Jews Against the Occupation '48 was founded in 2003 to advocate for a just peace for all people living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Our submission will address section (e) of the Letters Patent: any matter reasonably incidental to a matter referred to in paragraphs (a) to (d), focusing only on paragraphs (a) and (d).
Antisemitism - “It's a trick. We always use it.”
Shulamit Aloni, member of Israel's Parliament for 27 years, in 2002
PREAMBLE
In this submission, we explore the evolution of the new conception of Jewish identity that informs the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, the impact of this new understanding, and its implications for social cohesion in Australia:
We comment on the position of Jewish Australians in the Australian national body, and explore the nature of communal organisations that claim Jewish identity, interests, and representation rights.
We consider the politics of antisemitism. We explain why Zionists ushered in a new conception of Jewishness that sought to replace the traditional European scholarly pacifist with an agrarian warrior, and why, a century later, Israel added yet another iteration of Jewish identity - the collective Jew embodied as the Jewish State - and with it, a new definition of antisemitism.
We outline the history of Jewish anti-Zionism, which was officially founded in the same year as Jewish Zionism - 1897. However, if consideration is given to the religious prohibition against human initiation of the ingathering of the Jewish people, and the belief that this ingathering heralds the arrival of the Messiah and the establishment of the Kingdom of God, then Jewish anti-Zionism is not only centuries older than its Zionist counterpart, but actually has an authentic Jewish pedigree.
We agree that certain representations and criticisms of Israel and Israelis can be antisemitic. Those that employ classic antisemitic tropes involving insidious and nefarious Jewish power clearly cross the line from legitimate political criticism into bigotry. Also, substituting "Zionist" for "Jew" when adjacent language dehumanises or vilifies Jews is antisemitic, but condemning Israel and Zionism in terms that identify their attributes without such language is not. We also refute the assertion that pointing out the congruence between Israel's behaviour and that of the Nazis, denying Israel the right to exist, and calling for the dismantling of the Zionist project in historic Palestine, are inherently antisemitic.
We outline how the conflation of Judaism and Zionism has placed us in the crosshairs of outrage at Israel's behaviour, and on the other hand how our own outrage at Israel's behaviour and our rejection of Zionism have made us a target of Zionists. Both collectively and individually, we are the victims of vicious antisemitic vilification and intimidation from Zionists - abuse which, while prompted by our political views, target us specifically as Jewish people.
We argue that government responses to the roiling community tensions in Australia since October 7th 2023 have undermined social cohesion and exacerbated antisemitism.
Finally, we offer our conclusions and recommendations.
Initials
Australasian Union of Jewish Students - AUJS
Jewish Board of Deputies - JBD
Jewish Community Council of Victoria - JCCV
Jewish Council of Australia - JCA
Jewish National Fund - JNF
Executive Council of Australian Jewry - ECAJ
National Council of Jewish Women of Australia - NCJWA
Zionist Federation of Australia - ZFA
1. JEWISH AUSTRALIANS
On December 14, 2025, fifteen people, mostly Jewish, were slaughtered in a shocking terrorist attack. Nothing can justify this ruthless murder spree, nor excuse the extreme trauma inflicted on survivors and on loved ones of both the slain and those who survived. Nothing can console the devastated community, nor expunge this grave crime from our history. What demands examination, nevertheless, is the way this horrific tragedy has been politicised and instrumentalised.
In the following days, the president of the Zionist Federation of Australia (ZFA), Jeremy Leibler, wrote to President Herzog "on behalf of Australia’s Jewish community, inviting him to come to Australia to stand with a grieving nation and a shattered community." By December 23, the ZFA could "welcome the Australian Government's decision to now extend the formal invitation in accordance with protocol".
That is, the president of "the national roof body for Zionist organisations" personally invited the head of a foreign state to visit Australia. In an ex post facto formality, the Australian government approved.
Unlike even the deeply Zionist Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), the ZFA has absolutely no mandate to represent Jewish Australians. It exists specifically and solely to advocate for Zionism and Israel in Australia. While Jewish Australians with Israeli citizenship may have been shot in the Bondi massacre, the attack did not target Jewish Israelis. It targeted Jewish Australians.
While it is true that many secular Jewish Australians are primarily connected to their Jewish identity through a Zionist organisation, this does not confer legitimacy as a representative of the broad Jewish community, nor can it fulfil the role of a rabbi in times of crisis and bereavement. As expert on international human rights law, and former Australian Human Rights Commissioner, Chris Sidoti, acutely observed, "Herzog is a political leader, not a religious leader [...] If the prime minister wanted to support the Jewish community, he would have done better to invite a respected Jewish religious leader." Indeed.
Further, the Australian Government's acquiescence to the Zionist politicisation of the Bondi massacre completely excluded the Jewish anti-Zionist community from public rituals of mourning unless we were willing to cede yet another Jewish experience to appropriation and exploitation by Israel. The only appropriate national response to the shooting was an apolitical one, where Jewish people of all political persuasions were held equal.
The capture of Jewish identity by Zionism has grave consequences. This was made crystal clear in an interview on ABC radio on January 29, 2026. While not explicitly endorsing the impending visit by Israeli President Isaac Herzog, the Minister for Multicultural Affairs, Anne Aly, said that the invitation was "protocol" as such invitations are typically extended after "an attack where foreign individuals have been the targets".
In any reasonable context, this would prompt outrage as an antisemitic trope - Jews as a seditious fifth column loyal to a foreign state above their own country. But such is the dangerous blurring of the lines achieved by decades of Zionist propaganda that a federal minister with a significant portfolio, one which should require a sophisticated understanding of religious, ethnic, and cultural issues, refers to a group of Australians as foreigners.
Jewish Australians are not "foreign individuals". Yet this is precisely where we end up when Israel lobbyists have managed to convince politicians and other powerbrokers that Jewish identity is virtually synonymous with a sense of loyalty and belonging to a foreign country, simply because it has anointed itself The Jewish State and commits its atrocities in our name.
While many Jewish Australians are heedless of this fallacious and dangerous association, anti-Zionist Jews are dismayed. We have neither love for nor loyalty to Israel. We reject Zionism. We are Australians. Nevertheless, we are largely denied a voice. Our views are excluded from public discourse on both Israel and antisemitism, despite the fact that we are stakeholders. The antisemitism incubated by the serial and egregious crimes of the Jewish State threaten all Jews, not only those who are Israel's cheerleaders and apologists.
On February 5, 2026, Israeli news outlet Ha'aretz, published an important article by David Issacharoff, editor and writer at Ha'aretz English edition and visiting fellow at Der Spiegel, in response to a post on X by Yair Lapid. Lapid is the leader of what, in Israel, passes for a "centrist" party, Yesh Atid. Lapid had called the Jewish Council of Australia (JCA) an "extremist Jewish left-wing organisation" and accused its members of being "servile lackeys of Hamas [in the vain hope that] people will forget that you’re Jews". In this scurrilous post, he reflects the latest antisemitic slur to be cast against Jews who refuse to condone Israel's genocide: we are "pick-me Jews" - we performatively oppose Israel because we crave approval from antisemites.
As Issacharoff astutely observed, epithets such as Lapid's "directly bolster antisemitic narratives portraying Jews as traitors and agitators. These Jews, who are voicing a different moral stance and refuse to remain silent, may in fact be saving face for many other Jews and Israelis, showing that they are not all conflated with Israel."
Anti-Zionist Jewish Australians are indeed performing a vital service for all Jewish Australians. Our moral compass is not deflected from the true north of universal humanity by Jewish exceptionalism or tribal loyalty. Our willingness to be ostracised, vilified, and threatened by what we once regarded as our community subverts efforts by antisemites to deem us all accountable for Israel's crimes.
