Mohammed Farhat had been arrested, charged, convicted and jailed. He confessed to causing the property damage but explained that he had been promised $4,000 and drugs and was simply carrying out another person’s instructions. Towards the end of his jail sentence, the State applied to place Farhat under an Extended Supervision Order under the Terrorism (High Risk Offenders) Act 2017 (NSW). This is imposed after a person has served their sentence and can subject them to continuing supervision and restrictive conditions if the Court is satisfied that they pose an unacceptable risk of committing a serious terrorism offence if left unsupervised.

The decision about the extended supervision order fell to Justice Fagan of the NSW Supreme Court, in State of New South Wales v Farhat. Instead of focussing on the question at hand, Fagan J used the authority of judicial office to deliver a judicial polemic that reproduces and legitimises antisemitic ideas, undermining the work being done to reverse the antisemitic trend and to restore social cohesion.

The judgment is full of factual errors, statistical manipulation, purposeful misunderstandings and crude analysis. Fagan J didn’t seem to accept that antisemitic motivation had already been judicially established in Farhat’s case - at Farhat’s sentencing, the Magistrate found that hatred or prejudice against Jewish people to be an aggravating factor under s 21A(2)(h) of the Crimes (Sentencing Procedure) Act 1999 (NSW)—a finding that was established beyond a reasonable doubt. Farhat later appealed his sentence, but the District Court dismissed the appeal. In a civil case, with lower standards of proof, Fagan J reached a conclusion incompatible with the earlier criminal finding.

In the judgment, Fagan J provides a sweeping account of antisemitism, Zionism, the Arab-Israeli conflict and Jewish communal representation that is historically selective, conceptually confused and, at critical points, profoundly hostile to the contemporary Jewish understanding of antisemitism. In the process, he proclaims an extremely weak idea of antisemitism as valid, undermines the internationally acclaimed International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism [IHRA], accuses Israel of genocide and denies Jews the right to self-determination. [I critically assess his claims and reasoning in Justice Fagan’s Catalogue of Sins & the Farhat Case]. Here I turn to the harm done by this judgment. That harm is to democracy & the rule of law, to the Australian community, to Australian minorities and to the specific victim group.

Fagan J was greatly offended on Farhat’s behalf that Farhat had been accused of antisemitism. At [81] he wrote: “To label the defendant an antisemitic bigot is a serious matter. It is apt to damage his reputation and his prospects of rehabilitation.” It seems that being called an antisemite did “injustice to the defendant” [81]. Farhat is reconstructed as the proverbial “good boy” who somehow found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time—his agency steadily displaced by vulnerability, influence and circumstance. But Fagan J is asking the wrong question: he has converted a statutory inquiry into the motivation for the offence into a moral inquiry about whether a young man should bear the identity-label “antisemitic bigot”. In the process, Fagan J is also reverting to a classic form of antisemitism known as the Livingstone Formulation. If someone is accused of antisemitism, instead of answering the charges or explaining themselves, they turn the tide and blame the victim for harming them and accuse the victim of silencing them. This shifts attention from whether the conduct complained of is antisemitic, to accusing the victim of antisemitism of improper motives.

The rule of law, which Fagan J has sworn to uphold, gives courts a special position to prevent ordinary democratic institutions from exhibiting blind spots that prevent minority rights claims from receiving appropriate recognition. Courts are not meant to mirror whichever social group the judge identifies with. A judge does not represent the majority, the working class, the educated elite, minorities, activists, or government. Judicial authority is only legitimate because it is non-representative: the judge must decide according to law and evidence. Judges, who are not democratically elected, exercise coercive public authority specifically to temper the excesses of the majority. Fagan J rejects international scholarship and international institutional understanding of antisemitism in favour of a purported majority Australian view of antisemitism.

Fagan J rejects the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Working Definition of Antisemitism [IHRA], which is the product of an international intergovernmental process and has become the dominant institutional definition of antisemitism across liberal democracies. It has been adopted or endorsed at the national level by 47 UN member states, including Australia. The IHRA Working Definition was not devised overnight by a single advocacy organisation. It emerged from more than a decade of work beginning with European monitoring of antisemitism in the early 2000s, involving government agencies, antisemitism experts, scholars and Jewish organisations; was first operationalised through the EUMC Working Definition in 2005; was used and tested internationally for a further decade; and was then adopted in 2016 by the 31-government plenary of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

Fagan J does not merely decline to use IHRA. He depicts it as indefinite, detached from Australian usage, “verbose and imprecise”, and connected with a “parasitic rejection” of protest against Israel. The consequence is obvious and seriously unhelpful: every university, government department, regulator or professional body using IHRA now has a Supreme Court judgment available to those seeking to discredit it. Equally, this is an attack on the Federal Government which has incorporated the IHRA, potentially leading to a breakdown between the different branches of government.

Instead of relying on authority, Fagan J substitutes “ordinary Australian usage” and his own historical reasoning for accumulated expertise concerning antisemitism. If judicial authority can trump expertise without first mastering the field, the same method can migrate to racism, disability, misogyny, Indigenous discrimination and other complex forms of structural inequality. Facts are already fragile, and truth and expertise need protection. “Ordinary Australian meaning” is not neutral. It privileges the knowledge of the majority over the interpretive knowledge of the group experiencing the prejudice. That becomes particularly serious because Fagan J simultaneously discounts the institutional knowledge of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and elevates a tiny dissenting organisation as an equivalent Jewish authority. Fagan J’s whole approach devalues expertise and privileges majority ignorance over minority knowledge.

While the practical effect is to make contemporary antisemitism easier to disguise, the greater damage is to Australian democracy. Since 1995, the Australian government has struggled with the issue of managing racism while retaining other democratic rights. The result was an amendment to the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 which added ss18B -F. These provisions and subsequent legislation make it clear that society supports minority rights and recognises the harm of racial hatred. The legislation does not offer a specific definition of antisemitism, but the rules of statutory interpretation require the ordinary meaning to be used. Parliament identified a form of prejudice and deliberately legislated to make it legally cognisable, and yet here a court interpreted the law through the very assumptions that previously rendered that prejudice invisible; the court does more than make an isolated error. This interrupts the democratic corrective process. The legislature has attempted to enlarge the law’s field of vision; adjudication narrows it again. That implicates the rule of law. Chief Justice Gleeson of the Australian High Court commented in a speech at Melbourne University, ‘Courts and the Rule of Law’ in 2001:

“The importance of the rule of law lies partly in the power it denies … and in the discipline to which it subjects all authority… The importance of the rule of law lies partly in the power it denies to people and to governments, and in the discipline to which it subjects all authority. That denial, and that discipline, are conditions of the exercise of power, which in a democracy, comes from the community which all government serves.”

Judicial prestige and authority, he tells us, are undermined when the judiciary is seen by the community, and the other branches of government, to fail to conform to the discipline of the law which it administers.

The damage of this case lies in a weakening of the distinction between law as democratically enacted and judicially administered and law as reconstructed through the judge’s own social and ideological assumptions. The judicial system is supposed to be part of the machinery by which power is tempered. The highest level of injury caused by this case involves this process:

Þ the parliament identified a social wrong (antisemitism and racial hatred)

Þ the law supplies a corrective

Þ the judicial reasoning fails to recognise the wrong

Þ the corrective is weakened

Þ confidence that law can constrain social and institutional power is diminished.

Australians rely on courts because they assume judicial decisions are produced through a distinctive process: law, relevant evidence, impartiality, procedural fairness and reasoned judgment. That confidence permits an extraordinarily important social coherence: people obey judgments they dislike. Governments lose cases and comply. Citizens accept adverse orders. Political conflict is converted into legal controversy rather than retaliation. A court therefore contributes to social cohesion not by making everyone agree with its decisions, but by maintaining confidence that the same disciplined institution is available to everyone.

When a judgment appears instead to elevate majority intuition and ignorance over law, expertise or evidence, the social message changes. Citizens begin to wonder whether legal protection depends upon whether a judge happens to understand their experience. The damage is therefore not confined to confidence in one judge or one case. It affects confidence in law as a reliable common institution. Every citizen loses something when courts cease to provide reliable assurance that public authority will be exercised according to law rather than according to prevailing assumptions.

A Supreme Court judgment is not a university essay or political intervention: it is an exercise of state power, and its authority derives from the disciplines of adjudication—relevance, evidence, procedural fairness and the obligation to decide the issues actually before the Court. When a judge uses reasons for judgment to pronounce broadly on contested questions of antisemitism, Zionism, Israel, history and communal representation that are unnecessary to resolving the case before it, those propositions acquire a legitimacy they could not command in ordinary political debate.

Further, a published judgment communicates what an authoritative public institution recognises, condemns, excuses or refuses to recognise. This is a novel usage of a judgment, maybe expected in the social media age. There are lots of political messages that can be lifted from the case and shared as memes. Those seeking to minimise contemporary antisemitism, discredit the IHRA definition, defend extreme anti-Israel rhetoric or resist institutional measures against antisemitism can now appropriate the authority of the NSW Supreme Court for their purposes. They need not persuade their audience that IHRA is “verbose and imprecise”, that allegations of antisemitism operate parasitically upon criticism of Israel, that particular anti-Israel conduct is political rather than antisemitic, or that established Jewish organisations misrepresent Jewish opinion. They can instead rely on the authority of the Supreme Court of New South Wales.

The amplification is already happening. The Australian Federation of Islamic Councils welcomed Farhat as an “important judicial contribution” to the distinction between antisemitism, criticism of Israel and opposition to Zionism, emphasising Fagan J’s rejection of IHRA at a time when governments and institutions are deciding how antisemitism should be defined. More significantly, the Alliance of Australian Muslims and the Australian National Imams Council expressly relied on the judgment in calling on Federal and State governments, universities and public institutions to reject the IHRA definition, presenting Fagan J’s conclusions as judicial affirmation that criticism of Zionism is distinct from antisemitism. The ‘progressive’ Jewish Council of Australia likewise welcomed the ruling as protecting political expression and distinguishing criticism of Israel and Zionism from antisemitism. This is no longer a hypothetical concern about what might be done with the judgment: within days, organisations were invoking the authority of the NSW Supreme Court to influence the very institutional rules by which antisemitism will be recognised.

The decision has institutional performative force, simply because it is the pronouncement of a court. It supplies language, legitimacy and apparent legal authority to propositions that governments, universities, employers, journalists and later litigants can repeat as “the Supreme Court has said…” or “the Supreme Court has said…” We could see this as judicial norm entrepreneurship: the judge is attempting to reshape social and institutional understandings of antisemitism. The effect of this misuse of judicial authority is to weaken our confidence in the institutions entrusted to decide disputes according to law.

From courts, people learn not only what is lawful but what respectable institutions regard as normal, legitimate and condemnable. If a Supreme Court judge describes sympathy for Hezbollah as understandable, treats antisemitic identification as an attempt to suppress protest, and treats anti-Israel vandalism in a Jewish neighbourhood as merely political, those propositions acquire social legitimacy simply through their source. This normalises sympathy for extremist organisations even in countries like Australia that have proscribed Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation.

There has also been damage done to truth, as the judgment distorts historical knowledge beyond the case. A Supreme Court judgment describing contested claims about 1948 as “uncontroversially established” once again gives those propositions an authority they did not possess as historical scholarship. The harm is not confined to historians: journalists, teachers, activists and future litigants can cite the judgment as though a court has settled the history. Equally, it converts contested political allegations into institutional fact. The phrase “Israel’s genocide of the Gazans” is the obvious example. Once a judge states a contested allegation as fact, the prestige of the judiciary launders the proposition into public discourse.

The danger of this judgment is larger than its treatment of antisemitism. It does not circulate through society neutrally. It is received by people and institutions that possess power over the conditions on which others participate in public life. The progression of damage caused by this case, and the way in which the whole society suffers, begins with the failure of recognition of the full injury to failure of law; from failure of law to failure of institutional trust; from failure of institutional trust to diminished equal citizenship; and finally to the concrete injury suffered by the person whom the law was supposed to protect.

When a Judge makes a proclamation, in a judgment or otherwise, he or she has an incredible level of responsibility. The authority that goes with the position means that the voice is amplified many times over and has a responding impact. Justice Fagan abandoned his obligation to justice and offered a strategy to undermine any positive work that the Royal Commission could do. Prior to this judgment, Australian jurisprudence had been developing in a manner which was showing respect for oppressed minorities. This judgment takes us backwards both in the use of law and in its content about antisemitism. The damage travels outward: to the rule of law, to confidence in the judiciary, to the capacity of democratic institutions to correct prejudice, to the equal citizenship of minorities and to the people whom the law was enacted to protect. That is why, when a judge gets it badly wrong, the whole country suffers.

Because Fagan holds the most limited definition of antisemitism imaginable, it is unlikely that he will recognise the number of objectionable points he makes in the judgment. If there is any doubt about the influence of a Supreme Court judge, the number of news reports responding to the case suggests that further social division has arisen in direct response to the judgment. Many are claiming this judgment as a vindication of their view of Jews as unworthy and as moral support for their beliefs that October 7^th was resistance. If a Supreme Court judge can ignore history and truth, then surely they can too.

So what was in the judgment? Fagan J provides a sweeping account of antisemitism, Zionism, the Arab-Israeli conflict and Jewish communal representation that is historically selective, conceptually confused and, at critical points, profoundly hostile to the contemporary Jewish understanding of antisemitism. In the process, he proclaims an extremely weak idea of antisemitism as valid, undermines the internationally acclaimed International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism [IHRA], accuses Israel of genocide and denies our right to self-determination. Almost everything he writes is unnecessary for the decision he has been called upon to make.

This article is a catalogue of just some of the issues, insults and insidiousness of Justice Fagan. Although as a general rule the advice is not to respond to those who libel us with facts, the reason is that hostile folk won’t listen and are not interested. It is different when a Judge makes unacceptable statements. I’ve responded to each of his positions, correcting facts where appropriate.

FAGAN J REJECTS ACCEPTED DEFINITIONS OF ANTISEMITISM

Fagan J rejects accepted definitions of antisemitism, ridicules international standards of antisemitism and claims that his view is that “commonly held by Australians”. However, his view is extremely limited and rejects a great number of manifestations of antisemitism, including any recognition of antizionism. In the process, he gives institutional authority to the non-recognition of antisemitism, which I’ve argued is fatal to any potentially successful intervention to prevent/limit antisemitism. That may be the deepest harm. The judgment does not merely fail to recognise particular conduct. It provides a vocabulary and a judicial authority through which others can continue not to recognise it.

a. Fagan J insists that “Fuk Israel” cannot be antisemitic [80]. He writes “A curse in those terms is not antisemitic, either self-evidently or by any degree of analysis or construction. It is a crude political expression of contempt and dismissal of a foreign state.” He refuses to accept that the surrounding Jewish context can and does alter its character. Yet the State’s contextual case was not that someone disliked Israel. The slogan was repeatedly imposed through criminal damage and arson in a locality publicly associated with a substantial Jewish population. Ironically, in [207], when the words actually are “the Jews”, Fagan J is willing to use context to reinterpret them as meaning the IDF or Israelis. But at [80], context is declared incapable of making words about Israel communicate hostility towards Jews. He thereby converts the valid proposition that criticism of Israel is not inherently antisemitic into the much stronger proposition that anti-Israel expression cannot acquire antisemitic meaning through context.

b. Fagan J argues that antizionism is not antisemitism [118]–[119]. Fagan J fails to recognise two important matters. First, antisemitism has always operated through coded language. Soviet antizionism systematically developed “Zionist” as a political code through which older accusations against Jews—conspiracy, disloyalty, racism, global power and exploitation—could be reproduced in ostensibly political language. The modern understanding is that antizionism recodes the libels about us and is almost transparent in its antisemitism. So factually, Fagan J is wrong. Secondly, Zionism is part of Jewish identity. It is true that some Jews reject Zionism, but many more Jews reject Kashrut, do not celebrate Festivals and never go to a Torah reading. But no one would argue that this means that these are not fundamental aspects of Jewish personhood and peoplehood. A feature of Jewish identity can be political, contested and unevenly held, while still functioning as a marker through which Jews are designated and excluded. Zionism is historically and socially connected to Jewish collective identity, Jewish peoplehood, attachment to Zion and the existence of Israel. So antizionism can be political and still be antisemitic when it denies Jews a form of collective legitimacy afforded to others, uses inherited anti-Jewish tropes, imposes collective responsibility or targets Jews as local representatives of “Zionism”.

c. Fagan J argues that the meaning of antisemitism is determined by “established common usage in Australia” [84] and therefore by what an ordinary Australian would understand the term to mean. The problem is that popular recognition cannot determine the true boundaries of a form of prejudice. If the public has an incomplete understanding of contemporary antisemitism, using that understanding as the legal benchmark simply reproduces the very failure of recognition that is in issue. Ordinary usage may be evidence of the problem rather than the solution: it can reproduce existing blind spots and prevent law from recognising evolving or coded forms of discrimination. Prejudice cannot be defined by the success of the prejudice in making itself invisible.

This is especially important with antisemitism because its forms change. Explicit Jew-hatred is comparatively easy to recognise. Political coding, collective responsibility, conspiracy language, designation through “Zionists”, Holocaust inversion and attacks directed through Israel may be less readily recognised by the general public. A narrow popular understanding may therefore tell us something about social knowledge, but not about the phenomenon itself. This is why we need a statutory code including the full cultural repertoire of antisemitism. IHRA provides a great basis for understanding antisemitism, but it is a working definition in need of updating. The full extent of antizionism, the impact of the amplifying process and ambient antisemitism are essential if we are to capture everything involved.

FAGAN J REJECTS IHRA AS PARASITIC

Fagan rejects the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism [IHRA] [105]–[113], describing it as indefinite, inconsistent with ordinary Australian usage and ultimately as fostering a “parasitic rejection” of protest against Israel. Yet IHRA is an internationally developed, non-legally binding identification tool formally embraced by Australia and widely adopted by governments and institutions. A judge may criticise IHRA; what is extraordinary is for a judge to dismiss accumulated international and governmental expertise in favour of his own account of “ordinary Australian meaning”, while imputing an improper censorial purpose to those who use the definition.

a. The judgment effectively displaces accumulated specialist knowledge with judicial intuition [105-13]. Fagan J says antisemitism should be governed by ordinary Australian usage, then declares that a sophisticated international attempt to identify contemporary forms of antisemitism is detached from that usage. But if contemporary antisemitism is systematically under-recognised, that methodology entrenches the ignorance the definition was developed to overcome. He treats his own understanding of antisemitism as epistemically superior to the accumulated expertise of the international body created to study it, the governments around the world that adopted its definition, and the Jewish communities whose experience the definition was designed to help recognise.

b. Fagan J accuses IHRA and, by association, Jews of being “parasitic” [113]. Fagan’s description of the promotion of IHRA as attaching a “parasitic rejection” of protest against Israel to the public’s abhorrence of antisemitism is especially disturbing because the metaphor has a long and notorious history in antisemitic discourse. Jews were repeatedly represented in European antisemitism as alien bodies living off, exploiting or corrupting the “host” society; Nazi racial ideology made the image explicit, portraying Jews as a “parasitic race” and Nazi propaganda described them as “parasitic”, culturally contaminating and feeding upon the nation. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum identifies “parasite” as one of the characteristic terms through which Nazi propaganda dehumanised Jews and made their exclusion and persecution more acceptable. In a judgment devoted to defining antisemitism, the choice is astounding: Fagan J uses one of the historically characteristic metaphors of antisemitism to describe the supposed conduct of those—including Jewish organisations—who seek recognition of contemporary antisemitism. The historical resonance makes the phrase considerably more troubling than a merely synonym for “derivative” or “opportunistic”.

c. Fagan J uses pejorative descriptors of IHRA beyond the term “parasitic” [113]. He disparages IHRA as “verbose and imprecise”, “detached from reality” and ineptly drafted; characterises it as an attempt to “repurpose” antisemitism to capture criticism of Israel; as well as describing its promotion as attaching a “parasitic rejection” of protest against Israel to society’s abhorrence of antisemitism. This moves beyond technical disagreement into a sustained delegitimization of the definition and its proponents.

Fagan J exemplifies the truth of the Livingstone Formulation [113]. By suggesting that promotion of IHRA has a “parasitic” purpose of suppressing protest against Israel, the judgment risks institutionalising the claim that allegations of antisemitism are themselves political manoeuvres. David Hirsh’s Livingstone Formulation describes the practice of responding to allegations of antisemitism by accusing the person making the allegation of acting dishonestly or in bad faith to silence criticism of Israel. The effect is to shift attention from whether the conduct is antisemitic to the supposedly improper motives of those who identify it as such. Fagan J’s description of IHRA’s promotion as a “parasitic rejection” of protest against Israel is a striking judicial example of that move. It is shocking that a Supreme Court judge does not merely reject an allegation of antisemitism; he imputes an improper political purpose to those who seek to identify it.

d. Fagan J mischaracterises what IHRA does [106]. Fagan reproduces only part of IHRA before attacking it. He quotes the core definition but does not give equivalent weight to the limiting sentence and examples necessary to understand how the definition operates. IHRA expressly provides that “criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” Its Israel-related examples concern such matters as collective responsibility of Jews, classic antisemitic tropes, discriminatory denial of Jewish self-determination, Holocaust comparisons and double standards in context. It therefore does not equate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

e. Fagan abuses statistics [114-116]. Fagan abuses statistical evidence in his putting down of IHRA. He invokes the Senate Inquiry into Antisemitism at Australian Universities (2024)’s 669 submissions when discussing opposition to IHRA, as if this was the strength of opposition to IHRA. However, 669 was the total number of submissions made to the Inquiry, and it is unlikely that no more than a very small number of these submissions were critical of IHRA.

Further, he treats Pew’s finding that 79% of Australians viewed Israel unfavourably as though it answered whether contemporary anti-Israel discourse can be antisemitic. It does not. It tells us nothing about antisemitism or attitudes to antizionism in particular. The survey measured attitudes to Israel, not attitudes to Jews or the operation of IHRA, and IHRA itself expressly excludes ordinary criticism of Israel from antisemitism. This is a straw man dressed up as social science: “79% dislike Israel, therefore IHRA is unacceptable.” That conclusion simply does not follow.

