In the wake of the Bondi Beach terrorist attack, as victims’ families and Jewish organisations demand assurances from the Australian government that violence against Jewish Australians will not be normalised, calls for a federal Royal Commission have emerged to confront what are assumed to be systemic or institutional failures preceding the attack.
However, the belief that an inquiry will deliver accountability and protection reflects a deeper refusal to acknowledge what is driving antisemitic violence today.
For two years, what has driven antisemitic violence is the steady mainstreaming of an ideology that recasts Jews as legitimate targets by laundering hostility through the language of ‘Zionism’. This mutated and modern form of antisemitism, what is called antizionism – or simply – anti-Israelism, has normalised the idea that Jews, rebranded as ‘Zionists’, may be singled out, harassed, or attacked without moral consequence. It is this lack of moral clarity that the Australian government has failed to confront.
Demonisation and hatred of Jews is not a static form of racism. Its expression and language have adapted across the ages using whatever vocabulary necessary to present itself as moral, reasoned and virtuous. This has been mapped into three distinct categories – anti-Judaism, antisemitism, and antizionism – hating Jews for their religion, hating Jews for their race, and hating Jews for their national existence as expressed through the Jewish state.
When religion dominated public life, Jews were accused of violating Christian truths and poisoning the moral order by refusing conversion. Christianity defined itself as the fulfilment of Judaism also known as supersessionism, thus Jewish refusal to accept Jesus was framed as moral corruption. Jews were cast as the people who had rejected God’s truth, killed Christ, and their continued presence within Christian society was portrayed as a spiritual danger. From this flowed accusations of ritual murder and blood libels, the claims that Jews murdered Christian children for religious purposes, as well as numerous conspiracies against the Church. These were not fringe beliefs. Anti-Judaism was taught in schools, amongst the clergy and ruling elite, which justified pogroms, expulsions, forced conversions, and ghettoisation as acts of moral protection for society at large.
When religion lost its authority and race theory took its place, Jews were no longer condemned primarily for what they believed but for what they were said to be biologically. Pseudoscientific theories cast Jews as a corrosive racial element, incapable of loyalty, inherently manipulative, and dangerous to the genetic health of nation states. Once again, Jews were framed as a civilisational threat and impure. The language shifted from theology to biology with the same moral language applied to it. This racialised Jew hatred – antisemitism– resulted in exclusionary laws, forced sterilisation, mass deportations, and ultimately the industrialised genocide of six million Jews in the Holocaust presented as a hygienic necessity for the survival of civilisation.
Today, in a secular, atheist-driven human rights-obsessed culture, Jew hatred has adapted once again. Jews are no longer accused of killing Christ or corrupting bloodlines with racial impurity, they are now accused of violating morality itself through the very existence of the Jewish nation state – Israel.
Antizionism, put simply as anti-Israelism, reframes Jewish self-determination in their ancestral homeland as a moral crime that must be dismantled in the name of justice, human rights, and liberation. This moral indictment is sustained through a small number of claims that now dominate public discourse and are treated as self-evident truths rather than ideological assertions. Namely, Israel is accused of committing genocide, despite fighting a war against a terror organisation embedded in civilian infrastructure. It is labelled an apartheid state, despite granting full civil rights to its Arab, Druze, Christian, Muslim, and Secular citizens and operating as a multi-ethnic democracy. It is declared illegitimate, as though Jewish sovereignty alone requires external moral permission to exist in comparison to any other nation. And, Israel is accused of ethnically cleansing Palestinians, even as the Palestinian population grows and its wars are fought against armed terror groups rather than civilians as a class. These four points are categorically false, yet have been promoted daily as fact since October 8, 2023, by almost all mainstream media. The Australian government, its backers, and agencies such as the Australian unions, not only do nothing to challenge them but have actively endorsed these claims. The promotion and endorsement before October 7th was more subtle and limited to party meetings and actions by individual members of parliament, but this has since exploded over the last two years.
What unites these accusations is not concern for human rights but the application of a singular moral standard to Jews. No other state is accused of genocide for defending itself. No other democracy is declared illegitimate because of its national character. No other people are told that their collective existence is itself the problem. Through this framework, Jewish self-defence becomes aggression, Jewish sovereignty becomes criminality, and Jewish survival becomes something to be apologised for. Once this logic is accepted as the norm, the consequences are predictable. Jews are no longer targeted as Jews but as ‘Zionists’, a linguistic sleight of hand that allows hostility to be denied even as Jewish individuals, institutions, and communities are attacked. Violence is reframed as resistance, intimidation as protest, and calls for the destruction of Israel as moral urgency. Jew hatred is now moralised. Even the claim that ‘it’s not Antisemitic to criticise Israel’ functions as an Antisemitic trope. No serious advocate for Israel has ever argued that criticism of Israeli policy or the Israeli government is inherently Antisemitic. The line is repeated to shut down scrutiny and to make hostility toward Jews (recast as ‘Zionists’) seem acceptable.
A federal Royal Commission is not equipped to deal with an ideological failure and moral collapse of this kind. It is systemic and seismic in scale of global proportions.
What would actually combat modern antisemitism, i.e. anti-Israelism, would require the Australian government to name the false narratives and correct demonstrably untrue claims. To then audit and amend official language, to censure public figures who promote modern Antisemitic tropes and falsehoods, and to enforce existing laws without apology. None of this requires new powers, new processes, or new systems. What it requires is political courage of which our government lacks.
This is why calls for a Royal Commission, however well-intentioned they may be, and however hurt the Jewish community is or how powerless Jewish organisations may feel right now, risk becoming a way of avoiding the harder task of confronting what is actually driving the problem.
A Royal Commission would channel public anger into hearings, submissions, and a final report, allowing the political system to say that the issue has been examined, lessons have been learned, and processes will be reviewed. Yet it will surely leave untouched the false anti-Israel narrative that has made hostility toward Jews seem morally justified in the first place. Australia has held more than 130 federal Royal Commissions and none has ever legally blamed a government for wrongdoing which makes it difficult to believe that another inquiry would suddenly deliver accountability here. In practice, a Royal Commission would provide reassurance that something is being done without confronting the ideology that is driving the problem. The government could address this within a year by actively challenging false anti-Israel narratives and confronting the ideology it has helped to normalise, but that would require a level of political courage it has consistently refused to show.