2. WHO SPEAKS IN OUR NAME?
While a slew of nominally Jewish organisations claim to represent Jewish Australians, even a cursory examination of their stated aims, histories, executive members, members, constituent and associate bodies, donors, and sponsored projects reveals their Zionist ethos and priorities.
(a) The Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism
In July 2025, Australia's Special Envoy on Antisemitism, Jillian Segal, released her Special Plan to Combat Antisemitism. The only people who welcomed it were those whose political interests it served. The rest of us read it with the same dismay and sinking sense of despair that we experienced upon her appointment.
Segal is not engaged in Jewish affairs other than as an advocate for Israel, and has demonstrated no concern for antisemitism unless it is defined as criticism of Israel. Predictably, her Plan has been lauded by Jewish establishment bodies. ECAJ president, Daniel Aghion, observed that it is "fully aligned with the ECAJ’s thinking and our community‘s expectations". Equally predictably, it has faced strong criticism from those whose concerns embrace the robustness and integrity of Australian institutions and democracy.
University of NSW Scientia Professor, Louise Chappell, writes that the Plan "falls short in a range of areas essential to good public policy due to biased arguments, weak evidence and recommendation overreach." Executive Officer of the JCA, Max Kaiser, an expert on antisemitism and Australian Jewish history, noted that the Plan "is riddled with misinformation and claims about nefarious funding sources for protests and universities that verge on conspiracy theory."
Respected publisher and high-profile member of Australia's arts and culture community, Louise Adler, who is Jewish, penned a scathing account of both the Plan itself and how it came to be imposed on Australians through the relentless intimidatory tactics of wealthy and well-entrenched Israel lobby groups, which, "with their News Ltd megaphone [...] successfully badgered the government of the day, cowed the ABC, intimidated vice-chancellors and threatened to defund arts organisations".
So, whence came this Plan? Segal has always been embedded in high-powered legal, government, and corporate positions. She was a director of National Australia Bank (NAB) while it engaged in the egregious misconduct that saw it singled out for censure at the Royal Commission into the Banking, Superannuation, and Financial Services Industry. Her decision to bypass the public tender process and grant a hefty contract to Yaron Finkelstein, a prominent advisor to the Liberal Party for over a decade evinces blatant disregard for due process.
Furthermore, Finkelstein is an enthusiastic supporter of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), which has been found by the United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHCR), the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, Human Rights Watch (HRW), the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), Genocide Watch, Amnesty International, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Physicians for Human Rights Israel, and Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, to have committed genocide. By any reasonable measure, his appointment attests to Segal's extreme partisanship and alarming moral lacuna, either of which should preclude both a role in shaping government policy and payment from the public purse.
Segal's involvement in so-called Jewish issues has been limited to the ECAJ, Australia's most powerful and virulent pro-Israel lobby group, of which she is immediate past president; the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce (AICC), of which she was chair until March 2025; and the International Board of the Weizmann Institute of Science, co-creator of Rafael "one of Israel’s leading state-owned weapons corporations", of which she is a member. In November 2023, Segal co-signed a statement condemning Labor and the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Penny Wong, for calling on Israel to "cease the attacking of hospitals", and for its support of a UN resolution calling for a ceasefire. Is this really someone who should be adjudicating the boundaries of legitimate criticism of Israel?
In early 2020, ASIO warned that far-right extremism is a significant and rising threat in Australia. Both 2024 and 2025 saw a surge in neo-Nazi activity on our streets and on social media. In late 2025, March for Australia protests saw prominent displays of White supremacist racism and aggression, certainly intensified if not entirely incited by anti-immigration scaremongering spread by Advance, the far-right lobby group bankrolled to the tune of $50,000 by Segal and her husband's family trust fund. Advance is a "murky" network of at least six interconnected entities run from fake national headquarters in Canberra’s CBD by directors giving fake residential addresses. It aggressively spreads online and print media disinformation, including referring to immigrants as “rapists, paedophiles and murderers”, and claiming that Welcome to Country is part of a secretive plan by “elites” to “delegitimise Australia’s history”. Even indirect association with any group alleging that Palestinians are a "risk to security", and accusing left-wing politicians of being "mostly on the same side as Hamas" should disqualify Segal from any role with an influence on the right of Australians to advocate for Palestine.
On August 31, Thomas Sewell, leader of the unapologetically White supremacist National Socialist Network (NSN), delivered "what can only be described as the keynote speech" from the steps of Victoria's Parliament House. In November, at a NSW Police-authorised neo-Nazi rally outside NSW Parliament House, an explicitly antisemitic banner was displayed, and the phrase "blood and honour" - the calling card of Hitler Youth - was shouted multiple times.
Not one of these outbursts of explicit antisemitism prompted Segal to comment. Under questioning at Senate estimates, Segal claimed that while she didn't publish a statement on the November 7 rally, she had conveyed her condemnation to media outlets that contacted her office. In at least one case, this was not true. Meanwhile, Segal has publicly and proactively condemned pro-Palestine marches.
Segal's disgraceful failure to condemn, let alone to focus intently on addressing, a clearly emboldened far-right and explicitly Nazi movement with dedicated leaders and a growing following, demonstrates beyond doubt that she is not a person who should be tasked with ensuring the safety, security, and wellbeing of Jewish Australians.
(b) The Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ)
ECAJ describes itself as "the peak body of the Australian Jewish community, representing and advocating for the community to government, in the community, and around the world". It includes among its work "Advocating for the national rights of the Jewish people and encouraging support for Zionism in Australia", and "Monitoring the content of school curricula in teaching about Israel and the Holocaust". Since at least 2012, ECAJ has made submissions to the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) on how Australian schools should educate students.
Its Zionist pedigree is impeccable. In 1974, the ECAJ teamed up with the ZFA to form Australia-Israel Publications (AIP) whose mission was to present pro-Israel narratives throughout Australia to counter the mounting criticism Israel was facing for its violence against Palestinians in the then newly-occupied Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT).
ECAJ represents Australia in the Large Jewish Communities Task Force Against Antisemitism (J7), established by the US's Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in 2023. The J7 meets every fortnight via Zoom "to share information, to share best practices, [to] draft legislation that might work in other countries, or [discuss] different litigation". In early December 2025, J7 met in Australia. By December 18, the Bondi massacre had given the ECAJ all the leverage it needed to succeed in pressuring PM Anthony Albanese "to impose antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal’s Plan to Combat Antisemitism on the Australian public".N
ECAJ constituents are state and territory roof bodies, themselves overwhelmingly Zionist. One of its affiliates is B'nai B'rith, which identifies a pillar of its work as being "to improve the lives of Australians" through "supporting and defending Israel". How this works is not specified.
Another ECAJ affiliate is the JNF, founded in 1901 to buy land in Palestine and drive Jewish settlement. It has always been instrumental in the dispossession and expulsion of Palestinians. In 1940, Joseph Weitz, director of JNF Lands Department, wrote: “There is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries, and to transfer all of them, save perhaps for Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem. Not one village must be left, not one [Bedouin] tribe.”
After 1948, the JNF was part of a three-member Transfer Committee overseeing either the systematic destruction of Palestinian villages, towns, and cities, or their repopulation with Jews. On the ruins of more than 400 destroyed villages, the JNF planted forests to prevent Palestinians from returning and to obliterate evidence of Israel's crimes.
The JNF continues to facilitate the theft of Palestinian land. Through its key role in Israel's Land Authority, which directly controls 93% of all the land in Israel and Occupied East Jerusalem, the JNF exercises significant control over the dispossession of Palestinians, operating not only under the 1950 Absentees’ Property Law, which transfers ownership of the property of expelled Palestinians to Israel or to Jewish Israelis, but also via practices deemed questionable even in Israel.