Fagan also invokes Pew Research Center’s finding that 79% of Australians viewed Israel unfavourably as though it answered whether contemporary anti-Israel discourse can be antisemitic. Pew is a highly regarded, nonpartisan international survey organisation. The figure comes from its Spring 2026 Global Attitudes Survey of 44,657 adults in 36 countries, which asked respondents whether they held a favourable or unfavourable opinion of Israel. It did not measure antisemitism, attitudes towards Jews, Zionism or antizionism, nor respondents’ views of IHRA. In Australia, 79% reported an unfavourable view of Israel, rising to 94% among respondents identifying with the political left. This is pretty horrible evidence about Israel’s contemporary unpopularity. However, it is not evidence about the meaning or prevalence of antisemitism. Fagan J uses an authoritative statistic to answer a question the survey never asked. This is totally unacceptable.

FAGAN J PROVIDES FALSE NARRATIVES OF GENOCIDE & JEWISH HISTORY

Fagan J accuses Israel of committing genocide [116]. He refers to “Israel’s genocide of the Gazans” as though genocide were an established fact rather than a libel. This is extremely serious. Genocide is not merely a criticism of military conduct; it is an allegation of the intentional destruction, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Accusing someone of genocide is one of the most horrendous of all accusations. It is the ultimate condemnation of a people – a genocidal nation is lacking in humanity, is indifferent to human life, callous and lawless. Israel is nothing of the sort. Nor are Jews. By contrast, Hamas has repeatedly articulated an eliminationist project directed at Israel and Jews, and Hezbollah’s ideology and rhetoric have likewise included explicit violent hostility to Jews and to Israel’s continued existence. Both state very clearly that they want to demolish Israel and wipe the Jews off the map. From the river to the sea. That is genocidal intention. Alleging this of Israel and Jews is a libel. No court of any sort has found otherwise – the International Court of Justice, in the case South Africa has brought before it, has said that Israel may have a case to answer, which is a long way from a finding of genocide. Fagan J says Australian polling may reflect humanitarian reaction to “Israel’s genocide of the Gazans since 7 October 2023.” On that day and ever since, Israel has been reeling with shock after the terrorist attack involving the murder of 1200 and the abduction of 250 by the rulers of Palestinian Gaza.

a. Fagan J presents a false and biased interpretation of the Arab-Israeli conflict [90]. Fagan J adopts a selective account of the Arab–Israeli conflict that lends judicial authority to a Palestinian historical narrative while presenting contested propositions as “uncontroversially established”. For example, Fagan J alleges that in 1948–49 Israel achieved Jewish demographic dominance by the forcible expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians and the demolition of more than 500 villages, and presents this as “uncontroversially established” history. What is wrong is that he turns a contested causal interpretation into settled fact.

Arabs left Israel for many reasons, and the causes of Palestinian displacement in 1948 remain historically contested: expulsion did occur, but so did flight under attack, fear, collapse of local society and other causes. Secondly, there is no evidence that “More than 500 villages [were] demolished”. Different historians count different categories—villages, towns, localities, tribes—and “depopulated” is not the same as “demolished”. Further, Fagan J relies incorrectly on historian Benny Morris. Morris expressly says his book is a study of the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem, not a general history of the 1948 war, and therefore gives limited attention to Arab violence against Jews. Fagan uses that deliberately bounded work as authority for a sweeping account of the whole conflict.

Fagan J’s account of the conflict concentrates on Palestinian expulsion and destruction without equivalent treatment of what was happening to Jews on the land, the UN partition proposal, rejection by the Arab leadership, the civil war beginning in 1947, and invasion of Israel by neighbouring Arab states after Israel declared independence. He further fails to note that a larger number of Jews were expelled from Arab countries – at least 850,000 – and Israel had to absorb these penniless refugees.

b. Fagan J rejects Jewish history, alleging that Zionism is a late-19th-century political ideological invention [118]–[119]. Fagan J presents Zionism as essentially a modern political doctrine with which Jews have “chosen to identify”. That leaves out the much older Jewish religious, liturgical and historical attachment to Zion, return to the Land of Israel and Jewish peoplehood. The political movement founded in the nineteenth century was new; the underlying Jewish attachment to Zion was not. From the time of the exile from Israel at the time of the destruction of the First Temple, Jews have sought to return to the land. Many have, and there has been a continuous Jewish presence for 3,000. From Mt Sinai to the present, Zionism has been inherent to Jewish peoplehood.

c. Fagan J sanitises Hezbollah and problematises Hezbollah’s antisemitism [148]–[152]. Fagan J stresses Hezbollah’s emergence as Lebanese “resistance, but does not give comparable historical weight to its foundation. His treatment of Hezbollah’s terrorism history appears materially incomplete. He leaves out the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, alongside the 1994 AMIA bombing and 2012 Burgas attack. Also missing from that history is the fact that Hezbollah has held the Lebanese people hostage for years and, in the process, transformed the character of Lebanon from a Christian to a Muslim state. Hezbollah is unpopular in Lebanon and operates as a state within a state. It opened a front against Israel on 8 October 2023, independently of the Lebanese state, and maintained an armed force capable of bringing Lebanon into a major war. Omitting these matters materially changes the explanatory narrative.

Fagan J’s treatment of Hezbollah is also difficult to reconcile with earlier NSW Supreme Court cases. In State of New South Wales v Haidar [2020] NSWSC 38, Hezbollah was described as having been founded in 1982 with Iranian assistance, as maintaining a highly capable armed militia, and as receiving substantial political, ideological, financial and military support from Iran. That Court also noted the ideological allegiance of its leadership to Iran’s Supreme Leader and Hezbollah’s military intervention in Syria. The Commonwealth’s own terrorist-listing material says the same thing. Against that background, Fagan’s presentation of Hezbollah principally through the language of Lebanese resistance and communal sympathy is conspicuously selective.

FAGAN J DISREGARDS THE JEWISH VIEW OF JEWISH REPRESENTATION

Fagan J denies the Jewish perspective on communal voice and representation, which is disbelieving Jewish knowledge about themselves. He treats the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) and the Jewish Council of Australia (JCA) as though they were equivalent competing Jewish voices. They are not. The community does not accept that they are. We are horrified at the amount of credibility JCA is given. The ECAJ, an 82-year-old federated peak body, is the group that Australian Jewry has chosen as its political representative. The JCA is a two-year-old advocacy organisation - a self-selecting renegade group representing a specific and tiny segment of the community. It does not even represent all left-wing Jews, as I am one and am certainly not aligned with their purposes.

a. Fagan J dismisses the ECAJ as a “transparently, a pro-Israel lobbying organisation”. The ECAJ certainly advocates positions concerning Israel. But reducing this organisation to a lobbying organisation describes one component of what it does as though it were the institution’s defining character. The ECAJ does not claim authority because 200 organisations are its direct “members”. Its representational authority is federated. It is constituted by the eight state and territory Jewish roof bodies, whose own affiliates, together with ECAJ’s national affiliates, encompass more than 200 communal organisations spanning religious life, welfare, education, students, women, sport, humanitarian activity and other dimensions of Australian Jewish life. There is no meaningful single headcount of their memberships because participation overlaps extensively, but the structure reaches across a Jewish population estimated at approximately 117,000. The reduction of ECAJ’s role as a pro-Israel lobby is used to discount its authority on antisemitism, an area in which it has decades of monitoring, reporting, governmental engagement and communal responsibility. Because the ECAJ was not a party to the proceedings, it had no opportunity to answer the Court’s adverse characterisation of its purpose and institutional role.

b. Fagan J subjects the JCA and ECAJ to radically different scrutiny. The JCA, a recent self-selecting advocacy organisation, is treated as an authoritative counterweight to the ECAJ without equivalent examination of its representativeness. A dissenting Jewish organisation is powerful evidence that Jewish opinion is not unanimous. It is not evidence that the dissenting organisation and the national federated peak body possess equivalent representational authority. Nor does the existence of Jewish disagreement determine whether something is objectively antisemitic. JCA is a two-year-old advocacy organisation whose membership is in the range of 1,400 to 2,500 individuals, who subscribe to their “progressive political and human-rights” platform. The JCA represents a genuine strand of Jewish opinion. Dissent from a representative body does not render the representative body to the same status of the small lobby group.

c. Fagan J dismisses ECAJ’s expertise on antisemitism and promotes JCA’s. The ECAJ has engaged in long-running institutional monitoring, reporting and advocacy around antisemitism; produces annual Australian antisemitism reports and operates an incident-reporting system with other communal bodies. It receives reports directly, verifies incidents, works with state roof bodies, security organisations, the Australian Union of Jewish Students, the Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism [5A]; its data have become part of public-policy discourse. It has constituencies such as the Anti-Defamation Commission, university professors and other experts on antisemitism as well as dedicated staff working daily on antisemitism. On the other hand, the JCA has a range of academics and scholars, none of whom have published significantly on antisemitism. By comparison, I am a member of the Executive Council of the ECAJ, and I have on my own published more than the entirety of the JCA on antisemitism and probably more on human rights.

The JCA unquestionably includes accomplished academics, lawyers and writers. However, its institutional claim to “expertise in antisemitism” should not be taken at face value or confused with a large collective record of specialist scholarship on antisemitism.

d. Fagan J gives the JCA a legitimacy it has not earned and is not entitled to. The JCA is treated as an authentic Jewish counter-voice to the ECAJ without equivalent scrutiny of its organisational base, representativeness, ideological position or expertise. The result is an asymmetrical weighting of Jewish evidence: the longstanding communal representative body is discounted because of its connection with Israel, while a relatively new dissenting organisation is used to demonstrate that Jewish opinion itself undermines ECAJ’s position. It fails to recognise the diversity of opinion amongst organisations and individuals who are participants in the ECAJ. Many of those organisations are stronger in number and significantly more institutionally knowledgeable about antisemitism.

CONCLUSION:

The decision of Fagan J is one of the most disturbing documents I have ever read. Written by someone who is at the pinnacle of institutional power, the document does everything we have been fighting against in our attempt to deal with antisemitism. It undermines me as a Jew, but it also undermines the Royal Commission. It has given judicial notice to libels and adds to the harm Jews are experiencing in Australia today.

The case was about whether a 22-year-old low-life should be subjected to a terrorism supervision order. He had committed property offences. Arson and spray painting numerous cars in a Jewish area, already heightened by previous experiences of antisemitism. The spray paint supported terrorism and was antisemitic. He claimed he didn’t know. He was paid to do it and just did what he was told. Fagan J brought the Nuremberg Defence [80]–[81], into Australian law! Fagan J substantially exculpates Farhat ideologically because he was carrying out another person’s instructions for reward rather than acting from a political commitment of his own. Farhat was found innocent because he was following orders!

If that isn’t worrying enough, Fagan J thinks it is perfectly reasonable for Australians to support terrorists! He believes that it is completely understandable that Australians of Lebanese background would sympathise with Hezbollah [161] and probably “Globalise the Intifada”. If they support violence and terrorism, they should be deported or jailed or at least condemned. It is not an Australian thing to do to support terrorism. It’s not an Australian thing to do to hate Jews – it is accepted by a much too large percentage of the population – but still un-Australian.

Fagan J presents a selective history of the Arab–Israeli conflict and modern Middle Eastern politics, repeatedly converting contested interpretations into established facts while omitting historical context that would complicate the narrative he adopts. He converts a contested allegation about genocide into judicial fact. And, importantly, he creates doctrinal confusion across Australian law. This case sits uneasily beside the other judicial decisions relating to antisemitism. He lowers the standard of analysis required; he relies on public opinion rather than fact and has essentially told the rest of the judiciary and the State of NSW that they must follow his lead. Different courts and tribunals have until now operated with incompatible understandings of antisemitism. It will be extremely harmful to the Jewish community should Fagan be allowed to stand.

As a human rights lawyer and a Jew, I believe in justice and fairness, dignity and respect. I also believe in the responsibility of the legal profession to support those who are victims of crime and those under attack. I expect intelligent people to see through propaganda and misinformation. I hope those with judicial authority will understand the centrality of recognition of the full cultural repertoire of antisemitism. This judgment does not live up to the expectations of decent people in any way.

What needs to be done is to transform the current antisemitic social norms into norms that value Jews as equal members of society – no better or worse than anyone else. And this is not an impossible task. We know that Australia has been particularly successful in norm transformation projects – from anti-smoking, to drink driving, to sexual harassment. In each case the project involved reorienting thought about the subject-matter from positive to negative action. In each case, many people did not consider that what they were doing was wrong.

The normalisation of antisemitism means that many Australians are currently complicit in preventing Jews from exercising citizenship rights. People do not typically abandon their moral standards when they behave harmfully; instead, they selectively disengage those standards from the conduct through specific cognitive mechanisms — reconstructing the act, obscuring their own agency, minimising the harm, or discrediting the victim — so that they can act against their own moral code without self-condemnation. Moral disengagement is thus not a defect of individual character but a set of ordinary, learnable mechanisms that allow harmful conduct to become normalised and self-exculpating within institutions and societies over time.

The way antisemitism works, from the harm it does to the way it is amplified to the coding, needs to be accounted for. As Bandura’s account of moral disengagement tells us, there are mechanisms by which ordinary institutional actors permit harm to persist without ever experiencing themselves as complicit. Euphemistic labelling comes first: an incident is recorded as a “workplace dispute,” a “free speech matter,” or an “isolated online comment” rather than named as antisemitic, and the relabelling itself does the work of disengagement — no one has to decide antisemitism doesn’t matter; they only have to decide that this incident isn’t really antisemitism. Diffusion of responsibility comes next: institutions refer the complainant on, and the hostile environment persists not because any actor endorses it but because no actor is required to own it. This is why reform will only succeed if it clarifies for everyone what we are dealing with.

The Commission’s instrument must therefore be built to intervene at the mechanistic level, rather than the individual. Countering euphemistic labelling requires a presumption schedule that forecloses relabelling — a closed set of illustrative examples, drawn from Kaplan, Wertheim, Vorchheimer, and other cases that fixes what an incident is regardless of how an institution chooses to describe it. Countering diffusion of responsibility requires an institutional accountability mechanism with a single point of ownership so that no institution can hand a complainant onward without consequence.

I have made several reform proposals. What I include here is the minimum that needs to be done.

What is needed first is a specification of manifestations of antisemitism. This should include IHRA but must go beyond it to remove limitations and ambiguity. It should also be specified that antisemitism in a public place (including all aspects of the internet and all lifestyle environments) is to be condemned. I therefore propose the addition of a non-exhaustive Schedule of rebuttable presumptions of antisemitism covering traditional and contemporary manifestations to the Race Discrimination Act.

Secondly, the Commonwealth government needs to develop crucial whole-of-government policies on antisemitism. Two are urgent. One involves what I have described as Recognition - where every act of antisemitism, minor or major, is called out by the government, the institution, the workplace or whoever is in authority. This will make it clear to Australians what is and isn’t antisemitism. Another policy must be to engage in proactive condemnation of antisemitism. Condemnation occupies a central place in successful experiences of social change. Émile Durkheim, for example, argued that public condemnation of wrongdoing reaffirms the values and boundaries of the community. When societies condemn conduct, they do more than express disapproval. They communicate the standards by which members of the community are expected to live. Condemnation tells us as much about what a society values as about what it rejects. Recognition and condemnation take us a considerable way towards norm transformation.

The political formula for condemnation should read something like this:

Name the conduct. Name it as antisemitism. Explain briefly why. Declare it unacceptable and un-Australian. Affirm that Jewish Australians belong and will be protected. Call upon the whole community to reject it.

In full, a statement of condemnation – which we’d expect to hear often – would be along the following lines:

We condemn [the particular speech or conduct] as antisemitic. It [attributes collective guilt, demonises Jews or Zionists, threatens, excludes or creates fear]. This conduct is unacceptable and un-Australian. Jewish Australians are equal members of our national community and must be able to live, worship, work and participate openly and safely. We call upon every Australian institution and every member of the community to recognise and reject this conduct wherever it occurs.

But none of this can be tokenistic. It must cover all antisemitism – not just the most recognisable forms. It must incorporate antizionism, amplification, epistemic injustice along with the more traditional understandings. The political purpose of recognition and condemnation is to establish a clear national norm. Governments and institutions of the state (schools, etc) should say publicly and repeatedly that particular antisemitic speech and conduct are unacceptable and un-Australian. Effective condemnation will tell the whole community: this is antisemitism; this is what it looks like; and this is not how Australians treat one another. It educates people who may not recognise contemporary antisemitism, withdraws social permission from those who excuse or repeat it, and authorises schools, workplaces, cultural bodies, religious organisations and ordinary bystanders to respond.

Condemnation potentially performs a remedial function. Antisemitism produces not only fear and exclusion but also isolation: the experience of seeing conduct clearly, reporting it and then being told that it did not occur, was merely political, or has been misunderstood. When government identifies the conduct accurately, it confirms that Jewish Australians have been heard and believed. It restores some measure of public recognition and equal membership by demonstrating that Jews are not required to name and resist antisemitism alone.

Next, we need a National Antisemitism Strategy. An independent expert group on law reform and social norm transformation, as well as antisemitism, should be established to develop an anti-antisemitism campaign. They should prepare and periodically revise a national strategy covering: prevention; protection; education; enforcement; institutional responsibility; online environments; equal participation; data and evaluation; coordination between Commonwealth, states and territories. The strategy needs defined responsibilities, deadlines, funding, indicators and public reporting—not another elegantly typeset statement of concern.

An office of Antisemitism Ombudsman or Commissioner is proposed. The office would receive and investigate complaints; conduct own-motion and systemic investigations; issue guidelines and compliance notices; identify emerging manifestations; monitor institutional responses; assist complainants; initiate or support public-interest litigation; publish regular reports; recommend funding or regulatory consequences; audit implementation of the national strategy.

Law should be used strategically. It is not helpful to criminalise every act of antisemitism. The objective is to manage the phenomenon and restore Jews to equal citizenship. It is necessary to condemn all acts of antisemitism, but not to punish them. What is important is accountability of institutions and organisations, as well as individuals.

Further, law should be used creatively. It could prescribe educational curricula and mandate institutions to set up effective processes for managing antisemitism. It can use the doctrine of hostile environments developed in sexual harassment cases when dealing with many manifestations of ambient antisemitism. Similarly, making a Council responsible for removing stickers or antisemitic graffiti in a timely manner is more helpful than investigating who put the posters up and prosecuting them. Especially because even if the perpetrator is found guilty, their individual action may not meet the criminal threshold. The law can also deport members of terrorist organisations and extremist Imams. Equally, the law could make it unlawful to employ a person who actively promotes Jew hatred, without prosecuting the antisemite. These are all available and should be deployed effectively in response to antisemitism.

I suggest some reform of the Racial Discrimination Act, so that it expressly covers intimidation, harassment and hostile environments; includes a new provision linking the Schedule to a rebuttable presumption; clarifies that intent is not essential; adds provisions on cumulative conduct and online-reach; includes appropriate treatment of aggravating factors; makes institutional responsibility clearer; and includes faster declaratory and injunctive relief.

I would introduce a positive duty to prevent antisemitism, whereby schools, universities, workplaces, professional organisations, cultural bodies and public institutions should have a proactive duty to take reasonable and proportionate steps to prevent antisemitic harm.

Doxxing and coordinated online harassment need addressing. The law should cover punitive publication of personal information; lists identifying Jews or Zionists for retaliation; coordinated pile-ons; review bombing; threats and repeated targeting; bot amplification and deepfakes; economic and employment consequences; urgent removal and protective orders.

In order to limit the amplification of antisemitism online, online platforms should be made responsible for the antisemitic environments their systems create or amplify through: content-environment safety standards; know-your-content and risk-assessment duties; civic-impact assessments; transparency concerning recommendation systems; rapid response to coordinated targeting; liability or regulatory consequences for knowing amplification; and systemic-risk and remediation notices.

I also have proposals about access to justice; remedies; education and professional training, institutional accountability; the need for systems relating to evidence, data and early warning; the security tax imposed on Jews to protect ourselves; and what is needed for equal participation. I’m concerned that public money should carry public obligations. Universities, festivals, arts bodies, broadcasters, professional organisations and other funded institutions should comply with prevention duties; maintain equal-participation policies; report serious incidents; implement remedial directions.

Dealing with antisemitism will not be easy. It is entrenched and normalised in Australian society to the extent that we are experiencing a rip in the social fabric of society. Yet it can be done, and the promise of the Royal Commission is that serious steps will be taken to deal with the problems so that Jews are entitled to equal citizenship.

CONCLUSION

The title of this essay comes from a pamphlet by Vladimir Lenin in 1902. Lenin argued in that pamphlet that workers would not spontaneously develop revolutionary socialist consciousness merely through economic struggle; socialist consciousness needed to be introduced and organised by disciplined leaders (in his case the revolutionary party). He advocated for a centralised vanguard of committed professional revolutionaries capable of providing political education, strategic direction and resistance to state repression. In the same way, what is to be done about antisemitism requires ongoing dedicated leadership to develop a sophisticated series of mechanisms to address antisemitism in its many forms operating in a wide range of different environments, often producing unexpected and unique occurrences of antisemitism.

Lenin’s spontaneity/consciousness split is about why leaving things alone reproduces the status quo — spontaneous trade-union consciousness never escalates into revolutionary consciousness on its own; it needs to be organised from outside. Bandura suggests the same structure for harm: moral disengagement is spontaneous — it doesn’t require organisation; it’s how diffuse harm reproduces itself without anyone deciding to be an antisemite. Antisemitism will not change on its own. It is more likely to fester with every failure to intervene, every decision not to act. Ambient harm will not organise itself into accountability any more than trade unionism organised itself into revolution — it requires an external structure (institutional, legal) that intervenes in the disengagement mechanisms rather than waiting for individual moral conversion.

I have done my best to explain what needs to be done. It is now up to the Royal Commission to use its knowledge and authority.

The Royal Commission’s final mandate is “Social Cohesion and Extremism: Recommending practical legal, policy, and educational measures to counter ideologically motivated extremism and foster a resilient, inclusive multicultural society.” The emphasis here is misleading. In context of the Inquiry terrorism and extremism play a relatively minor role. Managing them would help, but will not fix the problem of antisemitism. That requires a whole of society approach.

