whom were well known to police and had extensive criminal records,” Scully and Goodwin write. “They were not at all representative of their humble and respectful wider culture.”

Another focus of the book is the retaliatory attacks, which Scully and Goodwin write were much more violent than the riots and could have unleashed a “bloodbath” but for a highly effective police and government response.

They claim police thwarted a planned attack on Cronulla’s Northies Hotel with machine guns and a hand grenade, and a rampage through Miranda Westfield’s shopping centre by “fifty cars full of Middle Eastern men … with baseball bats, iron bars, knives, guns and other weapons”.

Noble, who edited a book on the riots in 2009, says it is possible that he and other researchers of the event “perhaps didn’t give enough coverage to these revenge attacks”, but says Scully and Goodwin’s assessment of their severity was “based on documents that only they had access to”.

Morsi acknowledges the police response may have been effective at containing the conflict, but warns that Scully and Goodwin’s framing makes racial divides harder to bridge.

“The ways we remember the violence that we do and is done to us are important,” he says. “‘A group of violent Middle Eastern men decided they wanted to cause trouble and escalate the violence against local Anglos protecting their beach’ … If it’s remembered that way, it will fuel a populist, racist idea of threat.”

With weekly clashes between police and protesters angry at the conflict in the Middle East, the book’s publication “couldn’t be worse timed”, Hussein warns.

“The ‘right’ circumstances for a scare campaign against Lebanese and Palestinian migrants is right now.”