In the Negev-Naqab desert, the JNF works with the Israeli state to force Bedouin citizens of Israel out of their homes and destroy their communities in order to replace them with Jewish Israelis. In the West bank and East Jerusalem, the JNF works with ultra-nationalist settler groups such as the Ir David Foundation (Elad) to acquire land for settlements. It has carried out numerous campaigns to destroy Palestinian homes and/or forcibly displace Palestinians to make way for Jewish settlers.
Operating through subsidiaries, the JNF has acquired more than 16,000 acres of Palestinian land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and has often used subsidiaries to transfer property to Elad, the settler organisation mentioned above which aims to Judaise East Jerusalem. Furthermore, the Israeli government has frequently used a JNF subsidiary to take over Palestinian land in the OPT.
In what appears to be covert acknowledgement that it might eventually face scrutiny under Australian criminal and taxation law for its support of settlements found to be unlawful by the UN, JNF Australia claims to be independent from its parent organisation, KKL-JNF in Israel, which directly facilitates these settlements. However, it has in fact transferred millions of dollars to KKL-JNF. JNF Australia also runs programs that support IDF soldiers, which may expose it to legal risks given proceedings against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
ECAJ's ongoing affiliation with a fundraising body directly supporting the violation of international law, and already hedging its bets against Australia's future incorporation of relevant international law into its domestic framework, should call into question its suitability as a representative voice for any community, let alone its eligibility for government grants worth millions of dollars.
This is especially pertinent as, although the ECAJ operates both a registered charity and a company, both subject to disclosure requirements, these grants were disbursed to its third registered entity, an incorporated association, which is not required to publicly lodge audited financial statements.
(c) The Australia-Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC)
AIJAC claims to be "the premier public affairs organisation for the Australian Jewish community", a description which emphasises its Jewish credentials while deflecting attention from its Zionist ones. Despite its initials, AIJAC is not simply a successor of AIJA, the Australian Institute of Jewish Affairs. AIJA was founded in 1984 to research issues of concern for the Australian Jewish community, such as antisemitism and Jewish education. AIJAC, on the other hand, was formed in 1997 through the merger of AIJA and AIP, the Zionist media outfit founded in 1974 by the ECAJ and the ZFA to counter mounting criticism of Israel post-1967.
The national chairman of AIJAC is Mark Leibler, former president of the ZFA, Life Chairman of United Israel Appeal (UIA) Australia, former Chair of the UIA World Board of Trustees, Governor of the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce (AICC), and executive member of the Jewish Agency for Israel. He is also a Senior Partner in the Arnold Bloch Leibler law firm, which donates to the ZFA, and provides pro bono assistance with submissions to this Commission to AIJAC, ECAJ, ZFA, JBD, JCCV, and NCJWA, all of which are Zionist organisations. In 2024, Leibler was awarded the Israeli Presidential Medal of Honour, Israel’s highest civilian award.
Mark Leibler is a prominent activist for Indigenous rights. In 2023, in response to racist social media posts by David Adler, then head of the far-right AJA, Leibler said that due to the AJA’s “misleading name”, it is very important for people within and outside the Jewish community to “understand that this organisation and this person [...] do not speak for us” and “do not communicate what, in any sense of the term, can be regarded as Jewish values". Anti-Zionist Jews are equally dismayed by the misleading names of almost all "Jewish" communal bodies in Australia.
In February 2025, twenty anti-Zionist Jewish Australians took Mark Leibler to the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) for his vile slurs in a post on X that reached almost 340,000 people. The same post was also placed on X as an advertisement.
AIJAC is a partner in and supporter of the Be’er Sheva Dialogue, which, since its inception in 2015, "has brought together defence officials, senior parliamentarians and analysts from both Australia and Israel to discuss areas of shared strategic interests and challenges, as well as the potential for collaboration". The Dialogue is an initiative of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), which was established in 2001 by the Howard Government and is partially funded by the Department of Defence.
The enmeshment of a Jewish communal body in advocating for shared security and defence strategy between Australia and a foreign nation should be unthinkable. It is the embodiment of the antisemitic trope that casts suspicion on Jews for allegedly harbouring dual loyalties.
Nevertheless, it gets worse. Until recently, Australian Zionist bodies maintained undisclosed corporate connections to Israel's defence web. Since 1980, senior executives of the ZFA and the AIJAC have been linked with companies that had business links with Israel's military and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), formerly known as Israel Aircraft Industries. Powerful Zionist lobbyists, including Mark Leibler, were engaging with Australian and Israeli politicians and senior government officials, while companies they had established or were directors of conducted business with aviation, drone, military aircraft and weapons behemoth, IAI. While these business relationships were in place, IAI and its subsidiaries won numerous lucrative Australian government defence contracts.
(d) The Jewish Community Council of Victoria (JCCV)
By virtue of the fact that Melbourne hosts Australia's largest Jewish population, JCCV is the largest constituent body of ECAJ. JCCV members include the Zionist Council of Victoria (ZCV) and the Women's International Zionist Organisation (WIZO) as well as Jewish organisations which either espouse Zionism or are beholden to Zionist donors.
For example, the Yiddish-oriented Sholem Aleichem College aims to "cultivate [...] special ties to the State of Israel", and the Jewish Climate Network (JCN) receives funds from the Spotlight Foundation, whose director is Jeremy Leibler, president of the ZFA, partner in the Arnold Bloch Leibler law firm, and son of the abovementioned Mark Leibler.
When, in August 2025, the Australian Jewish Democratic Society (AJDS), a liberal Zionist constituent organisation, joined a public call for sanctions against Israel, it was hauled before the JCCV, which then issued a statement saying "calling for sanctions against the world’s only Jewish state [...] is in contravention of the JCCV’s Jewish values." Appropriating Jewish values to demand impunity for the commission of atrocity crimes is antisemitic in the extreme. If any non-Jew had claimed that such egregious inhumanity was inherently Jewish they would rightly be condemned for perpetuating a heinous antisemitic trope.
(e) The NSW Jewish Board of Deputies (JBD)
JBD describes itself as "the representative roof-body of the [NSW] Jewish community [with] 55 major communal organisations as its constituents". Its policies are exemplary. However, its programs and constituents betray a deep commitment to Zionist narratives and their promulgation. Its events include Israel Independence Day and its public affairs outreach includes NSW Parliamentary Friends of Israel, Journalists Mission to Israel, and NSW MP Mission to Israel, which involves "trade, political, diplomatic, military and civil society elements [and] visits to the territories", territories which are "Occupied" and "Palestinian" according to international law.
One of its education programs is Talking About Israel (TAI), a propaganda outfit founded by Lynda Ben-Menashe. In 2023, TAI offered "90 minute workshops in your home [providing] guiding principles to help you understand and talk about Israel and its war against Hamas". Ben-Menashe has worked as a consultant for both JBD and ECAJ and is currently president of NCJWA, whose affiliates include ZFA and ECAJ.
The NCJWA claims to be a proudly feminist and Zionist organisation". Somehow, it can reconcile its avowed feminism with support for an ideology that demands and a state that effects the erasure of Palestinian families. A state whose decades-long reign of terror in the West Bank has subjected Palestinian women to an onslaught of multiple layers of egregious and systematic discrimination and violence". A state whose systematic "sexual, reproductive and other gender-based violence" in Gaza is inflicting on women and girls harm "so extreme that existing concepts in legal and criminal frameworks can no longer adequately describe or capture them". A state whose military targets their male children whose "clustering of injuries [including to their testicles] was so striking, the numbers on some days were so great, it was inconceivable that it could have been coincidence". That the IDF was constituted from three terrorist paramilitary gangs is no surprise.
In February 2025, Ben-Menashe was utterly incensed by the choice of guest speaker at a UN Women’s Day luncheon. The offending speaker was Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who had presided over the 2001 World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, where Robinson had criticised a draft document equating Zionism with racism, and the offending (if accurate) text had been removed.