What should now be understood is that antisemitism is a social condition produced and sustained by institutions, norms, incentives and expectations. Antisemitism is also a social construct and it is within the power of government and other institutions of the state to change the current environment in which Jews are feeling unwelcome in their own country. Where there is a will to change social values, governments have, in the past, been able to bring about change. The first steps in that process involve recognition of the social harm and confirmation that the behaviour is inconsistent with Australian values. The second step is condemnation – the loud, frequent statements of government and the institutions of the state that the behaviour is unacceptable and should be condemned by every decent Australian.

For much of the twentieth century law was regarded as society’s principal instrument of social reform. Law establishes standards of conduct, allocates responsibility, creates institutions, signals public values and provides mechanisms for accountability. While scholars differ on the extent of law’s influence and the conditions necessary for its success, there is substantial agreement that enduring social reform rarely occurs in the absence of legal reform. While law is the central mechanism through which societies articulate values, structure institutions, shape incentives and respond to social problems, law is most effective when operating alongside institutions, education, leadership and social norms. Law does much more than punish offenders. It sets up the boundaries and structures in which acceptable behaviour operates in society.

But there is a prior step to introducing law. A rough-shot approach to “fixing” antisemitism will get us nowhere. The most urgent task is to ensure that those in power – including the Royal Commission –understand the length and breadth of antisemitism and ensure that the real problem is captured in any remedies suggested. If only a small part of the modern problem of antisemitism is condemned or outlawed, we Jews will not be much better off. Despite hours of public testimony and thousands of submissions the full scope of antisemitism still seems to allude the Commission. This is particularly the case where antisemitism involves indirect harm to individual Jews and breaches to social equality.

Traditional antisemitism—swastikas, Holocaust denial, blood libels—is relatively easy to recognise. Nonetheless, we saw in the Brighton Secondary College case that even swastikas may not be enough for a school or headmaster to admit there is antisemitism. Modern antisemitism is frequently expressed through coded language, antizionist rhetoric, conspiracy narratives, Holocaust inversion, and slogans that avoid explicit reference to Jews. This has produced lengthy disputes over whether conduct is antisemitic before any discussion can even begin about harm.

The problem can be seen most clearly in the debate surrounding “From the River to the Sea”; the “All Zionists are terrorists” litigation in Vorchheimer v Tayeh; and repeated arguments that attacks on “Zionists” are not attacks on Jews. The practical consequence is that Jewish complainants bear the burden of proving the racial character of conduct that many Jews experience as self-evidently antisemitic.

I have a number of law reform proposals. The most important of these relates to recognition of antisemitism. This is the point the anti-smoking and other campaigns suggest is most crucial. My proposal is the introduction into Australian law of a rebuttable presumption of antisemitism. What this would do is name every variety of antisemitic conduct and speech and declare it to be antisemitic at law. (The consequence of something being antisemitic is another question.) In order to protect freedom of speech and the slight possibility that behaviour appearing as antisemitic is not, the law should establish the definitional determination as rebuttable. This means that no court or institution need struggle trying to understand whether something is or is not antisemitism. It also means that no individual should be condemned without the opportunity to be heard.

Reform 1: Rebuttable Presumption of Antisemitism (s 18CA + Schedule X).

The Schedule to the Act is a list of antisemitic manifestations which is intended to be comprehensive and is to apply to behaviour or speech whether conducted in a physical location or on the internet or any other place where Jews are to be found in Australia. All action must be understood in the context of cumulative effect and other amplifiers.

Actions presumptively constituting antisemitism could appear under 10 headings:

· Violence, threats and intimidation.

· Antisemitic abuse and dehumanisation.

· Discrimination and exclusion.

· Religious antisemitism.

· Conspiracy, money and power.

· Collective guilt, disloyalty and conditional belonging.

· Holocaust denial, inversion and Nazi reference.

· Antisemitic antizionism.

· Slogans, chants and symbols.

· Contemporary methods and institutional effects.

However, the intention is that these headings be extremely detailed so that when seeking a remedy for antisemitism, or teaching about antisemitism, no one need waste time on definition. What is included in the Schedule must go far more than the adoption of IHRA, which should also be incorporated into Australian law (perhaps in the Acts Interpretation Act). That it is because it must specify all manifestations of antisemitism, even controversial ones. It must be clear that antizionism is antisemitism and that its manifestations are dangerous. It must be clear that antisemitism is not just an individual transaction but a social act which may transform the ordinary into something unacceptable. It must recognise that the seriousness and social meaning of conduct may be amplified by its repetition, religious or communal authority, place, timing, scale and reach, historical resonance, institutional uptake and institutional failure to respond.

Everything is complicated but must somehow be reduced to legal recognition. One big issue, so serious that even Saudi Arabia has acted on it, is the issue of extremist Imams. Religious preaching or religious instruction which specifies that Jews are inherently evil, corrupt or of dangerous characterister; invokes religious authority to justify hatred, discrimination, subordination or violence against Jews; praises or excuses the killing of Jews; presents conflict with Jews as a continuing religious obligation; or uses historical religious narratives as threats against contemporary Jews is dangerous. So the Schedule must include clarification that a rebuttable presumption of antisemitism arises where a person describes Jews collectively as “apes and pigs,” “monkeys and pigs,” or by another animalising or dehumanising expression, including where scriptural language is applied to contemporary Jews. If the Imam can demonstrate that the words used were not antisemitic on a given occasion, the law would allow for that to happen.

The schedule also presents the opportunity to clarify speech which is unequivocally antisemitic. It should include a long list of slogans which are unacceptable, such as:

• “Jews cannot be trusted.”

• “Jews only care about money.”

• “Jews are not welcome here.”

• “The Jews killed Christ.”

• “The Jews are cursed.”

• “Jews use the blood of children.”

• “Jews control the media.”

• “Jews control the banks.”

• “Jews control the government.”

• “The Zionists run the world.

• “Jewish money controls politics.”

• “You cannot criticise Jews because they control everything.”

• “Jews are more loyal to Israel than Australia.”

• “Why haven’t you condemned Israel?”

• “All Jews support genocide.”

• “Go back to Israel.”

• “The Holocaust is a lie.”

• “Six million is an exaggeration.”

• “Jews invented the Holocaust.”

• “Hitler should have finished the job.”

• “The Jews have become the Nazis.”

• Treating every Jew as a representative of Israel.

• Calling Jews or Zionists collectively genocidal, colonial, racist or terrorist.

• Treating Zionist identity as inherently evil or disqualifying.

• Denying Jews collective self-determination while accepting it for other peoples

• “Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews, the army of Muhammad will return.” (or just the Arabic)

• Requiring Jews to repudiate Zionism as a condition of participation.

• “All Zionists are terrorists.”

• “Zionists are not welcome.”

• “Death to Zionists.”

• “There are no innocent Zionists.”

• “Zionists are baby killers.”; “Zionists control politics.”

• “All Zionists support genocide.”

• “Anyone who supports Israel is a racist.”

• “You may participate only if you denounce Zionism.”

• “Death to Jews”

• “Finish what Hitler started.”

• “Where are the Jews?”;

• “Go back to the gas chambers.”

• “Jewish parasite.”

Ensuring we capture every manifestation of antisemitism is essential and seems to be the most difficult thing to explain. If the schedule is not comprehensive, an anti-antisemitism campaign will fail to recognise much antisemitic harm as antisemitic harm and Jews will remain victims, and there will be no return to social cohesion.

I’m depending, here, on the effective model for norm transformation derived from the anti-smoking and similar campaigns. We need to move Australian society’s acceptance of antisemitism to abhorrence. We want Australians to give it up, to find it unacceptable in others. Just like smoking. Once common, acceptable, desirable, glamorous. Now, dirty, unacceptable, relatively rare. Most people are embarrassed to smoke and look down on smokers. We need most people to be embarrassed if they engage in antisemitism and to look down on others who do. The antismoking campaign in Australia was extremely successful. There is no reason why an equivalent anti-antisemitism campaign could not be equally successful.

The central lesson from successful norm-transformation campaigns—including smoking, drink-driving, seatbelts and workplace sexual harassment—is that attitudes rarely change first. Conduct, institutions and social expectations are changed together until the new behaviour becomes ordinary and the old behaviour becomes socially anomalous. A strategy that concentrates primarily on eliminating private prejudice or hatred therefore begins in the wrong place. The immediate task is to alter the permissions, incentives, practices and institutional responses through which prejudice acquires social force. Attitudes may subsequently change as people encounter a different legal, institutional and normative environment.

My objective is not the impossible promise that antisemitism will disappear from private consciousness. Rather, it is to make antisemitism less available, less respectable, less rewarding, more readily recognised and increasingly inconsistent with ordinary civic life. Like smoking, the decisive achievement is reached when society no longer treats the harmful conduct as an inevitable feature of the landscape. The crucial distinction is between prejudice as a private disposition and antisemitism as a socially enabled practice. We may never eradicate the first. Government nevertheless has considerable power—and responsibility—to prevent prejudice and private disposition from becoming exclusion, intimidation, institutional abandonment or unequal citizenship. Action is required.

Setting: Melbourne 2026. A Year 11 classroom at a Catholic school. One Jewish student.

Subject: Studies in Religion.

Topic: What is a Just War?

Curriculum: From Aquinas to today, when can war be justified?

Subtext: A class about the Gaza War relying on popular misinformation.

Dramatic Element: The Jewish student fights back.

The teacher appears to be sensitive to the needs of the Jewish student. Before the class begins the unit, she discusses it with the student, whose hackles immediately rise. This topic is talked about at home – the family is very critical of Israel’s current government. It is one thing talking about the war with people who live and breathe it, another with a group of mainly hostile classmates. But it gets worse. The teacher tells the 16-year-old: “I know unbiased sources are hard to find—so why don’t you provide me with some videos and materials to use in class? But don’t use Jewish sources because they are biased.”

This sounds like an accommodation. In reality, the only Jewish student in the class has just been made responsible for constructing an unbiased curriculum on one of the most contested wars in the world—and forbidden from relying on sources associated with her own community. It’s complimentary to think she could do this. But it is far beyond what could reasonably be expected of a 16-year-old with no sustained expertise. I spent 4 hours and couldn’t put together appropriate material that stood on its own. Everything required explanation and a reasonably deep knowledge of the facts and debates around the topic. If the Jewish student cannot provide a complete alternative curriculum, the teacher will fall back on familiar materials—not because they are reliable, but because they are available and appear suitable for a classroom.

The school is right that this is a good subject for students to study. It is crucial that we critically assess what is going on in the world around us. To be able to intelligently engage, we need to judge what is happening according to principles of morality and justice and assess how they measure up against codes of conduct. Being involved in war is traumatising – even when it is happening from a distance. Israelis and Palestinians have suffered enormously during the current Gaza war, while Jewish and Palestinian communities in countries such as Australia have also experienced considerable distress. A war in the Middle East can never legitimise antisemitism in Australia, but Australians can legitimately consider what is going on in order to formulate their reaction to it.

This is not the first time that people have been troubled by war and have needed some help in disentangling their feelings. Just-war theory is an important part of Christian thinking about morality, peace and the use of force, and provides a valuable framework for assessing war and justice. Gaining the ability to assess a country’s behaviour in war and being able to understand the criteria which can be helpful in determining standards for warfare is an appropriate topic in the Year 11 curriculum.

The teacher explains that just war theory was developed in an attempt to reconcile two moral commitments that came into conflict: the Christian injunction to love one’s neighbour and seek peace, on the one hand, and the responsibility of political authorities to protect people from aggression and grave injustice on the other. Early Christianity contained a strong pacifist tradition. Christians were influenced by Jesus’ teachings to love one’s enemies, turn the other cheek and bless peacemakers. But what should one do if the effect of refusing to use force could itself permit innocent people to be killed, conquered or oppressed?

Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) taught that force might sometimes be morally permissible when used to restrain wrongdoing and restore peace. However, Augustine considered that war could never be thought of as good - even a justified war was tragic. In the 13^th century, Saint Thomas Aquinas (c.1225–1274) gave structure to the discussion by identifying three core elements of a just war. He tells us that first, the war must be authorised by a legitimate public authority. Secondly, it must be in response to a just cause, such as defending people against wrongful attack. Finally, those who wage war must possess the right intention, that is, the aspiration to restore peace and justice. Later Christian thinkers developed additional requirements, including that force must be a last resort, that success must be reasonably possible, that the expected good must be proportionate to the harm caused, and that non-combatants must not be deliberately attacked.

The just war tradition subsequently developed into three related fields of moral inquiry. Jus ad bellum asks whether there is sufficient justification for going to war: just cause, legitimate authority, right intention, proportionality, reasonable prospects of success and last resort. Jus in bello asks whether the war is conducted justly: combatants must distinguish military targets from civilians and must not employ force that is excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated. Jus post bellum asks what justice requires after hostilities, including with respect to the restoration of peace, reconstruction, accountability and fair treatment of the defeated.

These are distinct questions. A country cannot compensate for failure in one part of this formulation or excuse bad conduct in one area by pointing to good conduct in another. A state may have a just cause for entering a war but fight it unjustly. Conversely, soldiers may observe the rules governing combat even when their political leaders lacked adequate justification for the war. The just war tradition rejects two tempting absolutes: that war becomes morally good whenever one’s own cause is righteous, and that force is always wrong regardless of what it might prevent. Believing in either the Palestinian or the Israeli cause is therefore not, in itself, grounds for claiming that everything done by that cause is morally just. This means the focus is not on who is the strongest or who you believe to be right. The question is: should the war have been conducted in the first place; was the war conducted in line with the rules protecting civilians; and was there fair treatment of everyone concerned in the aftermath? The Christian just war tradition insists that even war remains subject to moral judgment.

To consider justice and morality in the context of any war requires facts that provide enough information to make a judgement call. Real facts. Not fake news. Not things that have gone viral on the internet or are popular understandings of what has gone on. In our scenario, the lone Jewish student tells the teacher you can’t use ABC or SBS analysis. The teacher acknowledges the student’s concern that ABC and SBS reporting should not automatically be treated as neutral or authoritative. She has watched some of the Royal Commission testimony and understands that serious concerns have been raised about the reporting of Israel and Gaza.

This whole enterprise is fraught. The rules of a just war are complex. I need about 2,000 words to explain them. More, once we try to apply them to assessing the war in Gaza. Other schools teach just war theory without applying it to a current conflict. Some use no illustration more recent than the beginning of the twenty-first century: examples that remain capable of illuminating the principles. They don’t use controversial arguments that may spill into hostility towards Jewish students or cause serious distress among the Jewish student body.

I don’t like that the Jewish student has been given an almost impossible task. She may well blame herself for what transpires in the classroom and in the playground. I think the teacher is trying to do a good job but is naïve. She doesn’t understand the potential harm she has set in motion. She would be better advised to teach the principles of just war theory without turning this particular classroom—and its only Jewish student—into a tribunal on Gaza. Over the next week or so, I will examine the separate and much larger question: what the rules of just war actually require, and how responsibly they can be applied to Hamas and Israel.

The teacher clearly needs a cheat sheet for planning her class. The points so far are:

The beginnings of a teacher’s cheat sheet: When Could a War Be Just?

Þ Just-war theory asks three separate questions: was going to war justified; was the war conducted justly; and was a just peace pursued afterwards?

Þ A just cause does not excuse unjust conduct, and unjust conduct does not invalidate the original right to self-defence.

Þ The criteria for going to war are: just cause, legitimate authority, right intention, proportionality, reasonable prospects of success and last resort.

Þ Supporting either the Israeli or Palestinian cause does not make everything done in its name morally just.

Þ Applying these criteria requires verified facts, not viral claims nor politically convenient narratives.

Þ Sources should be assessed according to their evidence, not rejected merely because they are Jewish, Israeli or Palestinian.

Þ A Jewish student is not responsible for Israel and should not be required to construct the curriculum or defend her identity before the class.

But blood libel does not adhere to people of other races. Not in its old form of poisoning wells and killing Christians for their blood, or in its current manifestation as genocidal baby-killing. Antizionism or an equivalent is not an allegation aimed at other races or ethnicities. Others are not abused because of their association with a country not even of their birth. Antisemitism has a different social grammar to other racisms. First of all, the standard racist tropes paint the victims of racism as inferior. Racism has characteristically justified dispossession, domination, exclusion and paternal control by depicting particular peoples as primitive, deficient or incapable. Antisemitism characteristically justifies exclusion and violence by depicting Jews as covertly powerful, collectively organised, morally corrupting and existentially dangerous. That produces forms of hostility that do not ordinarily structure racism against other peoples in the same way.

Antisemitism is often visible to Jews before it is recognised by others. This is not simply because Jews are more sensitive to hostility directed against them, but because antisemitism frequently operates through forms that do not fit the dominant public model of racism. I can not emphasise enough that the most important move that can be made regarding antisemitism is to ensure its full and thorough recognition.

There are a number of reasons why many people fail to recognise the full extent of antisemitism. One can only hope that the Royal Commissioner and her team will take this into account. Many do not recognise antisemitism, and this is for reasons that are real and need to be addressed. Consider the following, which touches a few of those reasons: When hostility is framed as opposition to Jewish privilege, it may not fit the observer’s model of racism as inferiority. When antisemitism is manifested through “Zionist” designation, the observer may not understand that political labels can function as proxies for Jews. It may simply be ignorance. Holocaust inversion or denial may not be seen as antisemitism because the historical meaning of equating Jews or Israel with Nazism may not be understood. When there is no specific victim, but a hostile environment, the observer who is used to looking for racism as direct interpersonal abuse may not recognise that environmental or cumulative harm constitutes ambient antisemitism. Similarly, Judaism is often not understood as a peoplehood, culture and collective identity. There are observers who treat slogans as abstract geopolitical claims without understanding their historical or social meaning for Jews. The eliminationist language is treated as political aspiration and justice and hence the underlying violence is missed. What appears to the observer as an ambiguous or merely political statement may belong to a well-established repertoire of antisemitic representation. This asymmetry of knowledge is not unusual. Members of a group subject to recurring hostility often acquire a more developed capacity to identify its codes, patterns and consequences than those who encounter each incident without that background.

We can think about non-recognition of antisemitism as a sliding scale of insult. The failure to know involves an observer who does not understand the form antisemitism takes and is in need of basic education. Next is the failure to inquire, where the observer lacks knowledge but has sufficient knowledge to know that they need to understand the phenomenon, but chooses not to investigate. Then there is the failure to believe, where the expert Jewish explanation is discounted because it comes from Jews. Finally, there is antisemitic reversal where Jewish recognition of antisemitism is itself represented as deceit, power or aggression.

The initial non-recognition of antisemitism is not necessarily antisemitic. It may reflect a genuine conceptual or historical deficit: a failure to know. The difficulty becomes more serious when a person or institution which possesses insufficient knowledge makes no reasonable effort to investigate the meaning, context or effects of the conduct. This is a failure to inquire. Institutions may, for example, accept that a slogan is merely political, that the targeting of a Jewish institution concerns Israel rather than Jews, or that each incident is too minor to matter, without examining whom the conduct actually designates, what historical meanings it carries, or whether its repetition has produced a hostile environment. At this stage, ignorance becomes culpability because the means of correction are available but are not used.

A further threshold is crossed when Jews explain the antisemitic meaning of the conduct and are not believed. Their testimony may be discounted because they are assumed to be oversensitive, politically motivated, communally defensive or incapable of distinguishing antisemitism from criticism of Israel. This is not merely disagreement about interpretation. It deprives Jews of epistemic authority in relation to hostility directed against them. The institution may instead rely upon a small number of approved Jewish voices to invalidate the evidence of the broader community, or treat Jewish fear and withdrawal as subjective reactions rather than evidence that equal participation has been impaired. The recognition failure then becomes a form of epistemic exclusion and gaslighting.

The most serious form is antisemitic reversal. Here, the Jewish attempt to identify antisemitism is itself interpreted through antisemitic ideas. Jews are said to invent allegations in order to silence criticism, exploit the Holocaust, secure political advantage or exercise institutional power. The complaint becomes evidence of the very manipulation, coordination or excessive influence that the antisemitic narrative attributes to Jews. Failure of recognition is therefore not always external to antisemitism or merely subsequent to the original act. It may become one of the processes through which antisemitism is defended, normalised and reproduced. It is a form of antisemitism in itself. The central distinction is between a person who does not initially understand what they are seeing, an institution that refuses to learn, a decision-maker who discounts Jewish testimony, and an actor who turns that testimony into a further accusation against Jews.

It is worth mentioning the Livingstone Formulation, which describes the process by which allegations of antisemitism are not merely disputed but systematically delegitimised. Rather than asking whether discriminatory conduct occurred, attention shifts to the motives of the complainant, who is portrayed as attempting to silence criticism of Israel, suppress free speech, or advance communal interests. Contemporary manifestations extend beyond the original formulation identified by David Hirsh. Jews who report antisemitism are increasingly characterised as acting strategically, exaggerating harm, or exploiting historical victimhood. Their testimony becomes evidence against them. In practice, this deprives Jews of the credibility routinely afforded to other minorities when reporting discrimination. The antisemitic harm therefore lies not only in the original conduct but in the refusal to recognise that conduct as antisemitic. The result is a self-reinforcing cycle in which the less antisemitism is recognised, the more difficult it becomes for Jews to obtain institutional protection.

Boy George calls on us to open our eyes- all of us, not just Jews. Antisemitism is harming Jews – whether hatred is involved or not. Just recognise when action disproportionately or uniquely harms Jews. It should be called out. Recognise it. Respond to ignorance with compassion, but don’t accept that a decision to remain ignorant is innocent. We so much want to dance again. In Israel, in Australia, and even in Gaza. Demand full recognition of antisemitism so it can be addressed.

Boy George, the iconic Culture Club singer, this week responded to the cultural silence surrounding October 7^th with an unusually direct declaration of solidarity. He wrote:

“You say genocide / I say war / When you’re attacked / That’s what the army is for / Does it get ugly? / You bet it does / When I know you want to kill / Every last one of us

You never mention October 7

Young girls raped against trees / Murdered brutally / For the crime of dancing / You condemn the Jews /With selective memory / Musicians holding flags / Mouthing like sheep / Propaganda fuelled by the internet / Feels so weak

But trust me, we will dance again / We will dance again / We will dance again / And there will be no war / But if you’re ever confused / I stand with the Jews / I don’t feel brave / I just need to behave like a human.”