Meanwhile, protesters had gathered in the streets bearing banners and signs condemning Israel's apartheid (already acknowledged by both Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Israeli Human Rights organisation B'Tselem, and demanding justice for Palestinians. There was no reference to Jews. This didn't deter Ben-Menashe from concluding that the conference “enabled the first step in the post-Holocaust resurgence of Jew hatred now engulfing the world” and that Mary Robinson was an antisemite.
On March 4, 2026, Ben-Menashe appeared on Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) program The Social Schism to offer her perspective on the feelings of Jewish Australians, where she likened the anti-Israel sentiment, and no doubt some genuine antisemitism, experienced by Jewish Australians since October 7th 2023 to the systemic oppression and often violent persecution which earlier generations of European Jews had fled. This is nothing less than Holocaust minimisation.
JBD is also associated with Chabad, a fundamentalist Jewish, extremist Zionist sect. Historically anti-Zionist, Chabad is now a fanatical supporter of Israel, rejecting Palestinian national rights and opposing any political settlement that would see Palestinian sovereignty over any part of the OPT. It cultivates in its adherents, from young children upwards, not only a currency of racist tropes but a complete disregard for international laws and norms.
For several years, Chabad has allied itself with Israel’s Minister for National Security, the far-right Itamar Ben-Gvir. Ben-Gvir is notorious not only for his recent abuse of Global Sumud activists, but for the "violence including rape, extreme hunger and humiliation [that] have been normalised in Israeli jails on his watch. An added "feather in his cap" is the gold noose pin symbolising his "morally illiterate" campaign to execute convicted Palestinians. On June 9, 2026, The Jerusalem Post reported that Ben-Gvir advised cabinet that Israel could intensify its operations in Lebanon by "arresting their women and youth and taking them to terrorist prisons. That's what hurts them the most".
Chabad hosts the annual Chanukah By the Sea celebration at Bondi Beach. Prominent speakers have included Alex Ryvchin, co-CEO of the ECAJ. In November 2023, Chabad Bondi's Rabbi Eli Schlanger was visiting an IDF base near Gaza where soldiers were “literally ready for that call to go in". Schlanger posed for triumphalist photographs and, like Israel's President, Isaac Herzog, signed an artillery shell. He enthusiastically raised funds for illegal West Bank settlements and for the IDF even after recognition that it was committing genocide. He justified settlement expansion by asking, "Can you imagine if this was in the hands of the Arabs?" When Schlanger was murdered in the Bondi massacre, NSW Premier Chris Minns eulogised him as "a great man [...] a gift for our city who did so much not just for the Jewish community, but for everyone who lives in NSW".
"Run under a Chabad ethos" is JBD member organisation Kesser Torah College, which, In May 2026, hosted the Australian Council of Jewish Schools annual Presidents and Principals conference. The antisemitism session featured high-level representatives of not only JBD but ECAJ. The security session included representatives of ECAJ and the Community Security Group (CSG). The keynote speaker was Justice Michael Lee. Video messages were received from Dr Hillel Newman, then Israel’s ambassador to Australia, and Julian Leeser MP, the Opposition education spokesman who proposed the 2024 Commission of Inquiry into Antisemitism in Australian Universities Bill.
(f) The Australasian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS)
AUJS is "the sole representative body for Jewish youth across Australia and New Zealand". Betraying a disconcerting lack of clarity about its own constituents and even its own agenda, it claims to "reflect the complete spectrum of Jewish student opinion" while being "committed to providing a voice and platform for every Jewish and Zionist student across Australia and New Zealand regardless of political affiliation or religious identity" and seeking "to promote a positive image of Israel on campus". Perhaps it should run a course on managing cognitive dissonance.
Its own records offer a glimpse into its politics. In a 2015 document, the AUJS described itself as a “pro-Israel group" that should "play the political game far more effectively” than pro-BDS groups. A 2017 document explains that it sees interfaith relationships as important “pre-emptive defence" if “Israel related harassment arises on campus.” In September 2023, an anonymous Jewish student at the University of Sydney emailed AUJS President Alissa Foster about “opening up to diverse views”, specifically the “richness of Jewish life outside of Zionism”. The student asked, "how would you as the president of a Jewish representative body treat a Jew like myself?” The President did not respond.
The Jewish population of Australia is approximately 120,000. The Jewish Independent, a liberal Zionist media outlet, has been conducting biennial surveys of opinions on Jews, Israel, and antisemitism. The 2023 survey apparently found 90% of Jewish Australians agreed that the Australian Jewish community should maintain close ties with Israel, 88% felt a high level of personal connectedness with Israel, and 86% saw the existence of Israel as essential for the future of the Jewish people. However, the survey polled only 1080 Jews, roughly 1% of the Jewish population, almost all of whom were involved in Jewish communal organisations, which are almost exclusively Zionist. 70% of respondents were over 55 years, and less than 1% were under 34. Conversely, in 2025, almost 1,000 people, also roughly 1% of the Jewish population, signed a letter calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
The 2025 survey found that young Australians in general have the most negative views on Israel. Even though many Jewish Australian children are immersed in Zionist narratives in their synagogues, Jewish schools, and Jewish sports clubs, they will eventually encounter peers outside the Zionist bubble. Some are already following their counterparts in the US, UK, Europe, and South America, joining anti-Zionist activist groups, doing stints with Jewish Israeli protective presence activists in the West Bank, and rebuilding their Jewish identity outside Zionism.
There is "a significant and growing number of Jewish people in Australia" who, even if they have not (yet?) renounced Zionism, are disillusioned and outraged to varying degrees by Israel. It is reasonable to assume that a significant proportion of them are young people. AUJS is clearly anachronistic, refusing to acquaint itself with "the complete spectrum of [current] Jewish student opinion".
(g) The Australian Jewish Association (AJA)
AJA supports Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people". What does this actually mean? In 2018, the Israeli Parliament passed the Jewish Nation-State Law, which states that only Jews have the right of self-determination in the country. One clause affirms that Israel views "Jewish settlement as a national value and will act to encourage and promote its establishment". In other words, Palestinians will never have a state even in the meagre 22% of historic Palestine remaining as the OPT, and will be excluded from the meaningful democratic rights and self-determination, as guaranteed by international law, in all the land controlled by Israel.
"AJA affirms that Judea and Samaria are integral parts of Israel’s historical and religious heartland and opposes the creation of a Palestinian state there. [It] supports Jerusalem as the eternal and undivided capital of Israel, with Har HaBayit (the Temple Mount) under Israeli administration." In short, the AJA is an extremist, expansionist Jewish nationalist organisation that dismisses international law.
AJA will stop at nothing. On October 9, 2023, the Palestine solidarity movement held a protest that assembled at Sydney Town Hall and marched to the Opera House. A tiny number of bigots chanted "Fuck the Jews" and were summarily ejected by organisers. AJA distributed doctored video footage over social media that presented the chant as "Gas the Jews". NSW police confirmed that an independent analyst found there was no evidence that this egregious imperative had been issued.
David Adler, immediate past head of AJA, has the dubious distinction of having sat on the advisory board of top "No [to the Indigenous Voice in Parliament]" campaign body, Advance, alongside former prime minister Tony Abbott. From these lofty heights Adler castigated other Australian Jewish groups for supporting the Voice. In January 2023, Adler claimed that “What is ‘racist’ is allowing people to drink themselves to death they bash/rape/murder the women/children & turning a blind eye to it because they are Aboriginal!” In relation to the ABC, Adler has said, “If you self-identify as a black lesbian, you’ll get the job.” In March 2023, he posted an egregiously racist tweet about Aboriginal broadcaster Stan Grant, asking “Is Stan Grant doing ‘black face’?” In May, he asked Aboriginal Senator, Lydia Thorpe, “What % Aboriginal are you? You appear quite white".