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/you-never-mention-october-7-new-boy-george-song-is-an-overt-defense-of-israels-gaza-war/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

It became clear that after 7 October 2023, the conditions under which antisemitism could be expressed were changeable. Many scholars and Jewish communities describe the post-7 October period as one in which social inhibitions against antisemitic expression weakened. Conduct that would have previously been regarded as unacceptable became, in many settings, normalised, justified, or even celebrated. The sorts of stories that were reported over and over tell it all.

Events at the Sydney Opera House loomed large. Many Jews believe that had the burning of flares and flags been kept under control, the outward violence directed at Jews been regulated by police and the antisemitic chants been responded to with the seriousness they deserved, the whole post October 7^th situation in Australia would have been entirely different. It is hard to know why anyone thought that Jews would consider the distinction between “gas the Jews” and “where are the Jews” to be significant. In both cases they threatened Jews with murderous violence – in one case through Holocaust strategy, in the other, through calls for Pogroms of the sort which had been experienced by Jews in the Gaza envelope a few days earlier.

Since October 7^th several things appear to have shifted simultaneously. The scale of incidents of antisemitism increased dramatically. The visibility of antisemitic hostility moved from fringe spaces into universities, workplaces, cultural institutions and city centres. Expressions once regarded as socially unacceptable have become publicly legitimate. Individual Jews were increasingly treated as representatives of Israel. Jewish belonging to society became conditional: Jews were often expected to denounce Zionism or Israel as a condition of full participation. Institutions became uncertain about whether behaviour was unacceptable antisemitism or reasonable criticism of Israel.

This is why, for many Jews, the experience of antisemitism has not simply been an increase in prejudice. Rather, it has been a transformation of everyday life. Strange things began to happen. The story of Sarah, the young woman intimidated one too many times and so no longer wore a Magen David, was not just about a change of her identity, it was about her regulating who she was and who felt she could be.

David, a respected surgeon had felt his Jewish identity is largely irrelevant at work until after 7th October, a colleague asked whether he condemns Israel. Staff meetings became uncomfortable because the Middle East is regularly mentioned. Online activists published lists of “Zionist doctors.” Patients asked him where he stands politically. David discovered something new: Everyone else is allowed to be a doctor. He is expected first to explain whether he deserves to be one.

Rachel owns a suburban café. Customers come because the coffee is good. After 7 October, someone posted that the café is owned by an Israeli. Google reviews suddenly appeared, accusing her of supporting genocide. People who had never visited give one-star reviews. Business fell. Nothing happened inside the café. The identity of the owner was enough.

A Year 11 schoolgirl is repeatedly accused of being a baby killer, and classmates constantly sneezed ‘Netanyahu’ behind her back. There was frequently a teacher in the room when this happened. This only came to light when she wrote her submission. She wasn’t sure if it was antisemitism or not. The primary culprit was eventually suspended under threat of expulsion. The teacher had apparently done nothing wrong. If the conduct was authorized by the teacher, how could it be wrong?

Much of what we are experiencing is new or at least amplified in a manner which we are not familiar with. Conduct is recognised and named, it becomes possible to gather evidence, develop institutional responses, educate the public and establish new social norms.

It is arguable that antisemitism only emerged as a public problem in Australia because of the Bondi Beach Massacre. Until then, Australian society had not collectively decided that antisemitism warranted public attention and response. Recognition is the process through which a private experience becomes a public concern. Once a phenomenon is recognised, it becomes possible to study it, measure it, condemn it, regulate it and ultimately change it. Recognition is the gateway through which social problems enter public consciousness and become capable of reform.

Before there can be condemnation, education, law reform or norm transformation, there must first be recognition that a phenomenon exists and warrants attention. Recognition is the moment in which a condition becomes a public problem rather than a private experience. For antisemitism, the struggle is often not only over the response, but over whether particular experiences are recognised as antisemitism at all. That makes recognition a central site of contestation rather than merely the first step in a policy process.

The decision to establish the Royal Commission may itself be understood as an act of recognition: an acknowledgement that antisemitism warrants public attention. Beyond this, the focus and processes of the Royal Commission tell us something else. The experiences described by Jewish Australians are treated as real, significant and deserving of serious consideration. In recognising antisemitism as a social problem warranting public attention, the Commission also recognises Jewish Australians as credible witnesses to the harms they experience. The Commission acknowledges both the existence of the problem and the legitimacy of those describing it.

When institutions fail to recognise conduct as antisemitism, they fail to intervene, allowing the harm to become entrenched and significantly more serious. Recognition is not simply symbolic. Without recognising behaviour as antisemitism, institutions cannot act to respond to the hatred. There are two cases held in Australian Courts that illustrate the significance of recognition of antisemitism.

Kaplan v State of Victoria

Between 2015–2020, five Jewish students at Brighton Secondary College (Melbourne) were subjected to sustained antisemitic bullying — swastika graffiti, Nazi salutes, a torn-off kippah thrown in a bin, “Heil Hitler” graffiti on a locker,”die in an oven”, “f***ing Jew”, physical assaults, including one student being held at knifepoint; and repeated harassment directed specifically at Jewish identity. This was an ongoing hostile environment, in which Australian Jewish students were expected to thrive academically. They were legally required to attend this daily hell, where despite repeated complaints to the school, the principal Richard Minack and his team failed to act. In Brighton Secondary College (Kaplan v State of Victoria) the Federal Court found that the striking feature of the case was not merely the abuse itself, but the institutional response. Chief Justice Debra Mortimer found there was an “inexplicable and unusual tolerance” of antisemitic conduct within the school. Complaints were repeatedly minimised, treated as ordinary bullying rather than antisemitism, inadequately investigated, or simply ignored. It is hard to imagine that school leadership could fail to appreciate the significance of the swastikas and antisemitic language and that they could therefore fail to implement systemic measures to protect Jewish students.

In the words of the Judge: “The legal wrong was not only that antisemitism occurred. It was that the institution failed to recognise it as antisemitism. Because it was misclassified as routine school behaviour, the school’s response remained fragmented and ineffective, allowing the hostile environment to become normalised.” (direct quote).

The most important issue here was the failure of recognition of antisemitism and that this institutional non-recognition was the operative harm. The Jewish students were treated differently from other minority groups when they reported bigotry — the harm wasn’t just peer conduct, it was the institution’s differential failure to see this conduct as actionable.

The Brighton Secondary College Case is a textbook illustration of the gap in bureaucratic self-protection that could have had a very different outcome for the Jewish students had there been an early acknowledgement of what was if fact, happening. Delaying recognition of antisemitism until judicially compelled to do so, and only partially even then (compensation without early disciplinary consequence for Minack) it a matter in need of repair.

Kaplan v State of Victoria (No 8) is instructive not for establishing that individual acts of antisemitic bullying are actionable — that much is uncontroversial — but for what it reveals about the RDA’s structural blindness regarding harm. The graffiti and generalised hostility functioned as a background condition of the students’ schooling, independent of any single identifiable perpetrator or incident; the harm was cumulative and environmental rather than discrete. Existing doctrine, oriented around specific acts attributable to identifiable respondents, captured this only awkwardly and belatedly, requiring six years of litigation to vindicate what should have been recognised administratively at first complaint. That the State fought the claim when it finally got to court rather than acknowledging up front that the swastika graffiti and Nazi salutes functioned as harm did further damage.

Recognition is the gateway to protection. If conduct is not recognised as antisemitism, institutions will typically respond as though it is merely political disagreement, ordinary bullying, or isolated incivility. The consequence is not simply conceptual error but practical failure: harmful conduct is left unaddressed, hostile environments become normalised, and Jewish participation in public life becomes progressively more precarious/ costly.

Vorchheimer v Tayeh [2026] VCAT 134

Menachem Vorchheimer (an Australian Jewish lawyer) brought an action against Hash Tayeh (a Palestinian-Australian activist). The latter had led the crowd at an anti-Israel/ pro-Palestinian rally in Melbourne’s CBD on 23 March 2025 in chanting “all Zionists are terrorists.” Vorchheimer was successful in his argument that under Victoria’s Racial and Religious Tolerance Act, the word “Zionist” functioned as a coded proxy for “Jew,” and the chant incited hatred, serious contempt, revulsion, or severe ridicule of Jewish people on racial/religious grounds. The Court held that the fact that Tayeh had been charged by police with four criminal offences for materially similar comments roughly two weeks before the rally should be treated as relevant context. The Court rejected Tayeh’s defence that “Zionist” and “Jew” are distinct terms, and the chant targeted political supporters of Israeli government conduct post–7 October 2023, not Jews as such. He also relied on political protest/free expression framing. Judge My Anh Tran, VCAT Vice President, held that the chant contravened the Act. The Tribunal held that the chant was directed, at minimum, against “all supporters of the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state,” rejected the “distinct words” defence, and held there is “no right to a catchy rally slogan” if it is inherently likely to incite hatred. The Tribunal also noted an observable antisemitic and pro-violent presence at the rally as relevant surrounding context it was entitled to consider.

The slogan has a history that goes back to Soviet Antizionism and the antisemitic hate-fest at the Durban Anti-Racism Conference. Although the current slogans are not always identical to those of the past, they show a clear antisemitic lineage. Antizionism has been demonstrated time and again to be a modern articulation of antisemitism – antisemitism in a language understood by today’s anti-Jewish activists. However, the Tribunal explicitly refused to rule on Zionism, antizionism, or the IHRA definition. Rather, the Tribunal rejected the “distinct words” defence to look past self-declared political meaning to ask what a term does to the target group’s sense of safety and status. The historical understanding of the terms cannot be used to undermine the actual impact of the actual words spoken. In this case, the only intelligible meaning was one that incited hatred against Jews.

The Recognition Gap

Both the Brighton Secondary College case and the Vorchheimer case turn on a gap in the recognition of antisemitism. Kaplan is a failure of institutional recognition: the conduct (swastikas, “Heil Hitler,” physical assault) was never definitionally ambiguous — everyone, including the school, knew it was antisemitic. The failure was administrative non-response, a congruence gap between policy on paper and its enforcement. Vorchheimer v Tayeh [2026] VCAT 134 is a failure of categorical recognition: whether the conduct (chanting “all Zionists are terrorists”) counts as antisemitic at all was the live legal question. Judge Tran’s finding that the chant was directed, at minimum, against all supporters of the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state, and that Tayeh had no right to a catchy rally slogan if it was inherently likely to incite hatred, resolves the categorisation question by looking to effect on the target group and context, not speaker intent or self-declared meaning. The Tribunal expressly rejected the “distinct words” defence (that “Zionist” and “Jew” are analytically separable) in favour of asking what the chant was reasonably likely to do to Jewish people who heard it.

Read together, the two cases map the full life-cycle of recognition failure. Vorchheimer shows courts can recognise antisemitism operating through a permission structure (antizionist idiom) once the harm-not-hate test is applied — vindicating the theoretical move, but only after five parallel VCAT proceedings and years of Vorchheimer’s own litigation effort to force the categorisation question to be asked at all. Kaplan shows that even where the categorisation is not contested — where conduct is unambiguously antisemitic on any test — institutional administration still fails absent external enforcement pressure.

Without institutional accountability mechanisms (addressed by Kaplan), correct categorisation at the tribunal level doesn’t automatically produce administrative recognition at the point of first complaint — school, university, or workplace. This allows antisemitism to be ignored and even reinforced by those in power who are unwilling to respond to the hatred around us..

CONCLUSION

Contemporary antisemitism presents profound problems of recognition. Much contemporary hostility towards Jews is indirect, coded, institutional or expressed through political language that does not resemble the racial hatred on which traditional legal and scholarly understandings were built. Public debate has consequently become preoccupied with definitional disputes rather than with the practical consequences of antisemitic conduct. The result is a widening gap between the lived experience of Jewish communities and the willingness of governments, institutions and the broader public to recognise that experience as antisemitism. This recognition failure has become one of the defining features of contemporary antisemitism and a significant obstacle to any effective response.

The consequences extend well beyond Jewish communities themselves. For non-Jews, failures of recognition create uncertainty about where legitimate political criticism ends, and discriminatory conduct begins. Employers, universities, police, judges, journalists and public officials are left without reliable conceptual tools for identifying conduct that creates exclusion, intimidation or unequal participation for Jews. Conduct that would readily be recognised as discriminatory if directed towards other minority groups is frequently normalised when directed at Jews because its social meaning is misunderstood or contested. This uncertainty weakens institutional decision-making, erodes confidence in legal protections and allows increasingly hostile norms to become embedded within public life. By the time overt hatred or violence emerges, the earlier social processes that enabled it have already become normalised.

Recognition failures also damage the democratic community itself. Democratic societies depend upon the equal citizenship of all their members, not merely through formal legal rights but through shared public understandings about who belongs, whose concerns deserve to be taken seriously, and whose safety warrants institutional protection. When antisemitism is consistently overlooked, minimised or reframed as something else, Jews experience a form of conditional citizenship in which they must continually justify their claims to equal protection. Equally importantly, the wider community loses confidence that democratic institutions are capable of applying principles of equality consistently. The failure to recognise antisemitism therefore harms not only Jews but the integrity of democratic citizenship itself. Recognition is not simply a matter of accurate definition; it is a prerequisite for preserving the equal status of all citizens and maintaining public confidence in the rule of law.

I believe the explanation lies in the field of social norms, the social rules of society that govern our behaviour. Not values, but including values. Not instructions or laws, but collectively shared expectations about acceptable behaviour maintained through social approval and disapproval, inclusion, exclusion and reputational impact. They determine not only what people do, but what they believe they can say or do without social consequence. Social norms are central to understanding how antisemitism can become normalised.

Social norms are the collectively shared expectations that govern what people perceive to be acceptable, unacceptable and expected behaviour. Unlike legal rules or personal values, they are maintained through social approval and disapproval, inclusion and exclusion, reputational consequences and institutional signals. They determine not only how people behave but also what they believe they can say or do without social consequence.

I argue that the contemporary surge in antisemitism is best understood as a transformation of these social norms. The perceived social cost of expressing antisemitic views has fallen, while the perceived legitimacy of expressing hostility towards Jews and Zionists has increased. This shift has enabled antisemitic conduct to become more visible, more publicly accepted and more institutionally tolerated. Understanding antisemitism through the lens of social norms therefore helps explain the pain of the last 2 & a half years.

One function of social norms is to transform individual behaviour into collective practice. Many people comply with norms because they believe that others expect them to do so, even if they do not personally endorse them. As Cristina Bicchieri has demonstrated, social norms are sustained by two forms of expectation: empirical expectations (what people believe others do) and normative expectations (what people believe others expect them to do). Behaviour often persists because individuals perceive it to be normal, rather than because they regard it as morally justified.

Individuals frequently engage in conduct they consider to be normal, expected or socially rewarded. Antisemitic conduct may be sustained not only by those who hate Jews, but also by those who participate in, tolerate or remain silent about practices that have become normalised within their social environment. Understanding antisemitism as a social norm helps explain how harmful conduct can become widespread even where explicit hostility toward Jews is absent.

Jewish antizionist voices often occupy a distinctive position within public discourse. Because they are Jewish, they are frequently presented as particularly authoritative or even courageous critics of Zionism, and their participation is used to demonstrate that particular forms of antizionist expression cannot reasonably be regarded as antisemitic. Their visibility performs an important normative function: it lowers the perceived social and moral cost of expressing similar views while simultaneously making Jewish objections appear contested or exceptional. From a social norms perspective, the significance of Jewish antizionist activists lies less in the substance of their arguments than in the social signal they provide. Their endorsement communicates that hostility towards Zionism has the approval of at least some members of the affected group, thereby reducing reputational risk for others who adopt similar rhetoric. In Bicchieri’s terms, they help reshape normative expectations about what is considered socially acceptable.

Jewish antizionist figures function as amplifiers - their identity increases the credibility and reach of particular narratives, allowing institutions, media organisations and activists to rely upon them as evidence that contested forms of antizionist expression are legitimate rather than antisemitic. Whether intentionally or not, this can contribute to the broader social production and normalisation of antisemitism by weakening institutional willingness to recognise Jewish experiences of harm.

Antisemitism is maintained through social environments, institutional practices and collective expectations. When antisemitic slogans, exclusionary conduct, hostile demonstrations, online abuse or discriminatory practices become normalised, they create social conditions that shape behaviour and influence what others perceive to be acceptable. Antisemitism therefore operates not only through individual acts but through the norms that govern public life.

The significance of applying a social norms lens is illustrated by the many successful social reform campaigns. Smoking, drink driving, workplace sexual harassment and domestic violence were not reduced simply because new information became available. In each case, social expectations changed. Conduct that had once been regarded as normal gradually became regarded as unacceptable. Legal reform, public education, institutional leadership and cultural change worked together to reshape the social environment within which individuals made decisions.

Changing Social Norms

If harmful norms are socially constructed, they can also be socially reconstructed. The history of successful reform suggests that durable norm change emerges through the interaction of law, institutions, education, leadership and public culture. This is key to our need to respond to antisemitism. If norms are socially constructed – built by humanity – they can also be pulled down, rebuilt or restructured. This is a human not a super-human endeavour.

Several scholars have identified elements of this process. Cass Sunstein has emphasised the expressive function of law: legal rules communicate social values, shape collective expectations and signal what a democratic society is prepared to tolerate. His work demonstrates that law not only regulates behaviour through sanctions but also influences social norms by altering what people perceive to be acceptable or unacceptable conduct. This insight is directly applicable to antisemitism. When governments, universities or professional bodies fail to condemn or respond consistently to antisemitic conduct, they communicate an equally powerful expressive message—that such behaviour falls within the bounds of acceptable public discourse.

Catharine MacKinnon demonstrated how the legal recognition of sexual harassment transformed conduct that had previously been dismissed as inevitable or insignificant. Her work illustrates that naming a previously unrecognised form of harm can itself be a catalyst for social change, enabling institutions to recognise injuries that had long been normalised and creating legal mechanisms through which those harms can be challenged. The parallel with contemporary antisemitism is striking. Much of the harm experienced by Jewish communities—including ambient hostility, exclusion from public spaces, institutional indifference and the cumulative effects of repeated antisemitic messaging—continues to be minimised because it lacks adequate legal and conceptual recognition. As with sexual harassment several decades ago, recognition is the necessary precondition for effective prevention, institutional accountability and meaningful legal remedies.

Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition argues that human beings develop and sustain their identity through relationships of mutual recognition within society. Individuals flourish when they are recognised as equal members of the political community, while persistent experiences of disrespect or misrecognition undermine self-confidence, social participation and the capacity to exercise citizenship on equal terms. For Honneth, injustice is therefore not limited to the unequal distribution of resources or formal legal rights; it also arises when individuals or groups are systematically denied the social recognition necessary to participate as full members of society.

This insight is particularly valuable for understanding contemporary antisemitism. Antisemitism harms Jews not only through discrimination, intimidation or violence, but by progressively withdrawing the social recognition that democratic citizenship promises. When Jewish identity is treated as morally suspect, when Jews are required to renounce Zionism as a condition of participation, when Jewish testimony about antisemitism is dismissed or disbelieved, or when Jewish participation in public life is constrained by hostility or exclusion, the injury is fundamentally one of misrecognition. Jews remain formal citizens in law but are denied the equal standing that democratic citizenship is intended to guarantee.

Honneth therefore helps explain why many contemporary manifestations of antisemitism appear difficult to categorise using traditional concepts of hatred or prejudice. Much of the harm lies not in explicit expressions of hostility but in the cumulative denial of equal social standing. This aligns closely with the argument advanced here: that antisemitism operates as a social process that degrades the conditions of democratic citizenship by progressively eroding the recognition upon which equal participation depends. Legal and institutional responses must aim not merely to prohibit discriminatory acts but to restore the reciprocal recognition that enables Jews to participate as equal members of the democratic community.

Martha Fineman’s theory of vulnerability highlights the responsibility of institutions to respond proactively to foreseeable harms rather than merely reacting after damage has occurred. Rather than treating vulnerability as an exceptional condition affecting only particular groups, Fineman argues that it is a universal feature of human life, requiring governments and institutions to build resilient structures that protect individuals before harm becomes entrenched. Applied to antisemitism, this shifts attention away from isolated incidents and towards institutional responsibility for the environments they create. Universities, governments and employers cannot discharge their obligations simply by responding after serious incidents occur; they have an ongoing responsibility to prevent the development of hostile environments in which antisemitic conduct becomes normalised and increasingly harmful.

Robert Cover reminds us that law operates through narratives as well as sanctions. His concept of nomos emphasises that legal systems derive their authority from the stories communities tell about justice, legitimacy and obligation. Transforming legal understandings therefore requires changing the narratives through which societies interpret both conduct and harm. This insight helps explain why contemporary antisemitism cannot be understood solely through individual acts of discrimination. Competing narratives about Zionism, colonialism, privilege or historical responsibility shape how particular conduct is interpreted, often rendering harms experienced by Jews invisible or morally justified. Effective legal reform therefore requires not only new rules but also a change in the public narrative through which antisemitism itself is recognised.

Marshall Ganz and George Lakoff demonstrate the importance of stories and framing in shaping public understanding. Ganz argues that movements succeed when they connect political action to compelling public narratives that create shared purpose, while Lakoff shows that people interpret facts through pre-existing conceptual frames. Sustainable social change therefore depends on presenting the evidence within frames that resonate with widely held democratic values. This has particular significance for antisemitism. Evidence of antisemitic harm is often rejected not because the facts are disputed but because they are interpreted through competing frames—for example, that Jews represent power rather than vulnerability, or that hostility directed towards Zionists is necessarily political rather than racial. Changing social norms therefore requires changing the interpretive frames through which contemporary antisemitism is understood.