(h) The Zionist Federation of Australia (ZFA)
Although "Jewish" does not appear in its name, the ZFA describes itself as "the representative body of the Australian Jewish community and its Zionist organisations". At least it is explicit in its purpose and does not attempt to obfuscate its agenda. Nevertheless, it appropriates Jewish identity and history and conscripts them into service for Israel. And, crucially, it is enmeshed in key organisations purporting to represent Jewish Australians. In June 2024, the ZFA had the sheer audacity to publish an article calling its president, Jeremy Leibler, "the face of the Jewish cause".
The foundational belief of ZFA is "the centrality of Israel to Jewish identity. It views Zionism as "a cornerstone of Jewish peoplehood [...] a core Jewish value that has endured for thousands of years, manifesting in modern times through the deep bond between the Jewish people and the State of Israel". History is not a Zionist strong point.
ZFA makes the fantastical assertion that "Zionism and support for Palestinian self-determination are not mutually exclusive". Whatever its idealised versions, Zionism is not an abstract idea, free to take the shape of whatever vision animates its defender. It advocates the existence of a Jewish state in historic Palestine. Early Zionist leaders acknowledged that creating a Jewish majority in a country with a large non-Jewish majority (67% at the time) required the elimination of as many non-Jews as possible. Their diaries document the plans, which were implemented both before and during the war of 1948. About 750,000 Palestinians were expelled.
Furthermore, the Zionists did not limit their ambitions to a Jewish State as defined under UN General Assembly Resolution 181 on the Partition of Palestine. In 1937, David Ben Gurion, who would become Israel's first Prime Minister, advised the Zionist executive, "After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine". In 1967, Israel initiated the Six Day War and achieved this goal. However, despite expelling another 300,000 Palestinians, a demographic nightmare loomed.
Contrary to the lofty rhetoric of Israel's Declaration of Independence, over 65 laws discriminate directly or indirectly against Palestinians under its rule, A 2021 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report found that Israeli authorities have "dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians [in some areas amounting to] the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution".
In 1948 Israel, Palestinians have the right to vote. However, their participation is circumscribed by tactics including the banning of the first independent "Arab" party in 1964, motions to disqualify "Arab" parties, various targeted pieces of legislation, criminal indictments against politicians for participating in demonstrations, and incendiary rhetoric such as Netanyahu's warning to his voter base during the 2015 election that "Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves".
In the West Bank, Palestinians can vote, but only in elections for the Palestinian National Authority (PNA/PA), whose authority is limited to partial control in 40% of the West Bank and covers only matters such as culture, education, ID-cards, and distribution of land and water. They cannot vote in Israeli elections, although Israel fully controls 60% of the West Bank, partially controls another 22%, and determines the reality of everyday life via the illegal Separation Wall; almost 900 permanent, intermittent, or roving military checkpoints; destruction and theft of infrastructure; home demolitions and invasions; displacement, assaults, raids, and arrests.
In Occupied East Jerusalem, Machiavellian identity categories prevent Palestinians from living with their families in the West Bank unless they forfeit their Jerusalem property and residency rights. They routinely have their properties confiscated and turned over to Jewish families in the relentless push to Judaise the Holy City.
In the Gaza Strip, Israel has corralled hundreds of thousands, now millions, of Palestinians under increasingly brutal conditions since 1948. The endgame has now become clear even to those who might have demurred. Jewish Israeli journalist Gideon Levy writes eloquently about the destruction of Gaza being the pathway to "total social disintegration, and then expulsion". As Netanyahu said on May 28, 2026, "First of all, seventy [percent]".
Furthermore, while Israel's 1950 Law of Return grants every Jew in the world, their spouse (Jewish or not), children, and grandchildren, the right to Israeli citizenship, Israel can never allow Palestinian refugees their Right of Return, guaranteed under international law.
Liberal Zionist illusions, whether naive or disingenuous, are irrelevant. A Jewish state established and maintained against the will and interests of the indigenous non-Jewish population will always require a Jewish majority. This majority will always have to be maintained by whatever means necessary. This is the reality of Zionism.
(i) The Jewish Council of Australia (JCA)
Unlike every other major Jewish communal body, JCA does not claim to be representative. It describes itself as "an organisation of Jewish people in Australia who are committed to the Jewish values of tikkun olam (repairing the world), calling out injustice, challenging assumptions and promoting debate, [who] work towards ending antisemitism and all forms of racism and [...] support Palestinian freedom and justice". Members are "a diverse coalition of Jewish academics, lawyers, writers and teachers [and bring] expertise in antisemitism and racism". Its motto is "Dignity. Equality. Freedom. For all".
In stark contrast to Jewish Zionist organisations which receive often huge amounts of government funding, and whose supporters include extremely wealthy private and corporate donors, the JCA is funded through donations from its mostly everyday Australian supporters. When JCA was granted partial leave - note "partial" - to appear before this Commission, it briefed a legal team "to ensure the Commission hears from progressive Jews who both fight against antisemitism AND advocate for Palestinian freedom and justice". While Zionist Jewish organisations briefed a large team of barristers without financial constraint, the JCA had to do a fundraiser.
JCA is gaining some visibility, but Jewish Zionists still dominate the narrative on Israel-Palestine, and through entrenched structures still enjoy privileged access to Australian powerbrokers. Their array of tactics, which includes both relentless lobbying and brute intimidation, has been honed for decades.
(j) The Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion
The Royal Commission doesn't explicitly claim to speak for Jewish Australians, but in practice it will do precisely that. Through its ideological framework and its selection criteria for valid Jewish experience it will deliver conclusions and recommendations that will shape not only perceptions of Jewish identity, political views, and experience, but also direct government and other significant policy that will claim to reflect these things.
It is bizarre, astounding, and outrageous that this Commission denied certain Jewish Australians leave to present evidence of shocking antisemitic abuse. Loud Jew Collective (LJC), based in Melbourne, were denied leave to appear because the Commissioner was "not satisfied that LJC has a direct and substantial interest in the scope of the hearing”.
Apparently being called "a token self-hating Jew" and "kapo shit" (kapos were Nazi collaborators), being depicted as rats, being told "We hope Hamas rapes you to death and cuts off your head", and "it's a pity any of your family survived the Holocaust", aren't sufficiently antisemitic to prove "direct and substantial interest in" a Royal Commission hearing into antisemitism. However, feeling alarmed at the sight of a Palestinian keffiyeh or a slogan condemning Israel qualifies.
4. THE POLITICS OF ANTISEMITISM
In 2025, actor Helen Mirren was called an “evil Zionist bitch” on a London street. The Metropolitan Police issued a statement that Mirren had been "subjected to antisemitic verbal abuse.” Mirren is not Jewish. We are now in such an absurd world that anti-Zionist abuse targeting a non-Jew is deemed antisemitic, yet Jews experiencing antisemitic abuse from Zionists are summarily excluded from a Royal Commission purporting to be invested in understanding and combatting antisemitism.
As distinguished British Jewish historian, Mark Mazower, writes, the term "antisemitism [...] has been used to mean different things at different times, [...] Because words do not exist outside time and place, we need to understand them in their setting.”
Antisemitism in the late 19th century was a right-wing response to rising Jewish civic emancipation. By the 1920s, Jews in both Europe and the United States (US) were facing the growing threat of not only traditional bigotry but antisemitic political ideologies. Groups such as the League of Antisemites depended “not so much [on] negative stereotypes about the Jews – these were common currency – but rather in getting [people] to believe that the Jews were a serious threat to their core social or political concerns.” Nazism began as a movement against Jewish emancipation.