The work of Cristina Bicchieri is particularly useful because it explains why information alone is often insufficient to change behaviour. People do not necessarily alter their conduct simply because they acquire new knowledge. Rather, behaviour changes when expectations change—when individuals come to believe that others expect different conduct and that those expectations will be socially reinforced. Successful norm reform therefore requires institutions not only to identify harmful conduct but also to communicate clearly what behaviour is expected, what conduct is unacceptable, and why the community regards those standards as legitimate. Bicchieri’s work demonstrates that legal recognition, public leadership and institutional practice reinforce one another by reshaping both empirical expectations (what people believe others do) and normative expectations (what people believe others think ought to be done).

This framework explains how antisemitism can spread even when private prejudices remain relatively stable. If people observe repeated antisemitic conduct going unchallenged, they infer that such behaviour is socially acceptable and adjust their own conduct accordingly. Conversely, consistent legal recognition and institutional responses alter those expectations, gradually denormalising antisemitic behaviour without requiring every individual to change their private beliefs.

Antisemitism as a Problem of Social Norms

Much contemporary discussion of antisemitism proceeds from the assumption that it is fundamentally a problem of individual prejudice, ignorance or hatred. On this view, antisemitism is understood primarily as an attitude or belief held by particular individuals, and the principal responses therefore become education, counter-speech, dialogue or moral persuasion. The underlying assumption is that if people’s beliefs can be corrected, antisemitism will gradually diminish.

While these measures have value, they struggle to explain a central feature of contemporary antisemitism. Many incidents occur not because individuals suddenly become more prejudiced, but because behaviours that would previously have been regarded as unacceptable come to be viewed as legitimate, understandable or at least socially permissible. The question is therefore not simply what individuals privately believe. Equally important is what they understand society to permit, encourage or reward.

The experience of successful social reform suggests a different way of approaching the problem. Across many fields—including drink driving, smoking, domestic violence, workplace sexual harassment and discrimination—lasting change has occurred not principally because every individual altered their private attitudes, but because societies transformed the norms governing public behaviour. Conduct that had once been tolerated became increasingly unacceptable. Institutions changed their expectations, laws reflected those expectations, leaders reinforced them, and individuals adapted their behaviour accordingly.

This insight shifts attention from internal beliefs to external social practices. Attitudes are inherently difficult to observe, difficult to regulate and often resistant to direct persuasion. Social norms, by contrast, are publicly expressed, institutionally reinforced and capable of deliberate intervention. They determine not merely what people think, but what people feel able to say, how they behave towards others, and what consequences follow from that behaviour.

For this reason, the central question is not simply whether individuals harbour antisemitic beliefs. Rather, it is whether antisemitic conduct is normalised, rewarded, tolerated or discouraged within particular social environments. A society may contain individuals with prejudiced attitudes while nevertheless maintaining strong norms against expressing or acting upon them. Conversely, individuals who do not regard themselves as antisemitic may nevertheless participate in practices that stigmatise, exclude or intimidate Jews if those practices have become socially acceptable within their communities.

Understanding antisemitism through the lens of social norms therefore provides a more practical and institutionally useful framework. It directs attention towards the mechanisms through which antisemitic behaviour becomes legitimate, the institutions that reinforce or discourage it, and the conditions under which harmful practices spread or decline. Rather than attempting to eradicate every private prejudice—a task that is neither realistic nor necessary—a social norms approach seeks to transform the public environment so that antisemitic conduct is consistently recognised, discouraged and ultimately denormalised.

On one level, Herzl’s insight speaks to moral responsibility. In the words of Rabbi Tarfon in Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers): “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” Once we become aware of the antisemitism in our midst, we cannot simply leave the problem to others. We each bear some responsibility for confronting it. That responsibility extends to governments, institutions, civil society and, importantly, to this Royal Commission, which has an opportunity to recommend reforms capable of bringing about substantial change. Yet Herzl’s insight is also one of pragmatism. It reminds us that even deeply entrenched social problems can be transformed. Those in positions of influence must understand that antisemitism is not an inevitable feature of Australian life. It is a social condition sustained by human choices and maintained through institutional practices and social norms. Therefore, through those same mechanisms, hatred towards Jews can be reduced, regulated and transformed and the conditions for equal citizenship can be restored.

From Social Norm to Social Deviance

The history of social reform demonstrates that social attitudes and behaviours once regarded as normal, inevitable or even impossible to regulate can change dramatically through a combination of law, education, leadership, institutional reform and social norm formation. Antisemitism should not be viewed as uniquely resistant to intervention. Australia has repeatedly transformed deeply embedded social practices when governments, institutions and civil society acted together over sustained periods. This confirms that it is possible for Australia to successfully reduce the deeply embedded social harms of antisemitism.

The reduction of unacceptable social norms was achieved through the interaction of legal reform, institutional leadership, public education, social norm change and cultural adaptation. Scholars from diverse disciplines have examined how this change occurs. Some emphasise the role of social norms and norm cascades (Sunstein, Kuran, Bicchieri); others focus on legal framing and institutional reform (MacKinnon, Cover, Fineman); still others examine the role of narrative, knowledge formation and public communication (Fricker, Brandt, Ganz, Lakoff). While their theories differ, they converge on a common insight: harmful social practices are neither natural nor immutable. They are maintained through social structures and can therefore be transformed through social action.

From Social Norm to Social Deviance

Perhaps the clearest example is smoking. During the 1950s and 1960s smoking was not merely accepted; it was embedded in everyday life. Cigarettes were advertised by doctors, smoked on aeroplanes, in restaurants, hospitals, universities and government offices. Smokers did not regard themselves as harming others and many considered smoking an expression of personal freedom.

The transformation of values did not occur through a single law. Governments progressively combined scientific research, public education campaigns, advertising restrictions, taxation measures, plain packaging laws, workplace restrictions, and changing social expectations. Importantly, the campaign shifted public understanding from smoking as a private choice to smoking as a social harm affecting others through second-hand smoke and public health costs.

Behaviours once considered entirely normal have become socially unacceptable. Smoking rates in Australia have fallen from approximately half the adult population in the 1960s to among the lowest levels in the world. The lesson is that harmful social practices can be transformed when institutions consistently reinforce new norms over time.

As Allan Brandt points out, the success of anti-smoking campaigns depended not simply on proving medical harm but on changing the social meaning of smoking itself. For antisemitism, the implication is that governments need not choose between education and regulation. Successful change generally requires both.

There are a number of other cases in point. There was the Road Safety and Drink Driving campaign of the 1960s and 1970s. Drink driving was often treated as a joke rather than a serious offence. Many Australians regarded driving after consuming alcohol as normal behaviour. Road deaths were extraordinarily high and public understanding of risk was limited. Campaigns such as “If you drink, then drive, you’re a bloody idiot,” together with random breath testing, visible policing, licence suspensions, media campaigns, and education programs, fundamentally altered public attitudes. The result was a substantial reduction in road fatalities and a profound cultural shift.

The Slip, Slop, Slap and Sun Safety campaign of the 1980s transformed one of the world’s most dangerous cultures regarding sun exposure into a country where skin safety is valued. There was a major shift in behaviour. Wearing hats, applying sunscreen and seeking shade became normal rather than unusual. This campaign is often regarded internationally as one of the most successful public health interventions ever undertaken.

Sexual Harassment was not even a concept when the campaign to change unacceptable social behaviour began. For much of the twentieth century, sexual harassment was regarded as an inevitable aspect of women’s participation in workplaces, universities and public life. Women were expected to tolerate unwanted comments, touching, exclusion, intimidation or humiliation as part of ordinary social life.

The introduction of anti-discrimination legislation transformed the legal environment, but law alone did not produce change. Public education campaigns, workplace policies, reporting mechanisms, leadership accountability, and cultural shifts helped create a new understanding that sexual harassment was not merely unpleasant behaviour but a denial of equal participation and dignity. The campaign reframed sexual harassment as a systemic barrier to equality rather than isolated incidents of interpersonal misconduct. In other words, the sexual harassment campaign transformed what was considered to be an inevitable experience into unacceptable conduct.

Many other campaigns provide precedent for the alteration of social norms. Each example involved different forms of social harm. Smoking involved public health; drink driving involved public safety; sexual harassment involved workplace equality; domestic violence involved private and family relationships. Yet despite these differences, the campaigns shared a number of common features.

What Successful Campaigns Have in Common

First, and most importantly, the harm being targeted for social change was identified and made visible. Conduct that had previously been dismissed as normal, inevitable or insignificant was redefined as harmful. Smoking became a public health issue rather than a personal habit. Drink driving became a threat to community safety rather than a matter of individual judgment. Sexual harassment became a barrier to equal participation rather than an unfortunate aspect of working life.

Secondly, institutions accepted responsibility. Governments, employers, schools, universities, professional bodies and the media ceased treating the relevant harms as private matters and instead recognised them as issues requiring collective action. Social change accelerated when institutions stopped merely observing the problem and began actively shaping the environments in which behaviour occurred.

Thirdly, law played an important role, but rarely through punishment alone. Legal reform signalled that society’s expectations had changed. As Cass Sunstein has argued, law possesses an expressive function: it communicates social values as well as imposing sanctions. The success of these campaigns lay not simply in deterring misconduct but in helping to redefine what responsible citizens regarded as acceptable behaviour.

Fourthly, social norms changed. Cristina Bicchieri’s work is particularly helpful here. Bicchieri argues that behaviour is often sustained not because individuals personally endorse it, but because they believe others expect it and because they perceive it to be normal within their social environment. Change therefore occurs when expectations change. People begin to understand that a behaviour is no longer accepted, expected or admired by their peers, institutions or wider community.

The result is that conduct which once appeared normal can become increasingly unacceptable, often with surprising speed. Smoking, drink driving and workplace sexual harassment did not disappear because every individual was persuaded by the argument. They declined because social expectations shifted, and new norms became established and reinforced.

The success of these case studies has led to research into the nature of social change and, in particular, social norm transformation. Theoretical accounts differ in emphasis, but scholars as diverse as Sunstein, Bicchieri, MacKinnon, Fineman, Brandt and Fricker all point toward the same conclusion: social harms persist because they are embedded within institutions, damaging norms and narratives. These harmful practices diminish when those institutions, norms and narratives are deliberately reshaped. So if there truly is a will to make a change, there is a way to make it happen.

Antizionism is not new. From the outset, it has been very clearly about Jews and nothing to do with Israel. Appreciating the background to modern antizionism allows us to realise that debates about Israel and criticism of Israel are not the object or intention of antizionism. Claims that antizionism is a response to the many faults of the state of Israel are disingenuous. Antizionism always was and always will be a form of antisemitism – coded language for undermining everything about being a Jew.

Soviet Anti-Zionism (1967–1991):

After initial support for Israel’s creation, the USSR turned hostile, especially after 1967. “Zionology” became official propaganda: books, films, cartoons, and campaigns depicted Zionists as global conspirators, Nazis’ collaborators, racists, and imperialists. This had little consequence for Israel, but enormous consequences for Soviet Jews. Antizionism justified persecution of Soviet Jews (refuseniks), emigration bans, and “rootless cosmopolitan” purges. Jews faced quotas, trials, and violence for “Zionist” activity (e.g., wanting to emigrate to Israel). Hebrew study and Jewish culture were also suppressed. This was clearly about Jews and not about Zionism. This is intended to harm Jews as Jews, in the name of antizionism.

By shifting hostility from “Jews” to “Zionists”, Soviet antizionism translated traditional antisemitic themes into the language of anti-racism and anti-colonialism. The harm of Soviet antizionism arose through designation, imputation and amplification. Because narratives about Zionists and Jews were promoted by a superpower through schools, universities, media and international institutions, they acquired enormous reach and legitimacy. The result was a form of ambient harm in which Jewish identity became associated with moral suspicion and political disloyalty. Soviet antizionism was therefore significant not merely because it discriminated against Jews, but because it created a conceptual framework that later enabled accusations of racism, apartheid and ultimately genocide to be attached to Jewish self-determination itself.

UN Resolution 3379:

In 1975, the UN formally equated the Jewish national movement with racism, contributing to the international delegitimisation of Jewish self-determination. (UN Resolution 3379: “Zionism is Racism.”) This resulted in a form of antisemitic harm that is difficult to understand through conventional frameworks. Traditional legal and political approaches tend to focus on discrimination, exclusion, threats, violence or direct expressions of hatred. Yet Resolution 3379 did none of these things. It did not mention Jews as an inferior race, advocate violence against Jews, or deny Jews civil rights. Nevertheless, for many Jews, it was experienced as profoundly harmful. My framework helps explain why. The Resolution operated as an act of designation and imputation. It designated Zionism as inherently racist and thereby imputed racism to those who identified with it. What was being condemned was a central component of Jewish collective identity.

The harm was intensified by amplification. This was not an accusation made by a fringe organisation or individual activist; it was adopted by the United Nations, the most authoritative and prestigious international institution of its era. Through the authority of the UN, the accusation acquired legitimacy, prestige and global reach. A claim that might otherwise have remained controversial was elevated into an internationally endorsed moral judgement. The result was to normalise the proposition that Jewish self-determination was uniquely illegitimate. The Resolution functioned as a powerful mechanism for shaping public perceptions of Jews and their place in society.

Resolution 3379 demonstrates the phenomenon of ambient harm and the degradation of the conditions of equal citizenship. The injury did not depend upon any individual act of discrimination. Rather, it altered the social environment within which Jews lived. Once Zionism had been officially designated as racism, hostility toward Zionists could be understood not as prejudice but as anti-racism. Exclusion, suspicion and moral condemnation became easier to justify because they were directed at an identity that had already been publicly stigmatised. The Resolution thus helped create the conditions in which many Jews experienced their participation in public life as increasingly conditional upon repudiating a core element of their identity. It is precisely this transition—from direct injury to the construction of a hostile social environment—that traditional frameworks miss, but which a harm-based analysis is designed to capture. Resolution 3379 is a paradigmatic case of how antisemitism can operate through designation, imputation, amplification and ambient harm to undermine the equal standing of Jews without ever expressing explicit hatred of Jews.

Durban (2001):

This antizionist trend continued with the fiasco at the 2001 Durban Conference (The UN World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance), which was intended to be a conference against racism. However, much of the political energy focused on Israel and Zionism, in language that Jews – including my brother z’l, a member of Australia’s delegation - experienced as frightening, demonising, exclusionary and even violent. There was antisemitic imagery, Nazi comparisons, conspiracy rhetoric, exclusionary treatment of Jewish delegates, distribution of inflammatory material and attempts to isolate Zionism as uniquely illegitimate.

While Resolution 3379 designated Zionism as racist, Durban expanded the designation to include allegations of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide. Israel was no longer portrayed as a state that engaged in wrongful conduct; it was increasingly characterised as a uniquely illegitimate state whose very existence was associated with grave international crimes.

The antisemitic harm of Durban operated through designation, imputation, amplification and mobilisation. The authority of a global anti-racism conference amplified these accusations, while NGOs, activists and institutions disseminated them internationally. The effect was not confined to Israel. Jews who identified with Zionism increasingly found themselves associated with apartheid, colonialism and genocide, regardless of their own beliefs or conduct. Durban, therefore, contributed to ambient harm by normalising the view that a core component of Jewish identity was morally tainted, while simultaneously mobilising political and social movements around that designation. This was a critical step in the progression from “Zionism is racism” to the contemporary allegation that Israel is inherently genocidal.

Jewish Antizionists and Harm to Other Jews

An argument that is often put is that antizionism cannot be antisemitism because there are antizionist Jews. However, the existence of Jewish anti-Zionists does not itself harm Jews. Jewish communities have always contained deep disagreements about theology, politics, nationalism and identity. Rather, the question is whether particular forms of antizionist advocacy contribute to harms experienced by Jews as Jews. Where Jewish antizionists endorse or amplify claims that Zionism is inherently racist, colonial, apartheid or genocidal, they strengthen narratives that Jews experience as degrading, exclusionary or threatening. Because Jewish voices are often regarded as uniquely authoritative on Jewish matters, such claims can acquire additional legitimacy and reach, amplifying their impact beyond what would be achieved by non-Jewish speakers alone.

The resulting harm may be substantial. Jewish antizionist advocacy can contribute to ambient environments in which Jewish identity is viewed with suspicion, in which accusations against Jews are normalised, and in which the experiences of Jews reporting antisemitism are discounted. It can also create uncertainty about what harms Jews and provide apparent validation for conduct that Jews experience as hostile or exclusionary. This may contribute to citizenship harm by reinforcing the expectation that Jews must repudiate Zionism or distance themselves from Israel in order to participate fully in public, professional or academic life.

My Perspective on Antizionism & Antisemitism

This account of Zionism and antizionism may not be yours. You may believe that antizionism is about criticising the government of Israel. You may think that Zionism supports killing Palestinians. The point here is not to resolve every historical or political disagreement, but to examine how antizionist expression operates socially and how it may function as antisemitic harm in practice.

There are many ways of challenging a government or rejecting a policy that do not involve harming people. It’s the difference between using language to bully and using language to communicate. Antisemitism is not defined by whether Israel is discussed, but by whether Jews are harmed as Jews. Ordinary political debate about international affairs, including criticism of Israeli governments or policies, does not in itself target diaspora Jews. Diaspora Jews do not govern Israel, vote in Israeli elections or exercise control over Israeli state policy merely by virtue of being Jewish. The existence of disagreement about Israel within Jewish communities further illustrates that criticism of Israeli policy is not inherently antisemitic.

The difficulty arises where discourse about Israel ceases to operate as ordinary political communication or criticism and instead functions socially to stigmatise, intimidate, morally contaminate or condition the participation of Jews. When anti-Israel rhetoric is directed at Australian Jews rather than those who might be able to change what happens in Israel, it is more likely to be antisemitic and harmful than not.

It doesn’t actually matter if you accept my narrative or not. When looking at antisemitism through the lens of social act theory and knowledge of how antisemitism actually works, it does not matter what is true or what the motive. If something does harm, we need to investigate the nature of the harm and whether it should be regulated. A speaker may believe they are attacking nationalism, colonialism or state violence. But if the effect is to deny Jews, alone among all people, the right to participate equally in Australian society, the conduct constitutes antisemitic harm.

This is especially so because Zionism, for most Jews, is not merely a foreign policy preference. It is bound up with peoplehood, historical memory, refuge, language, religion, family, culture, trauma and survival. One need not say that all Jews are Zionists to recognise that attacks on Zionism can harm Jews as Jews. The existence of dissenting Jews does not erase the group harm. Women may disagree about feminism; that does not mean misogyny cannot operate through attacks on women’s collective claims.

The question is whether the antizionist claim imputes collective guilt, denies equal standing, creates a hostile environment or makes Jewish participation conditional upon repudiating an aspect of Jewish identity. The fact that speech is framed as political commentary does not automatically resolve the question. In many areas of law, including defamation and anti-discrimination law, harmful conduct is not immunised simply because the speaker asserts a political purpose or believes the underlying claims to be true. Context, proportionality, reasonableness, and social effect all matter. The relevant issue is whether the form, context, and operation of the conduct unjustifiably harm others or degrade the conditions of equal participation.

There is a simple solution to this problem available to Australian decision-makers. I argue this more fully later, but my proposal will solve many of the problems of determining the boundaries of antisemitism. Amend s18C of the Racial Discrimination Act to include a Schedule listing matters that can be presumed to be antisemitic – including antizionism. The presumption of antisemitism becomes a rebuttable presumption, allowing space for a case to be made that the matter complained of is, in fact, legitimate criticism of Israel. This takes seriously the claim by Jews of the significant harm of antizionism and listens to the experiences recounted by Jews in submissions to the Royal Commission. This solves the problem of the ongoing need to litigate the same harms, at great cost to individuals and the Jewish community. It clarifies the position of antisemitism for those involved in institutions and law enforcement. But it also leaves open the possibility that, in given circumstances, the antisemitism complained of is not actually antisemitism.

There are precedents in antidiscrimination law for resolutions of this nature. Acknowledge that antizionism is harmful. Acknowledge that it must be regulated if a solution to antisemitism is to be found. Acknowledge that there may be one or two particular cases where this may be wrong. In this way, we allow speech to be free and Jews to be protected.

Antisemitism is best understood as a system of social harm operating through mechanisms including imputation, designation, mobilisation, amplification, and ambient intimidation. Here, I apply that framework to one of the most contested issues confronting the Royal Commission: the relationship between antizionism and antisemitism. Antizionism provides an especially useful case study because it sits at the intersection of politics, identity, history, and law. It therefore exposes both the strengths and weaknesses of existing approaches to antisemitism and highlights the need for a more sophisticated account of harm.

Zionism

Zionism is a political movement of the Jewish people based on the right to self-determination and safety in our ancestral homeland. Jewish people have lived continuously in the land of Eretz Yisroel for three thousand years, specifically in the 4 holy cities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberius. Throughout the centuries, Jews have prayed towards Jerusalem, wept for their exile from Israel, travelled to be buried in Israel and retained the language of ancient Israel in their prayers and their learning.

In the late 19^th century, modern Zionism was developed in response to the obscene level of antisemitism in Europe. It arose in response to persistent persecution, exclusion and insecurity experienced by Jews. Early Zionists generally envisaged a Jewish state in Eretz Yisroel built through migration, land purchase, diplomacy and institution-building.

Before 1947, the emerging state possessed no army, although a number of Jewish defence organisations emerged in response to increasing violence in the British Mandate, including the Haganah (1920), Irgun (1931) and Lehi (1940). Jews did not come to their land as a state power and invade a land occupied by others. They were not a European power seeking a colony outside their legitimate sphere of influence. They were pioneers and explorers and a ragtag of 140,000 and 300,000 refugees from Europe, complemented by 850,000 Jews who were expelled from Arab lands.

One could say that the mission of Zionism was fulfilled with the establishment of the Jewish State in 1948. Today, Zionism takes the form of predominantly Jewish support for the state of Israel. Israel is central to the Jewish soul both in terms of spirituality and cultural safety. More Jews are Zionists than pray to God; more Jews are Zionists than speak Yiddish; more Jews have Zionism as a common characteristic than any other identity marker of Judaism.

Because Zionism is inherently a Jewish movement, it doesn’t matter if any given Jew identifies as Zionist or not. The assumption is that you are a Zionist until proven otherwise, as many Jewish creatives and activists have found to their chagrin.