Following World War Two, the epicentre of Jewish life shifted from Europe to the United States (US) and Israel. In the post-war years, Jewish Americans enjoyed security and social acceptance previously unseen outside the Arab world, and antisemitism was "not [considered] something that could or should be treated separately from other kinds of bigotry or discrimination.”
However, the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 ushered a new and different element into the politics of antisemitism. In the US, left-wing Jewish commentators expressing strong criticism of Israel's violent dispossession of the Palestinians were called self-hating Jews by Zionist organisations. William Zukerman, founder of New York's anti-Zionist Jewish newspaper, observed that criticisms of Israel were now being “denounced not only as anti-Israel but as anti-Semitic.” Israel had begun its campaign to wrest ownership of Jewish identity from anti-Zionist Jews.
The 1967 Six-Day War was the turning point. Israel later admitted that it had started the war, but in its immediate heady aftermath of its conquests, claimed that it had triumphed despite suffering a surprise attack and facing an existential threat. In 1971, Mordechai Bentov, a member of the wartime government, explained, “This whole story about the threat of extermination was totally contrived, and then elaborated upon, a posteriori, to justify the annexation of new Arab territories". In 1972 and 1982 respectively, General Mattityahu Peled, Chief of Logistical Command during the war, and Prime Minister Menachem Begin said the same.
But the objective had been achieved. Fewer than twenty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Jews were again traumatised by existential fear, this time for the Jewish State, felt by many to be the one good thing to come of the Holocaust. This emotional identification with (perceived) vulnerability "helped to catalyse Jewry’s increasingly impassioned political engagement with Israel".
5. THE EVOLUTION OF THE IHRA DEFINITION
The most damning indictment of the IHRA definition is the fact that it depends on a redefinition of Jewish identity initiated not by Jewish scholars, historians, or community members in the diaspora, with lived experience of antisemitism, but by Israel as a cynical strategy to delegitimise criticism.
Not only does the definition contend that "rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism [can be] directed toward [...] non-Jewish individuals and/or their property" but six of its eleven examples depend on a redefinition of Jewish identity itself.
Step 1. The new antisemitism
Under the new antisemitism, Israel becomes the collective Jew. Antisemitism is transmuted from “discrimination against, denial of, or assault upon the rights of Jews to live as equal members of whatever society they inhabit” into denial of the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. Through this alchemical sleight of hand, a highly militarised, aggressive, expansionist state appropriates the victim status of persecuted, powerless, overwhelmingly poor European Jews.
This was Israel's answer to rising disquiet, domestic and international, at its behaviour in the territories it had occupied since 1967. In 1975, the UN General Assembly even passed Resolution 3379 (revoked in 1991 after ruthless economic coercion) equating Zionism with racism. Israel and its supporters responded to the realisation that Israel was losing its (undeserved) status as a progressive cause by launching a campaign to "redefine antisemitism" such that it demonised its critics as antisemites.
The new antisemitism not only prioritised the defence of Israel over the protection of Jews, but also identified anti-Zionism as a more dangerous form of antisemitism than the traditional form. After all, the latter had only engendered a couple of millennia of persecution, culminating in a genocide that exterminated two thirds of European Jewry and wiped an entire culture from the face of the Earth. A mere bagatelle compared to criticising Israel or calling out its state ideology. This redefined antisemitism also defied history to identify the political Left as the primary source of antisemitic hatred. This reflected Israel's dismay at the uncomfortable fact that the Left, after initially championing Israel as a progressive cause, was becoming highly critical.
Engineering such a profound shift in perception among both Jews and non-Jews required a formidable propaganda effort. Israel began disseminating problematic data to Jewish groups around the world researching antisemitism and its threat to their communities. Triggering the unspeakable trauma of a people just emerging from the Holocaust, instrumentalising their collective experience and historic fear of persecution, was collateral damage in the war to ensure impunity for the Jewish State.
In Australia, the campaign to promote the new antisemitism was led by ECAJ and ZFA, which banded together in 1974 to launch the abovementioned AIP, the media outfit dedicated entirely to promoting pro-Israel narratives in academic and public discourse and, of course, in the media. In 1997, AIP merged with the Australian Institute of Jewish Affairs (AIJA) to form AIJAC, and its mission and function were embedded in the new organisation.
Step 2. The 3D Test
The IHRA definition cites eleven examples, six of which depend on the new antisemitism. The founding architect of these examples was Israeli politician Natan Sharansky. In the early 2000s, Sharansky formulated the 3D Test to distinguish between antisemitism and legitimate criticism of Israel: the three Ds were demonisation (Israel’s actions are exaggerated), double standards (Israel is singled out), and delegitimisation (Israel’s right to exist is denied). The 3D filter was basically a controlled opposition operation, allowing enough criticism to project a veneer of liberalism, but not enough to address foundational issues.
Step 3. The IHRA definition
In 2005, elements of Sharansky's 3D Test were enshrined in the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) definition of antisemitism. Of eleven examples, seven concerned Israel. In 2016, a slightly modified version was adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).
According to the IHRA definition, an example of antisemitism is “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour”. The official national ideology of Israel is Zionism. Anyone with a working knowledge of Zionist ideology and history, let alone anyone observing or experiencing its implementation during the early years of Jewish colonisation in Palestine, then within the 1948 armistice line (Israel refuses to define its borders), then in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, then spilling into surrounding countries, and now enacted upon humanitarian activists, knows that the existence of a (Zionist) State of Israel is a racist endeavour. This example is a cynical device for ensuring that any future attempt to hold Israel accountable under the legally-binding International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) for its pervasive and egregious discrimination against non-Jews, would itself be decried as racist.
While the Commissioner accepts that "it is uncontroversial that criticism of the policies that may be pursued by the government of Israel from time to time is not of itself antisemitic,” her claim that of the eleven examples of antisemitism cited by the IHRA, only two have been criticised "because they concern political views that do not reflect hatred of Jews" vastly understates the scale of controversy.
The IHRA definition has been comprehensively criticised by numerous experts, including Jewish Australian Professor of Philosophy, Peter Slezak. It has also been called into question by the Federal Court of Australia which, in 2018, determined that criticism of Israel does not breach the Racial Discrimination Act. If criticism of the Jewish State does not constitute criticism of Jews qua Jews, then Israel is not the collective Jew, and the new antisemitism has no legal basis.
In 2018, eminent Australian KC Geoffrey Robertson found it "not fit for purpose". In 2020, over 350 scholars in the fields of antisemitism, Judaism, the Holocaust, Israel, Palestine, and West Asia (aka the Middle East), with widely differing views on Israel-Palestine, concluded that the IHRA definition not only had a pernicious effect on freedom of expression, but “has caused confusion and generated controversy, hence weakening the fight against antisemitism”. To rectify this situation, they drew up the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism. By April 2023, Kenneth Stern, the key drafter of the IHRA definition, who is Jewish, alongside 104 Israeli and international civil society organisations, had urged the UN to reject the definition because of its potential to interfere with the work of UN bodies.
The ludicrousness of conflating any level of criticism of Israel, even anti-Zionism, with antisemitism is further demonstrated by the Crossroads surveys undertaken by The Jewish Independent (TJI), a liberal Zionist media outlet. Even the 2023 survey, which polled a tiny, skewed sample of Jewish Australians (section (f) of this submission)) on their attitudes to Israel, showed "a marked decline in Australian Jews’ faith in Israel’s politics and society", with only 46% agreeing that democracy is “alive and well”.
The 2025 survey polled 71,000 Australians on their attitudes towards Israel, Jews and antisemitism. Arguably, the most revealing information to emerge is the negative correlation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, alongside a positive correlation between pro-Israel sentiment and antisemitism. Greens voters scored highest (29.8%) on the anti-Zionist scale and lowest (7.8%) on the Judeophobic scale. On the other hand, One Nation voters had the second highest sympathy for Israel (26%), just behind Coalition voters, and the most negative views on Jews (17.3%).