It is crucial to understand that Zionism says nothing about the politics of Israel. As the only democracy in the Middle East, it is expected that there will be extensive political dissent amongst citizens, and there certainly is. The Protest Movement, which demonstrated against the Government of Israel and its so-called reforms, did so with substantial numbers and lasted every week for 9 months until October 7^th and recommenced with the return of the final hostages. The Peace Movement is critical of the Israeli Government. The Women’s Movement is critical of the Israeli Government. About half of Israeli voters are critical of the Government. With a different electoral system in Israel, the Netanyahu government may never have had power. There is also considerable criticism of Israel by Jews living in the Diaspora. Us Zionists are very critical of the Israeli government. Not all. Just like not all Jews call themselves Zionists. Freedom of speech and opinion.

It is also crucial to understand that Zionism says nothing about the Palestinians. The Zionist movement has never been about anyone but the Jews. The Declaration of Independence of Israel invites the Arab population to stay in Israel and live in coexistence. Over 21% of the population of Israel today are Arabs who chose to do so. As with anything controversial, Jews are divided in their opinions about Palestinians. Constant terrorism and antisemitic harm in the name of the Palestinian cause are unlikely to endear Palestinians to Jews. Preventing antisemitism in Australia may have a positive effect on social relations between different groups.

Antizionism

Antizionism, on the other hand, is a political ideology that seeks the destruction of the State of Israel and the Jewish people. It rejects Jewish nationhood and the right to self-determination of the Jews; it engages in the vilification of individuals and groups associated with Zionism and denies the historic and spiritual Jewish connection to the land of Israel. Criticism of Israel is sometimes inaccurately described as antizionism. As we have seen, Zionists themselves frequently criticise Israeli governments, military actions, constitutional arrangements, settlements, judicial reforms, treatment of minorities, and peace-process failures. Such criticism does not negate Zionism because Zionism is not support for any particular Israeli government or policy. One cannot simultaneously support Jewish self-determination and oppose it absolutely. The term antizionism therefore, denotes something more than political criticism: it signifies opposition to Zionism itself — that is, opposition to the legitimacy of Jewish collective self-determination in Israel.

Antizionism is a form of antisemitism which opposes the Jews’ right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. As a consequence, it embraces violence and the destruction of the Jewish people. The term antizionism includes the defence of the terror campaigns of Hamas, Hizb’ut Tahrir, Hezbollah and others. It supports the Intifada (the random suicide attacks on Israeli civilians), and wants to globalise terrorism. It wants to replace the Jewish people in Israel with Palestinians, and calls for Genocide (“from the river to the sea”) to do so. It embraces lies about Israel (there was no famine) and Jews (who kill babies in Gaza). It uses Inversion and Holocaust Denial to undermine the Jewish sense of well-being. In a Diaspora setting, such rhetoric can function not merely as political expression but as intimidation and existential signalling toward Jewish communities. Anti-Zionist discourse may also incorporate forms of inversion, demonisation, conspiracy, or moral absolutism that portray Jews or the Jewish state as uniquely evil, genocidal or globally malign. This constitutes harm to Jews. Such narratives operate socially in ways analogous to older antisemitic libels, particularly where they encourage collective attribution, moral contamination or exclusionary hostility toward Jews generally.

Modern Antizionism

Modern antizionism builds upon the earlier progression from “Zionism is racism” to allegations of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide. Through slogans, posters, social media campaigns and political activism, Israel and Zionism are increasingly portrayed as uniquely evil and criminal enterprises. The central antisemitic mechanism is one of designation and imputation: genocide, apartheid and colonialism are attributed not only to the Israeli state but frequently to Zionists and, by extension, to Jews whether they identify with Zionism or not.

Accusations of genocide, apartheid and settler-colonialism are not ordinary criticisms. They are among the gravest moral accusations available in modern political language. Sometimes they are advanced as legal arguments. Sometimes they are deployed as slogans. The accusation does not merely say “this policy is wrong.” It says, “This collective project is criminal, racist, murderous and beyond legitimacy.”

With respect to genocide, a major issue is the spread of misinformation about the legal position. The ICJ has accepted that it is possible that Israel may have a case to answer. That is a very long way from a finding of genocide. It is even a long way from there being a probability of guilt. There has been no finding of international law. There has been no finding on Israel’s actions. And the harm is intensified when the accusation is asserted as settled fact despite legal contestation; when it is stripped of context or paired with Holocaust inversion; or directed at diaspora Jews. “Zionists are Nazis” is not an analysis. It is degradation. It uses Jewish historical trauma as a weapon against Jews. It does not merely criticise Israel; it symbolically expels Jews from the moral shelter built after the Holocaust.

This is where epistemic harm and ambient harm meet. Epistemic harm occurs when false, reckless or radically simplified claims distort the conditions under which Jews can be understood. Ambient harm occurs when those claims saturate the environment. The first corrupts public knowledge; the second alters public life.

Conclusion

The purpose of this framework is not to suppress political debate. It is to describe more accurately how antisemitism operates. To reflect upon what we are facing in Australia right now. Traditional liberal categories capture direct discrimination, threats and violence. They struggle with cumulative hostility, proxy language, moral imputation, environmental degradation and institutional silence.

Antisemitism works by making Jewish identity socially costly. It works by accusation, repetition, mobilisation and abandonment. It works when Jews are told that their safety depends on silence, dissociation or invisibility. And it works most effectively when institutions insist that nothing legally recognisable has happened because no single incident, viewed in isolation, appears serious enough. Failure to see this will result in failing the Jewish people.

This is the mistake this Royal Commission should not make. The Royal Commission must recognise what is at stake. It must be able to determine which conduct, amplified by context, undermines the equal standing of Jews in Australian public life. And it must understand that adopting the social process theory of antisemitism allows for a range of innovative solutions to antisemitism’s harm to Australia’s democracy. Believing that antisemitism is a contested category rather than a defined harm leaves Jews in the den of the lion.

Different scholars describe what happens to society using different terminology. Durkheim speaks of social solidarity. Putnam and Fukuyama emphasise trust and social capital. Marshall writes of citizenship and participation. Arendt focuses on belonging to a political community. Margalit examines the conditions of a decent society. Waldron highlights equal social standing. Although these traditions employ different terminology, they are describing related dimensions of the same social phenomena: the conditions under which individuals are able to live together as equal members of a common political community.

Equal citizenship refers to the practical ability of individuals to participate in society with dignity, security, belonging and equal standing. A citizen must not merely possess rights on paper; they must be able to exercise those rights in practice without fear, intimidation, exclusion, humiliation or coercion. Social cohesion is therefore not an independent social good floating above society. Rather, it emerges when citizens experience themselves and one another as equal members of a shared community.

Understanding social cohesion in this way is important. It helps explain why antisemitism should be understood as more than prejudice, discrimination, or even hatred. Antisemitism is harmful not simply because it targets Jews. It is harmful because it degrades the conditions of equal citizenship for Jews and, in doing so, weakens the social foundations upon which democratic societies depend.

Equal Citizenship as a Democratic Good

Modern democracies rest upon a simple but profound proposition: every citizen belongs equally within the political community.

This principle is often expressed through legal concepts such as equality before the law or non-discrimination. Yet citizenship has always been understood as something more substantial. T. H. Marshall argued that citizenship consists of the ability to participate fully in the social, economic, and political life of the community. Citizens must not only possess rights but must enjoy the practical capacity to exercise them.

Hannah Arendt similarly argued that rights depend upon membership in a political community. Her famous description of citizenship as the “right to have rights” reflects the idea that rights are meaningful only when individuals are recognised as legitimate members of the community entitled to enjoy them. A society in which certain groups experience their belonging as uncertain or conditional undermines the very foundations upon which rights depend.

Jeremy Waldron advances a similar argument through the concept of equal social standing. For Waldron, a just society is one in which individuals can move through public space secure in the knowledge that they are recognised as equal members of the community. Public expressions of hatred matter because they communicate that some people are less worthy of respect, less entitled to participate, or less welcome than others.

Avishai Margalit’s account of the decent society reaches a comparable conclusion. A decent society is not merely one with good laws. It is one whose institutions do not humiliate people. Public humiliation undermines human dignity and communicates inferior status. A society that tolerates the humiliation of a minority group diminishes not only the victims but also its own moral character.

Taken together, these theories suggest that democratic societies depend upon a set of shared conditions: belonging, dignity, equal standing, participation, trust, and mutual recognition. When these conditions are maintained, citizens experience themselves as members of a common political community. When they are degraded, citizenship itself begins to weaken.

Antisemitism & Democrracy

Antisemitism occupies a distinctive position in the history of democratic societies. For centuries, Jews have functioned as a test case for the willingness of societies to maintain principles of equal citizenship during periods of political stress. Antisemitic movements have repeatedly emerged by identifying Jews as enemies of the social order, attributing collective responsibility for societal problems, and treating Jewish belonging as contingent upon conformity or exclusion. In this sense, antisemitism has often functioned as a precursor to broader democratic deterioration.

The deepest harm of antisemitism is not necessarily found in any single incident. Rather, it lies in the cumulative degradation of the conditions under which Jews participate in society. A Jewish student who conceals her identity at university, a professional who avoids discussing Jewish issues at work, a family that removes Jewish symbols from public view or a community that increases security around schools and synagogues all provide evidence of something deeper than individual offence. These responses suggest that the practical experience of citizenship has changed.

The issue is not whether Jews remain citizens in law. They plainly do. The issue is whether they experience themselves as equal citizens in practice. The matter of security is significant. There are no Muslim schools with armed guards; there are no Christian schools with armed guards. Only Jewish ones. Because only Jews in Australia live in constant fear of our lives. It adds insult to injury that the Jewish community must pay for this security. Surely it is a basic job of the state to ensure the safety of all its citizens. Why are ordinary policemen & women not protecting us like they do other citizens?

Perhaps security is the clearest indicator of degraded citizenship. Jewish schools, synagogues, and communal institutions routinely operate behind security barriers, guards, surveillance systems and protective measures that are unnecessary for other Australians. These arrangements are accepted as normal by the Jewish community. Yet they represent a profound departure from the ordinary expectations of citizenship. Citizens should not require extraordinary security merely to attend school, worship, gather communally, or express their identity. The normalisation of such measures risks obscuring the extent to which equal citizenship has already been compromised.

Citizenship rests upon a reciprocal relationship between citizen and state. Citizens obey the law and participate in democratic life in exchange for the state’s commitment to provide equal protection and equal concern. When a minority community concludes that it must provide its own security, monitor its own threats, or bear extraordinary costs merely to participate in ordinary civic life, confidence in that reciprocal relationship begins to weaken.

When individuals feel compelled to conceal aspects of their identity, avoid public participation, limit their speech, withdraw from civic engagement, or alter their behaviour because of hostility directed at their group, citizenship becomes conditional. Participation carries costs that are not borne equally by others. The citizen remains formally included while becoming informally excluded. Take the enjoyment of the Melbourne CBD, for example. We used to spend weekends in town, shopping or at the state library or art gallery. That has long been out of reach for Melbourne’s Jews.

Public spaces play a unique role in democratic societies. They are the locations in which citizens encounter one another as equals despite profound differences of religion, ethnicity, class, and political belief. When members of a minority group begin avoiding particular streets, universities, institutions, events, or forms of participation because of hostility directed at their identity, public space ceases to function as genuinely shared civic space. What is lost is not merely the confidence of the targeted minority but one of the central mechanisms through which democratic societies maintain social trust.

The phenomenon of informal exclusion is particularly visible in contemporary manifestations of antisemitism. Much contemporary antisemitism operates through repeated accusations, symbolic exclusion, social ostracism, professional consequences, public campaigns, and assumptions of collective guilt. Individual incidents may appear minor when viewed in isolation. Their cumulative effect, however, may be profound.

Contemporary antisemitism increasingly operates environmentally rather than episodically. The cumulative effect of repeated slogans, demonstrations, online hostility, institutional failures, public accusations, symbolic acts, and social exclusion is not merely the production of individual harms. It is the transformation of the social environment itself. Jews do not simply encounter isolated incidents of hostility. Rather, the conditions within which they participate in public life are altered. Public spaces become less welcoming. Institutions become less trusted. Participation becomes more costly. Belonging becomes less secure.

It is for this reason that the concept of ambient harm is so important. Ambient harm does not arise from a single event. It emerges from the accumulation of signals that communicate to members of a group that they are viewed differently from others. Over time, these signals alter behaviour, perceptions, and participation. The result is a degradation of citizenship that may be difficult to identify through traditional legal frameworks focused on discrete incidents.

From Citizenship Harm to Social Cohesion

Social cohesion is often treated as the primary value at stake. This submission takes a different approach. The primary value is equal citizenship. Social cohesion follows when citizens experience dignity, belonging, participation, trust and equal standing. Conversely, social cohesion deteriorates when those conditions are undermined. Antisemitism therefore threatens social cohesion not directly but through its degradation of Jewish citizenship. It is because Jews cease to experience themselves as secure and equal members of the political community that broader social trust begins to weaken.

Social cohesion is produced through everyday interactions among citizens. Individuals cooperate because they trust one another. They trust one another because they assume that all members of society possess equal standing and are entitled to participate on equal terms.

When antisemitism communicates that Jews are less trustworthy, less welcome, less loyal, less deserving, or less entitled to participate fully in public life, it attacks this assumption of equal standing. The immediate victims are Jews. The secondary victim is the broader system of trust that allows diverse societies to function.

The causal relationship may therefore be understood as follows:

Antisemitism → degradation of citizenship → erosion of trust and belonging → weakening of social cohesion → broader social harms.

This sequence helps explain why antisemitism should be regarded not only as a minority rights issue but also as a matter of democratic concern.

It is weeks into the Royal Commission. We have heard accounts of experiences that most Australians would regard as abnormal and unacceptable. We have also witnessed repeated attempts to minimise, recharacterise or contest those experiences. Yet many of us are still struggling to understand how antisemitism works and where it derives its power.

The difficulty is not simply one of identification. Most Australians recognise a swastika when they see one. Most understand that vandalising a synagogue or threatening a Jewish person is wrong. The challenge is understanding the mechanisms through which antisemitism operates. Antisemitism rarely begins with violence. It begins with ideas, assumptions and imputations. Jews are assigned characteristics, motives, loyalties, powers or responsibilities that they do not possess as individuals. Those imputations are then repeated, amplified and normalised until they shape how Jews are perceived and treated.

To understand antisemitism, it is therefore necessary to move beyond isolated incidents and examine the processes through which meaning is attached to Jews. Antisemitism operates through imputation, designation, amplification and mobilisation. It derives much of its power not from what Jews do, but from what others imagine Jews to be. Much of the time, we would be hard-pressed to prove that the perpetrators hate Jews. Their action is based on a response to what they believe Jews represent.

The traditional liberal account of antisemitism is that antisemitism is a belief, a prejudice, an attitude, an insult, a discriminatory decision or an act of violence directed at Jews as Jews. Familiar questions follow: Was there intention? Was there incitement? Was there a victim? Was there a direct causal link between the words and the harm? Was the speech merely offensive, or did it cross some recognisable threshold into intimidation, vilification, discrimination, threat or violence?

That account is not wrong. It captures much of what antisemitism does. But it is incomplete. It treats antisemitism as a series of discrete incidents, when in fact antisemitism is a social process. Antisemitism does not merely express hatred. It assigns meaning. It imputes guilt. It marks Jews as morally suspect. It recruits bystanders. It alters environments. It changes what Jews can safely say, wear, teach, study, publish, support, grieve or celebrate.

The central point is this: antisemitism is more that a set of opinions about Jews or actions towards Jews. It is a way of doing things to Jews through social meaning.

British philosopher John Austin explained that language does not merely describe the world; in the right circumstances, it performs acts. To say “I promise” is not to report a promise, but to make one. To say “I sentence you”, is not to describe punishment but to impose it, if uttered by the right authority in the right setting. Hate speech scholarship develops this insight. MacKinnon, Langton, Maitra, McGowan, Waldron and Jones all show, in different ways, that words may subordinate, rank, license, exclude, silence or degrade, depending on social context and authority.

Antisemitic speech marks Jews as alien; casts them as collectively guilty; presents them as a danger to others; removes their ordinary moral individuality; denies their peoplehood; criminalises their attachments; or makes Jewish public presence conditional on apology, dissociation, or silence. Its force lies not only in its literal words but in what those words do within an existing history of Jewish vulnerability.

Antisemitism can be seen to operate through a sequence of escalating social acts. Not every incident proceeds through every stage. But historically and sociologically, these stages frequently interact and reinforce one another. As a rule, insufficient attention is paid to this process, which results in a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of antisemitism.

Here are the stages:

Imputation

Imputation attaches blame, danger, corruption or moral contamination to Jews as Jews. Jews are portrayed as collectively responsible for capitalism, colonialism, racism, genocide, financial manipulation, media control, war, or social decay. The individual Jew disappears into a morally charged collective identity.

Designation

Designation marks Jews as a category of people to be treated differently. Jews become “Zionists,” “settlers,” “colonisers,” “baby killers,” “foreign agents,” or embodiments of illegitimate power. Designation transforms identity into social suspicion. The Jew is no longer encountered primarily as citizen, neighbour, colleague or student, but as bearer of a politically contaminated status. When antisemitism is described by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks l’z as a virus that mutates, he was referring to the presentation of antisemitism. However, his analysis fits with the ways Jews are designated as other.

Mobilisation

Mobilisation encourages others to act upon that designation. This may occur through chants, slogans, online campaigns, boycotts, exclusions, harassment, protests outside Jewish spaces, institutional resolutions, or demands that Jews publicly dissociate themselves from Israel or Zionism to remain socially acceptable. Mobilisation creates permission structures. It signals that hostility towards Jews is morally justified, politically necessary or even socially rewarded.

Amplification

Amplification magnifies the social force of the antisemitic speech and conduct. Repetition, crowd size, institutional endorsement, online circulation, symbolic imagery, authority figures, timing during conflict, and failure by institutions to respond all intensify the effect. Amplification converts isolated acts into social conditions.

Ambient Harm

Ambient harm emerges when hostility becomes part of the surrounding environment. Jews begin to alter their behaviour because the atmosphere itself feels unsafe or degrading. They conceal visible markers of Jewish identity, avoid public discussion, withdraw from civic participation, reconsider where they study or work, or fear entering public space as Jews. The harm is no longer confined to particular incidents. It becomes environmental and cumulative.

Damage to Property

Damage to property often follows. Synagogues, Jewish schools, cemeteries, businesses, community centres, homes, memorials and symbols are vandalised, graffitied, defaced or attacked. Property damage is not merely economic harm. It is symbolic territorial messaging. It communicates that Jewish presence is unwelcome, vulnerable, or outside the protection of ordinary civic order.

Damage to Persons

Damage to persons is the final and most visible stage. This includes intimidation, threats, assault, harassment, stalking, exclusion from public participation, and in extreme cases, murder or mass violence. Physical violence rarely emerges in a vacuum. It is often preceded by prolonged processes of imputation, designation, mobilisation and amplification that gradually erode the perceived moral status of Jews and normalise hostility towards them.

Seen in this way, antisemitism is not simply prejudice held in private minds. It is a social process through which Jews are progressively transformed from equal participants in public life into morally suspect targets against whom hostility appears justified.

This is why imputation is central. Antisemitism works by attaching a morally contaminating meaning to Jewish identity. The Jew is made responsible for capitalism, communism, colonialism, racism, child murder, genocide, apartheid, media control, foreign influence, or war. These imputations need not be stated as “all Jews are guilty.” This may be conveyed indirectly, through slogans, posters, chants, cartoons, institutional statements, selective demands for denunciation, or the singling out of Jewish students, academics, artists, businesses or community organisations for events in Israel or Gaza.

Imputation is powerful because it moves the target from individual conduct to inherited or collective status. A person is no longer treated as a citizen, student, neighbour, colleague or professional. They are treated as the bearer of a tainted group identity. The question asked of them is not “What did you do?” but “Will you answer for what your group has done?” That shift is one of the core mechanisms by which antisemitism degrades equal citizenship.

This also explains why antisemitism cannot be adequately understood through offence alone. Offence is subjective and episodic. Antisemitic harm is often structural and environmental. I refer to this as ambient antisemitic harm. The problem is not simply that a Jew hears something unpleasant. The problem is that the statement may change the terms on which Jews are able to participate in public life. Waldron’s language of dignity is useful here: hate speech attacks the public assurance that members of vulnerable minorities are accepted as equal members of society. The harm is not only emotional distress. It is the withdrawal, or attempted withdrawal, of social assurance.

Understanding this process changes the questions we ask. Instead of asking only whether a person hates Jews, we ask what is being attributed to Jews and why. Are Jews being held collectively responsible for actions they did not commit? Are they being assigned motives, loyalties, powers or moral characteristics that are not attributed to others? Are they being transformed from individuals into symbols of some wider social evil? These questions direct attention to the mechanism through which antisemitism operates rather than merely its final manifestations.

This is why antisemitism should concern all Australians, not only Jews. Antisemitism is not merely a form of hostility. It is a way of organising social meaning. It teaches societies that some people may be judged not as individuals but as representatives of a collective evil. It replaces personal responsibility with inherited suspicion. It substitutes imputation for evidence. By the time synagogues are vandalised, students are excluded or people are assaulted, much of the work has already been done. The assignment of meaning has occurred, the designation has been made, and the hostility has been normalised.

The deeper question remains: why are these imputations so powerful?

The answer is that antisemitism rarely presents itself as hatred. It presents itself as moral judgment. The antisemite does not usually say: “I dislike Jews.” Rather, she says: “Jews are responsible.” Jews are blamed for capitalism and communism, for colonialism and cosmopolitanism, for war and for peace, for excessive tribalism and excessive universalism. The content changes across time and place. The structure remains remarkably constant.

This is what gives antisemitism its unusual resilience. It attaches itself to whatever a society most fears, resents or wishes to explain. Jews become symbols onto which wider social anxieties are projected. They are transformed from individuals into explanations.

Once that transformation occurs, hostility towards Jews can be reimagined as virtue on the part of the perpetrator. The antisemite is no longer attacking a Jew (her neighbour, colleague or fellow citizen). She is fighting the good fight against racism, colonialism, capitalism, genocide, globalism, nationalism or some other perceived evil.

This is why antisemitism is so difficult to confront. The challenge is rarely persuading people that hatred is wrong. Most people already agree that hatred is wrong. The challenge is persuading people that they are participating in antisemitism at all. Antisemitism derives much of its power from its ability to disguise itself as something else.

So it should be understood that antisemitism is not merely a form of hostility. It is a way of organising social meaning. It teaches societies that some people may be judged not as individuals but as representatives of a collective evil. It replaces personal responsibility with inherited suspicion.

The lesson of history is not that antisemitism inevitably ends in violence. The lesson is that violence becomes thinkable only after a long process of moral transformation in which Jews cease to be seen as ordinary human beings and become symbols of something larger and darker. By the time the violence arrives, much of the work has already been done.

If we fail to understand that process, we will continue to recognise antisemitism only after the damage is done. We will condemn the vandalism, the exclusion and the violence, while overlooking the ideas and assumptions that made those outcomes possible in the first place.

Understanding antisemitism in this way changes the questions we ask. Instead of asking only whether a particular statement is offensive, hateful or intended to cause harm, we begin to ask what social meaning is being attached to Jews and what that meaning does. Are Jews being assigned collective guilt? Are they being marked as dangerous, disloyal or morally contaminated? Are they being transformed from individuals into symbols of some wider social evil?

These questions direct attention to the mechanisms through which antisemitism operates. By the time synagogues are vandalised, students are excluded or people are assaulted, much of the work has already been done. The assignment of meaning has occurred. The designation has been made. The hostility has been amplified. The environment has changed.

To understand antisemitism, therefore, we must look beyond the swastika and beyond the assault. We must examine the process through which meaning is attached to Jews, amplified through institutions and social norms, and ultimately converted into permission. Only then can we recognise antisemitism not merely as a series of incidents, but as a social process that shapes how Jews are perceived, treated and ultimately included or excluded from public life.

By the time synagogues are vandalised, students are excluded or people are assaulted, much of the work has already been done. Imputation identifies the earlier stages of the process: the assignment of guilt, the construction of suspicion and the gradual erosion of moral individuality. If antisemitism begins with imputation, then effective responses must begin there too.

Antisemitism operates along a sliding scale of harm, beginning with seemingly minor acts of offence or exclusion and expanding toward deep structural damage to social equality and belonging. At one end lie insults, stereotypes, or everyday slights—microaggressions that may appear trivial in isolation but cumulatively impose a heavy psychological toll. They remind Jewish individuals that their identity can be a target of derision or suspicion, cultivating vigilance, self‑censorship, and alienation. Even at this level, antisemitism corrodes the assumption of ordinary safety and mutual respect that citizens rely on in public life.

As these attitudes accumulate and normalise, they create a permissive environment for more overt discrimination. Social and institutional exclusion—such as unequal representation, harassment in educational settings, or denial of religious accommodation—translates bias into practice. At this middle stage, harm becomes systemic rather than interpersonal: it structures opportunity and belonging. The repeated experience of being treated as an outsider undermines trust in civic institutions and deters participation in social and political processes.

At the far end of the scale lies the collective harm: the erosion of equal belonging and shared citizenship itself. When antisemitism is allowed to fester, it weakens the moral compact on which plural societies depend—a shared belief that all members are entitled to equal dignity, safety, and voice. This kind of harm transcends individuals; it impoverishes the civic fabric by normalising hierarchies of worth. What begins as insult or offence, if unaddressed, thus matures into a civic injury: the corrosion of equality and the attenuation of democratic solidarity. While as Jews this is something we have deeply understood, there has been no language with which to articulate our sense of alienation in the place we call home.

Types of Harm

What follows is a list of types of antisemitic harm. I’ve included information about whether the existing law and social practice acknowledge the particular harm. The question there is whether or not the harm experienced by Jews is acknowledged to be harmful. The following comments about Australian law and remedy are based on the current situation, which I don’t believe is adequate. I will later propose law reform. The following is the current baseline: whether an action may currently be available under Australian law and what sort of remedy might be available. This is fleshed out below.

· Insult or Offence: Acts such as insults, jokes, or slurs that signal social contempt or exclusion. They communicate that Jewish identity is somehow lesser or suspect, even when they carry no material consequence.

· Psychological Toll: Experiences of antisemitism, particularly everyday discriminatory acts, are significantly associated with poorer mental health outcomes among Jewish populations.

· Affront to Dignity: Being mocked, stereotyped, or demeaned because of one’s identity undermines self-worth, safety, and equal standing.

· Epistemic Harm: A groups reality is denied or the truth of their experience is challenged, there is deep harm not just because Jews are constructed thereby as morally illegitimate participants in society, the moral and factual framework through which Jews are understood becomes distorted in ways that normalise hostility and exclusion.

· Ambient (Environmental) Harm: The cumulative effect of repeated acts, symbols, narratives, and behaviours that create a pervasive atmosphere of hostility or exclusion, even where no single act crosses a legal threshold. Harm arises from the environment itself, altering how Jewish individuals experience

· Online Engagement: Exposure to antisemitic content online, including harassment, exclusion, and reputational harm through viral misinformation.

· Online Radicalization: Hateful online ecosystems that normalise and amplify antisemitism, increasing the likelihood of offline harm.

· Economic Burden: Financial costs imposed on Jewish individuals and communities, including security, property damage, lost opportunities, and legal expenses.

· Erosion of the Conditions of Equal Participation & Citizenship: Antisemitism degrades the social environment such that Jewish individuals cannot participate equally in civic life—education, employment, and public discourse—without fear or exclusion.

· Physical Violence: Assaults, threats, arson and attacks on individuals or property.

Addressing these harms requires a comprehensive approach that combines clear legal definitions, robust content moderation, structured intergroup contact, and accessible victim compensation programs.

At its most minor, the level that Gordon W Allport termed “antilocution”, antisemitism may take the form of expressive or dignitary harm—insults, insinuations, or casual mockery that cause embarrassment or offence but fall short of legal thresholds for discrimination or incitement. These acts are generally not regulated by law because they rest within the sphere of free expression. However, when speech is legally protected, its impact is socially minimised. Two examples are: (1) the casual assertions that “Jews control finance or media,” and (2) occasions when “Jew” is used as a slur to denote greed or dishonesty. These acts are frequently dismissed as trivial, yet they perform an important structural function: they create a shared background of suspicion. As Helen Fein argued, such expressions form part of a cultural repertoire that enables more serious harms to be interpreted as justified or intelligible. Crucially, at this stage, harm is often not recognised as harm—either by perpetrators or by institutions—and this lack of recognition is itself constitutive of the injury.

At an intermediate level, antisemitism produces recognisable psychological and relational harm, but still often falls into contested legal space. Two examples are: (1) when a Jewish student is required to answer for Israel’s actions in a classroom, thereby being treated as collectively responsible; and (2) when there is targeted online abuse accusing Jews of crimes such as genocide. Here, the harm is more visible: it affects dignity, identity, and participation. Empirical research by Rusi Jaspal shows that such experiences generate anxiety, identity threat, and withdrawal from public engagement. Yet even at this level, recognition remains unstable—institutions may treat the conduct as political discourse rather than discrimination. The result is a gap between experienced harm and acknowledged harm, which limits legal and institutional response.

At a higher level, antisemitism becomes structural and exclusionary, shaping the conditions of participation regardless of any single act. Two examples are: (1) when Jewish students avoid parts of a campus where antisemitic slogans are routinely expressed, effectively losing equal access to education; and (2) where organisations refuse to engage with Jewish groups on the basis that they are “Zionist” and therefore illegitimate. Here, harm is no longer dependent on subjective perception alone—it is objectively manifested in exclusion from social goods. Yet recognition still lags: institutions often interpret these patterns as political disagreement rather than systemic discrimination. This reflects what recognition theorists identify as misrecognition—a failure to see status injury as such, even when its effects are concrete.

This leads to what can be described as ambient or environmental harm, where the key feature is not a single act but a cumulative effect on the atmosphere. Two examples are: (1) the repeated public chanting of slogans widely understood by Jewish communities as endorsing violence, which create a pervasive sense of threat; and (2) the circulation of Holocaust inversion narratives that equate Jews with Nazis, thereby distorting historical memory and moral standing. At this level, harm is experienced as a change in the conditions of citizenship: individuals anticipate hostility and adjust their behaviour accordingly. Work such as that of the Australian Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism highlights that these harms are real and measurable, but they remain difficult for the law to capture because each contributing act may be individually lawful. Recognition here is the central problem: unless the cumulative effect is acknowledged, the harm remains legally invisible despite being socially pervasive.

Australian anti-discrimination and vilification law is effective at recognising discrete, attributable acts that can be tied to an identifiable respondent and assessed against a reasonableness threshold (for example, conduct reasonably likely to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate under s 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth)). It is also capable, at its upper end, of addressing serious and intentional harms through criminal law. What it systematically misses is harm that is cumulative, distributed, and environmental. Where antisemitism operates through repetition across actors, platforms, and settings—each act individually lawful or trivial—the law fragments the analysis and treats each instance in isolation. This produces a structural blind spot: ambient harm is experienced as real, pervasive, and exclusionary, but remains legally invisible because it cannot be easily attributed, aggregated, or pleaded as a single cause of action. The result is not an absence of harm, but an absence of recognition, with the consequence that the law intervenes too late—only once harm has crystallised into forms it is already equipped to see.

By referring to the significance of social cohesion for the well-being of Australian democracy, the Royal Commission has opened the door for legal recognition of the real harm of antisemitism. It is predominantly the ambient nature of antisemitic harm that leads to the breakdown of social cohesion. Social cohesion refers to the capacity of a society to sustain cooperation, trust, and mutual recognition among its members. Social solidarity reflects the underlying sense of shared belonging and commitment to the equal standing of others. Both are essential to the functioning of a liberal democracy. Antisemitism undermines the conditions of social coercion in a distinctive way. By marking Jews as a category subject to suspicion, hostility, or conditional acceptance, it disrupts the assumption of equal membership. When this occurs at scale, as it has over the last few years, the effect is not confined to those directly targeted. It signals a weakening of the norms that sustain inclusion across society. The relevant question is therefore not only whether particular acts are unlawful or offensive, but whether the cumulative effect of conduct degrades the conditions under which equal citizenship is possible. If so, the law must find a way of rectifying the situation. A democratic Australia cannot survive the onslaught of harm experienced by Jews and Non-Jews alike.

The most pressing feature of contemporary antisemitism in Australia is its normalisation. Jewish Australians are increasingly required to reorganise their lives in order to remain safe within society—avoiding particular locations, concealing visible markers of Jewish identity, and accepting heightened security measures for ordinary communal and religious life. These are not isolated responses to discrete incidents. They are adaptive behaviours to a changing social environment.

I have presented my submission to The Royal Commission in 6 parts as it is complex and needs room for digestion. This is from my second submission. In the fullness of time, my submissions will advance six core propositions.

Firstly, social cohesion and social solidarity are foundational conditions of a functioning liberal democracy. Antisemitism, like other forms of racism, undermines these conditions by fracturing the shared assumptions of equal membership and mutual trust upon which democratic life depends.

Secondly, antisemitism is best understood as a social practice that produces harm to Jews as Jews. This practice operates through identifiable mechanisms, including imputation (attributing collective guilt or hidden power), designation (marking Jews as a distinct and problematic category), mobilisation (encouraging or legitimising hostility), stigmatisation (attaching social taint), exclusion (restricting participation in civic and institutional life), and ambient intimidation (creating conditions of insecurity that inhibit full participation in society).

Thirdly, existing Australian legal and policy responses are increasingly inadequate because they focus primarily on discrete incidents and individual acts rather than cumulative social environments. Antisemitism includes forms of ambient harm produced through repetition, scale, authority, and institutional embedding. These harms manifest in fear, exclusion, self-censorship, and withdrawal from public and institutional life.

Fourthly, the Ambient Antisemitic Harm Principle needs to be used to assess when conduct, considered cumulatively and in context, crosses the threshold into actionable harm.

Fifthly, the principle is operationalised through a proposed Ambient Antisemitic Harm Test. The central inquiry becomes whether conduct undermines the conditions necessary for equal participation in democratic and civic life.

Sixthly, this framework has significant implications for law and policy. Effective responses must address not only individual incidents, but also the environments in which antisemitic harm is produced and normalised. Remedies from other areas of law can be brought to bear to address the problems of antisemitism.

Normalisation and the Environmental Shift in Antisemitism

Antisemitism in contemporary Australia is increasingly experienced not as a series of discrete incidents, but as a condition of social life. While acts of harassment, vilification, and violence remain central, they no longer exhaust the phenomenon. Instead, antisemitism now operates cumulatively, diffusely, and environmentally—altering the conditions under which Jewish Australians participate in public, institutional, and civic life.

This shift is not merely descriptive. It has normative and legal consequences. Frameworks that are calibrated to respond to identifiable acts—however serious—are poorly equipped to address harms that arise from repetition, scale, and social embedding. The result is a growing disjunction between the lived experience of antisemitism and the legal and policy tools designed to address it.

Normalisation operates in several ways. First, conduct that would previously have been recognised as degrading or exclusionary is increasingly framed as part of legitimate political discourse. The shift is not only in content, but in reception. Statements, slogans, and behaviours that produce fear or exclusion for Jewish Australians are often treated as matters for debate rather than as harms requiring response. Secondly, repetition plays a central role. Even where individual instances are ambiguous or contested, their cumulative effect is not. Recurrent exposure to hostile narratives, public demonstrations or institutional positioning creates an environment in which Jewish identity becomes contested and precarious. Thirdly, authority and institutional context amplify this process. When antisemitic tropes or exclusionary practices are tolerated or reproduced within universities, cultural institutions, professional bodies, government or public discourse, they acquire legitimacy and reach. The issue is not only what is said or done, but where, by whom, and with what degree of endorsement or indifference.

Normalisation, in this sense, is not a single act but a social process. Its effect is to shift the baseline of what is experienced as safe, acceptable, and equal. The consequences of this shift are observable in the adaptive behaviours of Jewish Australians. These behaviours are not hypothetical; they are a rational response to a changed environment.

Changed behaviours of Jewish Australians include avoiding particular geographic areas or public spaces; modifying or concealing visible markers of Jewish identity; relying on heightened security measures for routine communal, religious and educational activities; reassessing participation in professional, academic or civic institutions; and withdrawing from public expression of identity or opinion. These adaptations are individually rational but collectively significant. They indicate not merely the presence of hostility, but a change in the conditions on which they are allowed to participate in society. When members of a community alter their behaviour in order to maintain safety or access, the principle of equal citizenship - the basis of democratic governance - is already under strain. Importantly, these effects do not depend on direct victimisation. Individuals may experience the consequences of antisemitism without being the target of a specific act. The environment itself becomes the source of harm.

Before looking at conditions of democratic participation and equal citizenship, I want to examine the harm that antisemitism does to Jews. Without understanding that harm, we cannot address it.

Although there has been an increase in antisemitism over a number of years, none of us was prepared for what is happening in Australia in 2026. One explanation for this is that antisemitism has morphed, and we were not ready for it. Now, antisemitism attacks our very being. It attacks our ability to participate equally in society - at school, in medical facilities, in day-to-day life. Antisemitism is not about speech at all. It is about harming Jews in as many ways as possible.

The personal experiences of antisemitism I submitted to the Royal Commission, which I share below, may seem a little unusual. Especially because these are not the sort of experiences where legal action seems possible. But they are examples of the way in which antisemitism has moved from individual behaviour to ambient, environmental damage. So the trick is going to be, how can we develop a strategy for eliminating the form of antisemitism that limits who we are as people and degrades our right to equal citizenship

D. Firsthand Accounts of Antisemitism

1. At Peter Mac (March 2026)

I am currently undergoing Breast Cancer Treatment at Peter Mac. No one there has ever acted improperly towards me. However, I do know about abuse of Jews by people in positions of power in Australian medical facilities, such as the 2 nurses on Feb 25 in Bankstown, Sydney, who unashamedly said “I won’t treat them, I’ll kill them” and “You have no idea how many Israeli dogs came to this hospital and I send them to Jahannam (hell)”.

On one visit to Peter Mac I became extremely afraid. I did not know which medical professional I was meeting with that day, as this was a first appointment with a new speciality. A woman, wearing a staff lanyard, was wandering around authoritatively. As she got closer to me, I started sweating. I do not exaggerate! What would I do if I was meant to be her patient? I couldn’t go into a cubicle with her. That felt extremely unsafe. I did have a cup of coffee. Should I use it to protect myself? Throw it on her and run. This may seem like an extreme response, yet I hear similar fear expressed all around me. I used to have a keffiyeh that I enjoyed wearing, bought from Bedouins in the Sinai desert. Now the keffiyeh too has become a symbol of hatred owned by purveyors of terror and supported by thousands of Australians who, I assume, must be totally ignorant of what it represents. The test of antisemitism is whether a reasonable Jewish person would feel unsafe and be fearful because of the action taken. It is not whether the perpetrator intended to make a Jewish person feel unsafe or whether they had ill will towards Jews. The question is the impact of their behaviour. I testify that a large percentage of people feel unsafe in the circumstances I describe.

The particular woman had caused that level of fear in me because she was wearing a hijab. I don’t think all Muslims are terrorists by any means. On the other hand, to the best of my knowledge, not one hijab wearing woman internationally has ever expressed solidarity with the Jewish community when there have been antisemitic attacks or expressed concern about the sexual violence of 7th October. Islamophobia is a disproportionate fear of Muslims or Islam. My fear is not irrational or disproportionate. Even if only a tiny number of Muslims are terrorists, that could still amount to more than all the Jews in the world. What’s more, the fact that I am surrounded by calls to “globalise the Intifada” (kill Jews) and “From the River to the Sea” (genocide or ethnic cleansing of Jews), which the government and others in authority tolerate, gives me no confidence that anyone would come to my aid if I were attacked.

No one should have to live with this level of fear. Racism is the experience of the target group, independent of the intention of the perpetrator. The question is: Would a reasonable member of the target group experience fear, isolation, distress or danger as a result of the perpetrator’s behaviour? If so, the experience is one of racism or antisemitism when the target group are Jews. This is Australian law: 18C Race Discrimination Act.

The palpable fear being experienced by the community is pervasive. In the medical situation in particular, the vulnerability is extreme. A number of friends have felt at extreme risk of being poisoned or injured in public hospitals when the staff wear hijabs. Many recount an experience where they or their children have had a similar reaction to a “near antisemitic experience”.

Recommendation: This is not strictly speaking about the hijab. The issue is the divisions in Australian society created by the general display and acceptance of antisemitism. Prior to Oct 7, Australian Jews did not fear women wearing hijabs. The situation has changed. The threat posed by the broader society is extreme. This incident demonstrates the need to reduce the temperature, to create circumstances where social solidarity with Jews is demonstrable and where there is an environment of something more than just acceptance. The solution is not to ban the hijab. It is for the environment to be made safe and to feel safe for Jews. This has been done for other groups – the trans community in particular – so it could be done to protect Jews

2. Visiting the NGV (January 2026?)

On an ordinary Sunday afternoon, I headed with my daughter and 1 year old grandson to the NGV. This used to be a reasonably ordinary activity, but I forgot that nobody has taken responsibility or control of the pro-Palestinian rally that every Sunday disrupts the CBD at great expense to the taxpayer. On this occasion we arrived at Flinders St and headed towards the Gallery. We were unable to proceed because of the constant stream of pro-Palestinian protestors. After about 5 minutes of being jostled, my adult daughter was hysterical. We were separated by the demonstrators. I had the baby and my daughter was afraid for her child’s life. She did not believe that the nonchalant police would do anything should overt violence erupt.

The pro-Palestinian rally may not have appeared to be particularly violent to the outsider. The protesters were walking. Chatting. Holding banners with no particular interest. But their banners said terrible things. “Kill the Jews” “Globalise the Intifada” “From the river to the sea” – all specifically directed at us. Even “Free Palestine” is not a nod of support for Palestinians but a call for Jewish genocide. We are accused of blood libels and Apartheid, one of the worst sins of the 20th century. There were watermelons and inverted red triangles. This is violent, threatening language. We felt forced into close proximity with people who, at the very same time, are saying they want to kill us and our people.

My daughter did not breathe naturally until we were back on the train home. She had flashes of Nazi roundups and of the violent encounters with the pro-Palestinian lobby in London. Her fear was palpable. Her experience as a member of Melbourne’s CSG enhanced rather than deflected her anxiety.

You may think that this was an extreme reaction, but many reasonable members of the Jewish community and the mainstream non-Jewish community have simply stopped going to the CBD on a Sunday. They are fearful as to what might happen, particularly if they are identifiably Jewish. The fear is directly caused by the rallies and the failure of the police to act in response to antisemitism when they could have.

Recommendation: The Government should consider significant regulation of political protest as the current system has a chilling effect on the speech of the target group at the same time as limiting their access to public spaces. It is possible to do this consistently with freedom of speech. Proposals around the right to Political Assembly and the Right to Public Protest are considered elsewhere.

3. At Melbourne Law Seminar (May 2025?)

In approximately May 2025 I attended a seminar at Melbourne University Law School about Funding Opportunities for women’s rights work in the Asia Pacific. At the time I was President of a Jewish Women’s NGO and the topic was of specific interest to me. I had been a student at Melbourne University Law and was previously a member of academic staff. I have over the year attended a few seminars. I expected an academic level of discussion and this happened initially.

After half an hour or so, the conversation started referencing Gaza and the “genocide”. This was irrelevant to our subject matter. There was no room to debate whether there was a genocide perpetrated by Israel (which there has not been) and there clearly was no intention for this to be a topic for academic scrutiny. The initial disruption found approval, so the matter of Jews eating babies in Gaza was brazenly raised. There was no attempt to respond to this.

There is no place in the classroom or academy for ideological sloganeering. This is a specific method of limiting free speech. Where you engage in racist speech, it is well-known to have a “chilling effect” on free speech. That is, racism limits the speech of the target groups, makes them inarticulate or even unable to speak at all. In this situation the net sum of speech needs to add and subtract what is said and what is not.

4. Melbourne Law (May 2025?)

As I was leaving the Law School I was approached by a man in his late 40s. He whispered to me in Hebrew a very familiar prayer. I was quite shocked, but he was checking that I was a co-religionist so he could safely talk to me. While what he told me is strictly his story, he entrusted it to me so I think I should recount it here.