6. JEWISH ANTI-ZIONISM
Extreme mental gymnastics are required to hold the mutually contradictory positions that Zionism is inherent to Jewishness, yet Jews are not collectively responsible for the crimes demanded by Zionism. The assertion that Zionism is essential to Jewishness leads inexorably to the argument that all Jews support the existence of a Zionist state. As Zionism openly advocates Jewish demographic superiority in whatever territory Israel occupies, its manifestation necessarily requires the dispossession, legal discrimination, military oppression, cultural erasure, and genocide that have accompanied the Zonist project. The conclusion must be that all Jews view these abhorrent actions as lying somewhere on the spectrum between necessary evils and core Jewish values. The only way out of this conundrum is to admit that Zionism is not inherent to Jewish identity.
Admittedly, for a majority of Jews, Zionism is inextricable from their version of Jewishness, but for a significant and growing minority, including in Australia, it is not merely antithetical but anathema. In fact, Jewish anti-Zionism has been around for as long as Jewish Zionism.
The antisemitic roots of Zionism
The history of Zionism itself refutes the assertion that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. Zionism began as an antisemitic Christian theology that saw the return of the Jews to Palestine as the precursor of God's reign on Earth. This Evangelical enthusiasm should not be confused with love or concern for Jews, as the ensuing Apocalypse would result in our conversion or immolation.
From the 1800s, Christian Zionists began working to merge their vision with British imperial interests, cultivating close relationships with influential political figures. It was not until the 1880s, when Jewish communities across the Russian Empire endured a wave of pogroms, that the Jewish 'Lovers of Zion' established agricultural settlements in Palestine. Jewish Zionism formally emerged in 1897 with the first World Zionist Congress.
The founders of jewish Zionism gaslit themselves into believing that antisemitism was a natural response by indigenous populations to Jewish aliens in their lands. They agreed with antisemites that Jews were a degenerate people, and adopted ethnonationalist Blood and Soil ideology to argue that this was due to alienation from their ancient homeland. Echoing this idealisation of rural life as a counterbalance to the corrupting influence of urban culture, their remedy was for Jews to relinquish their pacifist and scholarly ways and become warriors of a national body if they ever hoped to be accepted as normal.
Meanwhile, Britain had its own reasons for supporting the Zionist agenda. Firstly, it did not want any more desperately poor Jews seeking refuge from European pogroms. Secondly, it was indebted to biochemist Weizmann for the industrial fermentation of acetone for the war effort. And finally, the Bolsheviks had revealed the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the secret Franco-British plan to renege on promises to the Arab nationalists for helping win the war, and instead divide the Ottoman Empire between themselves. Britain hoped that endorsing a Jewish homeland in Palestine would both prompt Jewish Americans to push the US to more enthusiastically embrace the war, and give Britain moral cover for those embarrassing plans for the Middle East.
By 1917, PM Lloyd George despaired at the intractable carnage on the Western Front. Russia was war-weary and the US was slow to mobilise. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire was crumbling, its provinces likely to become spoils of war. Lloyd George appointed General Allenby to secure Palestine for Britain. Allenby took command of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force and, after bypassing the ferociously-defended Gaza, took Beer Sheva and then Jerusalem. The Balfour Declaration was ready to ensconce European Jews as a British settler colony by proxy.
Even today, when the reins of imperial power are held by the United States, Christian Zionism remains a formidable force. Despite the highly visible antics of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) with five million members, Evangelical Christians, of whom there are around 85 million, exert enormous power.
Zionism, Israel, and antisemitism
Two Jewish scholars have been instrumental in exposing Zionist “collaboration with the Nazis and their obstruction of the rescue of European Jews to anywhere but Palestine”: Lenni Brenner in 1983 and Tony Greenstein in 2022. Greenstein also considers the implications of this betrayal for a future resurgence of antisemitism, and analyses Israel’s subsequent weaponization of the Holocaust.
This cozying up to antisemites was not an aberration. While Stalinist states in the USSR were carrying out vicious antisemitic campaigns and show trials, Zionist militias and, later Israel, were purchasing Soviet weapons. Israel supported Argentina under the Junta, during which time many thousands of dissidents, including Jews, were “disappeared.” In fact, Israel has always been naturally ideologically aligned with repressive regimes, and its economy underpinned by global export of not only weaponry and surveillance technology, but the techniques of repression.
Israel actively cultivates bromances with antisemitic leaders, such as those of Hungary and Poland and Trump in the US, as long as they are right-wing nationalists. A stark illustration of how irrelevant antisemitism is to the Zionist state is the fact that an evangelical pastor who believes that Jews will go to Hell and a megachurch televangelist who claimed that Hitler was part of God’s plan played prominent roles in the 2018 opening ceremony of the US Embassy in Jerusalem.
Nor is this a reflection of the shifting sands of modern international diplomacy. The founders of Zionism understood that state antisemitism was essential to their colonial ambitions. Herzl foreshadowed Israeli policy when he wrote, “the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.” Even worse for people who abhor antisemitism, and especially for those of us who stand to suffer from it, their ruminations on the nature of Jewishness are deeply unsettling. Herzl’s appalling ‘Mauschel’, published in the same year as the First Zionist Congress was held, would not have been out of place in ‘Mein Kampf'.
No wonder Zionists are intent on expanding the definition of antisemitism. The more the better. When Zionism is not only compatible with antisemitism, but thrives on it, it is nonsensical to claim that opposition to it is the real problem for Jews.
So many Jewish antisemites?
The idea that anti-Zionism is antisemitism enables the ridiculous assertion that significant numbers (in some periods of history, large majorities) of Jews were and are antisemites. Before Israel mounted its campaign to occupy and annex Jewish identity, Jews understood very well what antisemitism was. Even when Zionism emerged, Jews knew that to criticise or reject it did not negate their Jewishness.
Since its official founding as a political movement in 1897, varying proportions of Jews have deplored Zionism as anathema to the core Jewish belief that "Jews should have a special concern for the fate of all humanity, regardless of ethnicity or creed". In fact, it was this realisation that animated the Jewish Labour Bund, a revolutionary socialist anti-Zionist party also founded in 1897. While the Zionists were wooing the rich and powerful in an elegant hotel in Switzerland, thirteen idealistic young Jews in the deeply antisemitic Tsarist Empire founded the Bund in the back room of a simple house.
Before WW2, Jews freely debated Zionism, the vast majority of Western Jews, both religious and secular, concluding that it was at best unnecessary and at worst antisemitic and dangerous. Even after the Holocaust, Zionism remained controversial. Some religious communities rejected it as blasphemous, socialists and communists rejected nationalism altogether, and vast numbers of Jews of all persuasions abhorred both the concept and the reality of the racialised dominance over and dispossession of another people.
Acculturated Jews in Western Europe foresaw the perils of being perceived as a fifth column. In 1917, Edwin Montagu, the only Jewish member of British Parliament, saw the Balfour Declaration as "anti-Semitic and in result will prove a rallying ground for anti-Semites in every country in the world". He believed that Zionism was "a mischievous political creed [...] admitted by those who take a bigoted and narrow view of one particular epoch of the history of Palestine, and claim for the Jews a position to which they are not entitled”.
Progressive and leftist Jews rejected Zionism as a reactionary philosophy. Until very recently, most Jews were poor, and naturally allied with the struggles of the working class in their home countries. Jews in Eastern Europe mocked Zionists as “foolish” and formed the General Jewish Workers League, the Bund, committed to the struggle for social justice wherever they lived. In fact, Jews have played a disproportionate role in social justice struggles around the globe, from London's East End and the Bolshevik Revolution to the US civil rights movement and the struggle against South African apartheid. It was unthinkably inconsistent with the politics of liberation to support a colonial project.