The man in question is a senior member of the Law School, recipient of numerous awards, an international superstar of a Scholar. (I looked that up later). He told me he had been reduced to a shadow of himself by the pro-Palestinian lobby, real students or not. He felt that he could never teach properly again and he had no escape from the relentless attack he was being subjected to. The subject he was teaching did not lend itself to a Palestinian narrative or one with anything to do with race.

What he told me was that at the beginning of his classes the room was overtaken by pro-Palestinian students chanting racist slogans and radicalising his class. Every class. When he would restore order, he would begin teaching. His teaching methodology was interactive with a lot of participation and small group work. Whenever he left a gap, students would begin chanting “free Palestine” over and over. This was a rolling tide of abuse which prevented him from delivering his classes as planned and left him shaking and undermined. If a student raised a hand, there was a high probability that they would say “free Palestine”.

He told me that he would revert to full lecture-mode in future semesters. He would not allow even one question from the room. This was far from optimal, but he was not going through that abuse again.

Recommendation: It is well-known that many of the pro-Palestinian activists on Australian campuses are not students. Some are members of banned terrorist organisations such as Hizb ut-Tahrir, others are simply in the payroll of the activists. This must be responded to.

5. Webinar hosted by ANU (May 2024)

Early in 2024 I attended a Webinar, Environmental and Land Justice in Palestine. It was part of a series on Reimagining Palestine. I did not expect the narrative to be friendly towards Jews, although I consider this attitude to be foolhardy. No resolution to the conflict can be arrived at without each side demonstrating goodwill towards the other. As a peace activist, I need to understand the Palestinian narrative and how it can be integrated with the Israeli perspective.

This Webinar did not rely on or relate to scholarship. Instead, it spouted hatred in the name of a particular strand of critical anthropology associated with Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropologist at Columbia University. The Webinar involved adulation and reinforcement of her book Facts on the Ground (2001). The argument is that archaeology conducted in Israel is not a neutral process of uncovering objective historical facts, but is a practice shaped by institutional priorities and national identity formation, particularly in relation to Jewish historical narratives and territorial claims. It was not open for discussion but was stated as truth that the “facts” of Israeli & Ancient Hebrew archaeology are “produced” through interpretive frameworks, rather than discovered.

The discussion accepted that using archaeology to privilege certain historical narratives over others, leads to the erasure of indigeneity of oppressed people like the Palestinians. What I heard was that “Israeli archaeologists stole and reburied evidence of Palestinian indigeneity,” marginalising the Palestinian claim to history. This is accusing the Jewish people of theft and denying their 10 000-year connection with the land. It is accusing us of dishonesty. It is suggesting that we do not have legitimate evidence of continuous presence on the land throughout that time.

This is a libel against Jewish people.

6. Reverse Canary Mission https://www.reversecanarymission.org/person/melinda-jones

This is an organisation that doxes individuals for the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinian people worldwide.”

I recently was added to this database. I am attacked for being a Zionist, which is an inherent part of my Jewish identity. From the time of the Babylonian Empire, I have wept for Zion. In my daily prayers, I face Jerusalem and invest emotionally in my Zionist commitment. In the songs I sing, in the dances I dance, in the core of my Jewish being, I am a Zionist. These are inseverable aspects of who I am. Attacking me for being a Zionist is attacking me for being a Jew. It is clear that this is antisemitism in its modern manifestation.

But being the sort of Jew that I am, talking about antisemitism isn’t enough. I’m sick of the pain. I’m sick with the pain. We need to get beyond it. We need to take the next step. We need to understand what it is. We need to understand what’s going on so that we can fix it. We can’t rely on the Royal Commission to fix it. We can’t rely on the state or the government or on non-government organisations – bodies charged with dealing with human rights. None of them take it seriously enough.

If we apply our collective brains to the occasion surely we can come up with some answers. They can’t be the same answers that have been tried for the last hundred years. Interfaith dialogue and holocaust education don’t do it. There are tremendous programs that have had an impact on hundreds, even thousands of people. Yet there is still antisemitism.

As usual, I have too much to say. I can’t just write one submission to the Royal Commission. My submission is far too long so I’m submitting it in multiple parts. I’ve submitted two. The third will go next week. I can keep you busy with substacks for an age. Here’s how I begin:

B. Background to Submission

A liberal democracy such as Australia must respect the rule of law and human rights. The principles of human rights I draw from both secular and sacred literature. I attribute predominantly to Ronald Dworkin, the idea that rights are about treating each other with dignity and respect. This is the standard against which anything speaking in the name of rights must be assessed. Does the action or the law enhance or detract from the experience of dignity and respect? I add to this the fundamental principle that I take from Judaism, that we are all made in God’s image such that disrespecting another human is disrespecting God. Human rights are intended as principles and strategies for ensuring that all people are treated with equal concern and respect. An environment that tolerates any group of people living in fear because of the behaviour of others directed at them, is failing to protect human rights and therefore fails in its liberal democratic mission.

Further, liberal democracy does not run on rights alone. It also depends on a background of trust, mutual recognition, and reciprocal restraint that allows differently situated groups to share institutions, public space, and political life. This idea was formulated by Durkheim, whose basic point was that solidarity is the moral bond that makes social cooperation possible. More recently Putnam adopted the language of “bridging” social capital to capture the same idea in a plural society, that is that ties of trust and reciprocity operate across groups rather than only within them. When those cross-group bonds weaken, formal equality becomes thinner and more brittle: people still possess rights, but the ordinary confidence with which those rights can be exercised safely and on equal terms begins to fray.

Antisemitism undermines social solidarity because it recodes Jews as a category apart: suspect, dangerous, disloyal, over-powerful, or conditionally acceptable. This degrades what Waldron calls the public assurance of equal standing, and it weakens the bridging trust on which a plural society depends. The damage extends beyond the immediate target. Once one group is publicly treated as less securely belonging, the common civic bond itself is altered. Social cohesion is the key to the functioning of a successful democracy. Undermining any member of the society, individually or as a class, creates cracks in the social fabric which become more and more difficult to repair over time.

Targeting of individuals because they are Jewish has a significant flow-on effect to other members of the Jewish community. For example, I was personally affected when there was antisemitic graffiti outside the school, Mount Scopus College, attended by my grandchildren. The impact of antisemitism on social media is pervasive. If the target is the followers of an account, the expectation is that it will been seen by many – even hundreds of thousands – who cannot prevent seeing it without withdrawing from social media. Being doxed, as reported below, is not just defamation. It is intended that the false information will not just be a problem for the targeted individual. It is intended to create fear in those around the victim, and in other members of the community who may be targeted next. The cumulative effect of incidents of antisemitism is the creation of a hostile environment in which Jews are unable to thrive and unable to participate in society as equal members. This is the situation we have reached in 2026 Australia.

C. The Objective of My Submission

This is the first of a series of submissions. It contains reports of 7 occasions when I have personally experienced antisemitism. These may not always align with the Commission’s view of antisemitism. However, they were all occasions when I experienced harm as a result of being a Jew.

By accepting each of these experiences as antisemitic harm, I was able to readdress the question of the meaning of antisemitism, how it operates and the damage it does to Jews individually and as a community. My method has involved an examination of social theory and law relevant to the subject.

The overall purpose of my Submissions is to propose new and unique strategies for managing and regulating antisemitism in Australia. In order to do so, I revisit the concept of antisemitism in its scope and manifestation. Unlike traditional approaches to antisemitism, my position involves a harm-based, contextual, and cumulative approach. By way of contrast, existing legal and policy frameworks have largely been structured around the assessment of individual acts. Their focus is intention, expression, or discrete impact. These approaches are well suited for assigning responsibility and regulating conduct, but they are not well adapted to the forms of harm that arise from patterns of conduct and repetition. For a great deal of the damage of antisemitism is found in the extent to which it has been normalised and tolerated, particularly by those in positions of power. This is because antisemitism is increasingly experienced as a condition of social life—effecting where Jewish Australians go, how they present themselves, and whether they participate fully in public and institutional settings.

My argument is that antisemitism is a social practice which, directly or indirectly, harms Jews individually or collectively. This reflects established scholarship demonstrating that antisemitism operates through shared narratives, symbolic forms, and institutional settings, often without central coordination or uniform intent. Further, the harm done by antisemitism is assessed cumulatively and contextually. Conduct is evaluated not only in isolation, but in light of its repetition, scale, authority, and institutional embedding. Jews are entitled to equal membership and equal participation in society. If the antisemitic situation contributes to the degradation of the conditions of equal participation of Jews individually and as a community – such as by having to avoid certain social spaces – then intervention is required. This does not displace considerations of intention or expression but situates them within a broader inquiry into the conditions of citizenship, dignity, and social membership. The possibility of new legal strategies for dealing with antisemitism then arises.

I propose a framework that reconceptualises antisemitism as a social practice producing ambient harm, and propose a structured method for assessing when such harm degrades the conditions of equal citizenship, to which all members of society, including Jews, are entitled.

A number of years ago, I was doing work around children’s rights. We were trying to get the Convention on the Rights of the Child [CRC] taken seriously in Australia. Our specific concern was children with disabilities, whose right to education, in particular, was frequently denied.

We were pleased when the government decided to undertake an inquiry into the CRC. We were not optimistic that anything would change for the better, but took it as an opportunity to put our position forward. When the outcome was desultory, I decided to investigate what had happened.

I learnt some very useful lessons. The first, and most important, is that numbers count. On my side - the side of the good guys - there were submissions from authoritative individuals and institutions. For example, the Australian Law Reform Commission, the Australian Human Rights Commission, the Australian Human Rights Centre and the Children’s Rights Centre all wrote substantive submissions. The submissions argued comparative law, social theory, philosophy and statistics. They were long, detailed and well-argued.

Approximately 20% of the submissions were from individuals or organisations with expertise. The other 80% were predominantly scraggy handwritten documents. They contained little argument, other than stating their opposition to the proposals. Significantly, a large proportion of these submissions were identical - except for the name and handwriting. Yet they were counted and taken seriously.

What this tells us is that within the outcome of inquiries, numbers are crucial. In my study, every individual contribution, thick or thin, was included in the decision-making process. So each handwritten, light submission seemed to be given a weight equivalent to a substantial, expert opinion. So, for the Royal Commission into Antisemitism, we need to get everyone we know to submit something. Including our kids and our nonJewish friends. This is the easiest way to advocate for yourself and your community and your contribution will make a difference.

The second significant lesson I learnt from reading all those submissions is that expertise is unnecessary. I’d always imagined that no one would listen to what a mere mortal had to say. I would never have submitted anything unless it had footnotes and endorsements. I really thought an Inquiry was highbrow and looking for the contribution of a professional. Not so. Anything will do and anything is much better than nothing.

Let me walk you through it. For this Royal Commission, you have to write four things. You can adapt from the following words. There is no such thing as plagiarism here. Please use and spread this freely.

1. Antisemitism in Australia has been ... especially since October 7th 2023.

Replace the dots with:

• dreadful

• upsetting

• damaging

• distressing

• other

2. I have been ... (describe your feelings) affected by the antisemitism. I have been distressed by (replace distressed with any of the above):

• Antisemitic posters & graffiti

• The antics of the proPalestian lobby

• I have experienced violence

• I no longer feel safe to wear a Magen David or kippah in public

• I have been cancelled …

• I no longer feel safe (in certain places) ◦ I have been doxed.

• I’ve experienced antisemitism in my workplace, sport, social activities …

• I have lost friends who insist I am personally responsible for any failings of Israel

• Any other experience

3. This has made me feel:

• Scared

• Anxious

• Distressed

• Unhappy

• Worried

• Insecure

• Like leaving Australia

• Any other response

4. I am hoping the Government will take responsibility.

-----------------------------------------

That’s it. You can provide details of specific experiences, of antisemitism or its impact. The Royal Commission want to understand the impact of antisemitism on you or your Jewish friends. Do not worry if you have no story to embellish this with; write anyway. Four points, and you can even leave out the first and last points.

If you are having trouble writing, there is lots of help to be found. Look out for writing workshops that are being held across the country by Project A and NCJWA. Or be in contact with Share Your Story, an organisation set up by the community to help people to make submissions. There is also the Executive Council of Australian Jewry support project, which is very helpful.

I don’t live in the same city as the shooting. That doesn’t matter. I thought we lived on sacred ground, that there was a special flavour to this country springing up from the landscape to the cities themselves. I’m 5th generation Australian, my grandchildren 7th. Jews have been here since 1788. We thought we were part of the furniture. We’ve been such an intricate part of Australian life that there have been two Jewish Governors General, a Jewish Treasurer, a Jewish Attorney-General, a Jewish Justice of the High Court of Australia and 22 Jewish MPs at a federal level alone. We are integral to music, the arts, medicine, business and everything. How could we be singled out? How has our position gone from one of respect to one of hated?

The fact is that we’ve been willing to trivialise the impact of modern social theory - settler colonialism, post-structural gender theory and the DEI movement. These theories all discount truth and substitute it for ideology, leading to moral confusion. Not just about Jews. George Orwell predicted that by 1984 we would engage in “Doublethink”, which allows you to hold two mutually contradictory ideas at once leading to the erasure of objective truth. In slogan form it is, in Orwerllian terms, “Freedom is Slavery” or “War is Peace”. In modern terms, it is statements such as “transwomen are women” or “rape is resistance”.

A number of commentators have argued that the Chanukah massacre was not a result of antisemitism, but was caused by antizionism. I have no problem with this, per se, as I consider antizionism to be a modern manifestation of antisemitism. We have a fundamental problem, though. It is that almost nobody seems to understand what antisemitism is – let alone antizionism. Antisemitism should be a simple idea. Targeting Jews, treating us differently, allowing insults or slurs that would never be tolerated if directed at another group, shaming, abusing, being violent towards us. Substitute Muslim or Scotsman and see if it would be OK. However, there is lack of moral clarity about what is right or wrong. Because there is a failure to recognise antisemitism whenever the word Zionism or Israel is involved. Using antizionism as a pretext, the government and administration, and everyone in between, has used “Doublespeak” and pretended antisemitism is difficult to detect.

A simple solution would be for the government to regulate the use of particular phrases and explain what is wrong with their use. That way there would be no confusion about antisemitism in a greater number of areas of speech, and there would be exemplars for comparison when trying to understand others. The phrases I would proscribe include:

• Globalise the Intifada - calling on others to act with violence towards Jews everywhere in the world; encouraging the harming of Jews

• From the River to the Sea – calling on others to engage in the ethnic cleansing or the genocide of Jews living in Israel

• Free Palestine – calling on others to engage in the ethnic cleansing or the genocide of Jews living in Israel

• Zionism is racism – demonising Jews by declaring that all Jews are racist (bad, morally deficient)

• “all Zionists are…[insulting term such as terrorists, rapists, child killers, fascists] – demonising Jews by accusing them of immoral behaviour

It is the failure of the state to recognise the commonsense meanings of these words that has allowed the ongoing desecration of our community and the fear in which Jews live their lives. Over a two to three year period, more and more expressions of antisemitism have been in the atmosphere. Graffiti has been tolerated – we are expected to turn a blind eye. The language of settler colonialism has become prominent, even though virtually no one knows what it means beyond “we hate Jews”. Let me illustrate how pernicious this is.

A couple of days after the shooting, a very respectable Victorian magistrate, Malcom Thomas, was asked to consider whether the statement “all Zionists are terrorists” was inherently offensive under Victorian law. He said “no”, because he wasn’t sure of whether the offender intended to be hateful.

Let’s try to understand this. First, there is acceptance that “all Zionists” refers to the majority of Jews.It is irrelevant that there are some Jews who say that they are not Zionists and there are some non-Jews who identify as Zionists. So the statement that “all Zionists are terrorists is directed at Jews”.

Accusing someone of being a “terrorist” would normally be considered an insult. A terrorist is someone who lacks morality and who places no value on human life. A terrorist does not share the beliefs of the society and wills its destruction. A terrorist does not care about the well-being of individuals and sees no problem with massive collateral damage.

Very few people would consider it a complement to be called a terrorist. We know that to Hamas and its followers it is a glorious thing to be a terrorist. They said so while killing Jews in Israel and elsewhere. ISIS fighters may well think the same. And we know that those who want to “globalise the Intifada” love violence and might appreciate being recognised as terrorists. But the ordinary meaning of accusing someone of being a terrorist is that of deep insult, casting aspersions about one’s morality, sense of decency and humanity. Calling Jews terrorists is a fundamental attack on our identity. Peace is a central theme of the Jewish prayer book and the words of our prophets. It’s what we sing and pray for even in a country where we no longer feel safe. Being called a criminal, especially a murderous one, is insulting to us individually and as a people. It can’t be anything else.

How could the Magistrate, after a mass shooting of Jews by terrorists, declare that the saying “all Zionists are terrorists” is not inherently insulting? How would you have to read it, for it not to be insulting? The very use of those specific words is a choice to be insulting. It simply couldn’t be anything else. Is it because they are dealing with Jews that public officials are prepared to deny common sense? The ordinary meaning of the words is insulting. It is an insult to our intelligence to say otherwise. This is yet another inversion – the morally bereft throwing their faults onto Jews.

The degree of insensitivity to the political circumstances is amazing. The magistrate could have declared that saying “all Zionists are terrorists” is unlawful per se. He could have decided that saying “all Zionists are terrorists” is antisemitic. This could have left over the question of whether it was unlawful in the circumstances. The Summary Offences Act 1966 (Vic) s 17(1)(c)) Vic prohibits public use of insulting words in a manner that disturbs public order. If there is any point to these laws it is to protect minority groups from being made to feel unsafe and to protect the public from being saturated by defamatory lies.

So just as things have reached the absolutely worst point for Jews in Australia, a public official bends over backwards to read law against the interest of Jews. The environment for Jews is so unsafe that we have been subjected to the first mass shooting this century. The Prime Minister reluctantly said he’d deal with antisemitism – but none of us believe him. Lies about Jews are perpetrated every day – in Courts of law as well as in public. The Magistrate’s Court decision has actively made it harder to convict someone. When everyone knows the only way out of this mess is with law and order – taking the law and applying it. Had that happened on October 9^th and thereafter, Australia would be a better place. Every day there is some authority or other who treats Jews with contempt. Is this how we have to live? A shooting of Jews means nothing. The complete lack of regard for Australia’s Jews cannot lead anywhere good. And after Sunday night, we fear the worst.

So how can I not be angry.

It’s first night Chanukah. We light just one candle tonight and then build up to eight. Each day the light increases; the celebration of Jews being allowed to practice Judaism. It’s a very particularistic festival with universal themes of light and darkness and good triumphing over evil. Chanukah’s message can be read to include the rights of all peoples in a multicultural society to celebrate their own culture without fear or discrimination. No one is free unless we are all free. Noone is safe where Jews are not safe. Jews are not safe where other groups are targeted.

But the Bondi Beach community has forgotten this, or maybe never knew it. Because since 2023 they have tolerated their politicians and community leaders, their educators and their law enforcement agencies engaging in antisemitism. Comments that previously would not be stated in polite society are bandied on the media. The law has not been enforced regarding terrorism, regarding protests, regarding hate speech and regarding a range of other matters where the victims are Jews. The Australian bystanders are not innocent outsiders but are complicit when they don’t act. They don’t complain about the takeover of our cultural institutions or the serious abuse of Jews who’ve been cancelled or doxed. They don’t find it odd that the murder of Israeli peace activists and babies immediately resulted in an attack on Australian Jews. Not an attack on the perpetrators of the mass crimes against humanity – Hamas and the Palestinians – but an attack on their victims, Jews.

I recently recounted the story of Billings. How the town joined forces to defeat the powers of evil – the violence, the graffiti, the harassment. A coalition of human rights advocates from all backgrounds – mothers & fathers, church leaders, librarians, police people, traffic officers, café owners – decided that they’d had enough of the hatred dominating their town. When the police advised a Jewish family to take down their Chanukah decorations to prevent being targeted, 6,000 businesses and households responded by putting up their own Chanukah decorations. It took a few weeks to end, but the skinheads and the KKK eventually gave up. The 6,000 menorahs made the cost of antisemitism too high.

I naively thought that the Billings’ strategy was a strategy for us here in Melbourne Australia. Everyone tells us that antisemitism comes from the extreme. That mainstream Australians are at best indifferent to Jews. At worse, ignorant about our existence or plight. So we invest heavily in Holocaust education. We have world class centres for holocaust education. Thousands of schoolchildren attend sessions and commit to “never again”. We assume the good will of ordinary Australians who are decent people with a preference for the beach over politics.

Over this time, we have seen a massive growth in ordinary Australian bystanders. People who tolerate antisemitism with no thought to the impact of hatred on us all. People who pretend that they don’t know that accusing Jews of killing babies or of genocide is insufferably insulting. People who must know that allowing airspace for the pro-Palestinian crowd is effectively silencing Jews. There is even a new form of racism, where denying that a Palestinian is indigenous to Israel is tantamount to denying their existence. Needless to say, the same is not true when a Jew is denied a similar claim, even though in the case of the Jew it happens to be true.

Further evidence about how very wrong I was came from the goings on at Stonnington Council this week. The issue was the Menorah, which as far as I can establish had not been controversial before. Normally standing sentinel next to the giant Christmas tree, its existence at all became controversial. For reasons that can only be explained as antisemitism, the Mayor and her followers first deferred to a special meeting, a motion for the menorah to be placed at the Town Hall as before. There were 130 submissions and a full gallery at that meeting, expecting discussion and a decision. At the special meeting, there was no public and no debate. A new resolution was put moving the Menorah to a “safer location.” Two councillors then moved a motion denying the meeting of the opportunity to discuss the issue. The mayor would not accept any point of order reversing this, so Jewish supporters were effectively gagged. Those opposed to the Menorah’s public display used every trick in the book to deny basic Jewish inclusion – and succeeded.

If this is the level of leadership that is to see Australia become a safe place for Jews once again, we are in trouble. The Billings’s strategy suggests that the “authorities” see the problem and understand the dangers of racism. The people must also recognise the racism and find it unacceptable. Then there is a chance for social solidarity.