Even the understandable desire to escape waves of Christian persecution in Europe did not incline the overwhelming majority of Jews towards Zionism. They wanted the opportunities afforded by the New World. After the Nazi Holocaust, only a minority of survivors volunteered to go to Palestine. In the 1950s, Israel was suffering such a dearth of interest that the Mossad resorted to false flag attacks against Jewish targets in Baghdad to terrorise entire communities into migrating and providing the Ashkenazis with cheap labour.
Within the immigrant Jewish community in Palestine under the British Mandate, there was always an undercurrent of attempts to overcome the Zionist ontology. The Stern Gang, an extremist group, saw the fight against the British as an anti-colonial struggle, and sought to create a common partnership between Jews and Palestinians. Meanwhile, another terrorist group, the Irgun, fought mainly against the Palestinians, yet one of its members later became a prominent advocate for joint Arab-Jewish action. Also, from the very early years of Israel's existence, there was a current of Arab Jews, most notably Iraqis, who relentlessly criticised Israel for its profound and inherent Zionist racism.
There is a long list of Jews, Israelis among them, who are not only harsh critics of Israel, but often staunch ant-Zionists. The following eminent scholars and journalists have contributed enormously to our knowledge and understanding: Professor Ilan Pappé Professor Haim Bresheeth, Tony Greenstein, Rabbi Brant Rosen, Professor Nurit Peled-Elhanan, Jeff Halper, Gideon Levy, Amira Hass, Professor Amos Goldberg, Dr Norman Finkelstein, Joel Kovel, Max Blumenthal, Avi Shlaim, Dr Ronit Lentin, Ran Greenstein, Nir Baram, Haggai Mattar, Orly Noy, Yuval Avraham, Mairav Zonstein, Raz Segal, Nora Barrows-Friedman, Shir Hever, Professor Omer Bartov, and Antony Loewenstein, to name a few.
Peter Beinart, editor at 'Jewish Currents', professor of journalism and political science, and fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace, has not only completely debunked the myth that anti-Zionism is antisemitic, but speaks of Jewish support for Israel as it has wreaked unspeakable havoc in Gaza as "a moral wreckage that we [Jews] need to face".
Most Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews oppose Zionism as a matter of faith. Groups such as the Satmar Hasidim, one of the largest Hasidic dynasties in the world, and Neturei Karta (Guardians of the City), founded in Jerusalem in 1938 within the Old Yishuv (devout pre-Zionist Jewish communities in Palestine) do not recognise Israel. Neturei Karta Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss is a highly visible activist for justice in Palestine. Yaakov Shapiro, rabbi for three decades, now emeritus, and the recipient of numerous prestigious awards from Orthodox Jewish bodies, is a prominent anti-Zionist public intellectual. In Israel, these Jews are brutalised by Israeli military and police for their refusal to join the Israeli Defence Forces.
Then we have Jewish organisations such as Global Jews for Palestine with member organisations in eighteen countries and six continents, Jewish Voice for Peace in the US, and Jews for Palestine groups in the UK and most European countries. Groups in Israel include B’tselem, Israeli Committee Against Home Demolition, and Boycott From Within. In Australia we have well-established groups such as Jews Against Fascism, Tzedek, Loud Jew Collective, and Jews Against the Occupation ‘48, as well as other groups that have emerged since October 2023.
Palestinians have always documented, studied, and spoken about their experiences. However, due to the racist lacuna in the Western world view, it has often been Jewish voices that have been permitted to draw attention to the realities of Israel-Palestine. To silence our voices under the pretext that we are antisemitic would be risible if it were not so morally wrong and dangerous.
7. SOCIAL COHESION
The Letters Patent issued by the Governor-General, Her Excellency the Honourable Sam Mostyn AC, which established this Royal Commission, state that "social cohesion means the national consensus in support of democracy, freedom and the rule of law." Interesting…
The Australian Government body, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) defines social cohesion as "a multi-dimensional concept referring to social connectedness [...], solidarity and trust amongst individuals within and across communities and organisations, and within society at large". It explains that "unity is established through social relationships based on trust, shared values, feelings of belonging and the expectation of reciprocity" and that, for society to be truly cohesive, "inequalities and exclusion [...] are to be minimised".
The UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) measures social cohesion "through key dimensions [including] a sense of trust, sense of belonging, legitimacy of institutions, sense of recognition, social inclusion, social capital, civic engagement, and shared values". Not substantially different from when Gough Whitlam first used the term in 1972 to refer to "community life and community identity.”
The Scanlon Foundation Research Institute is an independent Australian research body dedicated to developing a sound understanding of social cohesion as a basis for public policy. After over a decade of research, it has concluded that, for all its variables, social cohesion boils down to "strong social bonds infused with a sense of togetherness".
Just like the redefinitions at the core of this Commission's inquiries, those of antisemitism and Jewish identity, the redefinition of social cohesion in terms that call to mind a conservative political edict or a confused libertarian's campaign pitch is a transparent and cynical tactic for manipulating the discourse through deception.
Genuine social cohesion depends on the perception of fairness. It is therefore fractured by inequity. The past two and a half years have exposed the Jewish Zionist community's disproportionate access to Australia's corridors of political and economic power. When racism against First Nations peoples is endemic, Arab and Muslim people are being harassed and assaulted, Palestinians are being silenced during their genocide, and the list goes on, the deferential treatment of the Jewish Zionist community, especially as its demands infringe on the rights of everyone else, inevitably engenders animosity and legitimises antisemitic tropes about Jewish power. Israel's stupefying impunity doesn't help.
Unsurprisingly, exceptionalising antisemitism compounds this divisive dynamic. Jews are far from the only ethnic or religious group subjected to persecution and genocide over the centuries. Wikipedia lists roughly seventy since about 1200 CE. Even the Nazi genocide swallowed not only the Jews of Europe but also Slavs, Poles, Roma and Sinti Peoples, people with disabilities, and other üntermenschen.
The Letters Patent assert that "strengthening social cohesion provides the strongest defence against antisemitism and other forms of religious and ideologically motivated extremism." Perversely, this is true - but only if we understand social cohesion in its original, meaningful sense.
8. CONCLUSION
There is no credible evidence that anti-Zionist sentiment or activism is aligned with negative attitudes towards Jewish Australians. In fact, the opposite is true. Where Jewish Australians perceive animosity or threat, this is engendered not by hatred of their Jewishness but by their decision to support a state whose sheer depravity has been seared into their consciousness for two and a half years. Then there's natural resentment that this privileged group frames itself as the victim and wrangles a laundry list of astronomically costly inquiries while the budget ignores homelessness and economic hardship. And all the while, Jewish communal bodies are hustling and cheerleading for a string of legislation that is tightening the noose around every other Australian's democratic freedoms.
Frankly, which other group would be supported to espouse views on human rights and international law, race, democracy, nationalism, and warfare that are abhorrent to most Australians? Protecting communities from hatred, intimidation and violence requires impartial protection of all communities' rights and freedoms. This demands the protection of the democratic rights and freedoms that best guard against fissures and fractures in Australian society.
The only effective way to combat prejudice against Jews is to remove the conditions which create animosity and, however unjustly, legitimise antisemitic tropes. As Israel is unlikely to rein in its hateful behaviour, the countries where diaspora Jews live are morally bound to do everything in their power to uncouple the conflation of Jewish identity with love for this rogue state. They must also resist Jewish Zionist pressure, relinquish Jewish Zionist approval, and treat their Jewish communities with no greater deference than any other community.
9. RECOMMENDATIONS
We urge the Commission to:
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