The Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion formally opened last week.
Over recent days, I’ve sat watching the lived experience testimonies and they are harrowing and resonate deeply.
For more than two years, Jewish Australians have carried the grief of October 7 while watching tens of thousands of Australians march in the streets celebrating it.
Public figures championed it, defended it, all while branding Jews with the slur of genocide.
The 21st Century blood libel, deployed against Israel and the Jewish Diaspora at the very moment of grief… After two and a half years, I am done with the debate. I want outcomes.
The Commission was told that one of the key drivers of Antisemitism in Australia is the growing conflation of hostility towards Israel with Jewish Australians. For what it’s worth, I have no problem being conflated with Israel. Israel is fighting a war of self-defence against barbarian tactics. What I do have a problem with is lies and what passes for criticism of Israel is predominantly Antizionist lies.
On day one, it was stated that a central task of the inquiry is to identify when Antizionism crosses the line into Antisemitism. I’ll save the Commission the trouble. It doesn’t cross a line. If Antizionism and Antisemitism were a Venn diagram of anti-Jewish bigotry, it is my opinion that in every documented instance, you would see a single circle.
Antizionism is not a proxy for anti-Jewish bigotry. It is anti-Jewish bigotry.
What makes Antizionism uniquely insidious is it takes a people’s liberation movement and reframes it as the bigotry itself.
Zionism – Jewish self-determination – has been recast as racism. And the movement that seeks to eliminate the Jewish state dresses its language up as liberation. The slogans confirm this. ‘Intifada’ is not a human rights slogan. ‘From the river to the sea’ in its original Arabic means ‘From water to water, Palestine will be Arab’. This is an ethno-nationalist eliminationist demand, not a civil rights one. And the dissolution of Israel is the ethnic cleansing of seven million Jews.
The problem we keep skirting around is that Antizionism palms itself off as political criticism when it is in fact ideology and slogans borne of a communist-Islamist fusion. Its basis is the dissolution of Israel and it falsely claims Israel is an illegitimate state. Just as Antisemitism dressed hatred in the language of science – racial biology, eugenics, pseudo-academic frameworks – Antizionism dresses hatred in the language of politics. And just as the law once accepted Antisemitism as legitimate political discourse, it is largely accepting Antizionism on the same terms today.
The courts reveal the limits of prosecuting Antizionism’s harmful and hateful expressions.
In November 2023, Islamic speeches were given at a mosque and published online. Three breached the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 18C. The court identified 25 racist imputations: that Jews are conspiratorial, treacherous, wicked, vile, that they control the media and the banks, that they are descended from apes and pigs. But two speeches were dismissed. These contained claims that ‘certain media outlets owned by the Zionist entities are trying to sway public perception’, that ‘right wing politicians have stepped into backing Israel because Israel holds their leash’, and that Israel is ‘the terrorist state of Israel and its mass murdering machine, the IDF’.
Sound familiar? Jews control the media. Jews control the government. And the Jewish state is a uniquely evil force in the world holding foreign governments and politicians by a leash. These are not criticisms of a state.
The charge that Jews – sorry, Zionists – control the media and the banks and control foreign governments comes straight from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The charge that the Jewish state commits uniquely monstrous violence against children is the blood libel – the medieval fabrication that Jews murder children for ritual purposes.
When we say Antisemitism is a virus, it’s because this is how it works. It mutates with the language of the time. And this language is promulgated across the board by mosques, churches, political figures, influencers and the media. As stated, it has become almost fashionable.
How are anti-Jewish tropes avoiding condemnation?
It comes down to the idea that the ‘ordinary reasonable listener would understand that not all Jews are Zionists’ and that ‘disparagement of Zionism constitutes disparagement of a philosophy or ideology and not a race or ethnic group’.
That is the gap. That is exactly the gap. And it is the gap this Commission must close.
Here’s a sample of why:
On one occasion, protesters blockaded a private Jewish function screaming, ‘All Zionists are terrorists!’ and ‘Intifada, Intifada!’ It is alleged protestors coordinated on social media, told others to block the entrances and exits, and to make ‘Zios’ as uncomfortable as possible inside the venue.
On another, a club listed Zionism alongside racism, sexism, transphobia, and homophobia in its house rules.
We have seen people associated with political groups displaying signs equating ‘Zionist Israel’ with ‘Nazi Germany’ with captions such as ‘Equally as evil or worse?’ and ‘Zionism has hijacked Judaism’. In my opinion, that’s Holocaust inversion and according to the Commission – is Antisemitism.
In 2025, we witnessed across the Palestinian protest movement signage illustrating the Prime Minister of Israel as the ‘Fuhrer’, ‘Zionism is a death cult’, and the appropriation of ‘Never Again’ – the phrase primarily associated with the Holocaust.
In 2026, weeks after 15 Jewish Australians were murdered at a Chanukah celebration at Bondi Beach allegedly by ISIS-inspired attackers, protesters gathered across Australia. Their signs did not mourn the Bondi dead. The signs they carried read: ‘Zionism is Terrorism!’, ‘Zionism is a Death Cult!’, ‘Death to America, Australia, and the Zionist Entity!’, and ‘Globalise the Intifada…’
Socialist magazines distributed at one protest had a sidebar describing the Bondi massacre as ‘How Israel’s war crimes brand terrorism’. This is the Antizionist movement.
And how did we get here?
Because on October 9 2023, protesters freely gathered outside the iconic Sydney Opera House chanting, ‘Where’s the Jews?’ and ‘F**k the Jews!’ while burning an Israeli flag. Police advised Jewish Australians to avoid the CBD as if that made it okay. At the same protest, one of the organisers endorsed Hamas’ ‘right to resist’ – meaning shooting up kids at a music festival is, apparently, a-okay for this organiser – and instructed the crowd to use the word ‘Zionist’ rather than ‘Jew.’
No one across two and a half years has faced significant consequences for any of it – especially not the current government.
The zeitgeist in Australia is Antizionist, and the result is that the floodgates for neo-Nazi white supremacism, for classical Antisemites, for anti-Judaists, and every form of anti-Jewish bigotry we thought we had pushed to the fringes are opened. So the single most important question is how do we make Antizionism’s harmful expressions prosecutable? How do we get back to some kind of normal?
Commissioner Bell reaffirmed her commitment to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of Antisemitism and the Commission is right to apply it, but the IHRA definition remains anchored in post-Holocaust language. It is not designed to capture Antizionism as a distinct ideology, and its adoption has not amended a single law. Subsequent legislation has followed: a ban on the Nazi salute, the Criminal Code Amendment (Hate Crimes) Act 2025, but none of it reaches Antizionism directly.
There has been one isolated advancement. In Vorchheimer v Tayeh [2026] VCAT case 134, the Judge found that Tayeh, by initiating the chant ‘all Zionists are terrorists’ at a rally in March 2025, contravened sections of the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act 2001. The tribunal found a very strong association between the word ‘Zionist’ and Jewish identity, and that the word ‘all’ carried the spectre of de-individuation – a hallmark of racism.
But this is one tribunal, one chant, one respondent. Victoria Police are separately prosecuting Tayeh in the criminal court, where the question is not whether the chant is Antisemitic but whether the words were grossly offensive. This is, in my view, entirely the wrong question. It doesn’t matter whether calling Jews terrorists is offensive. I am more than happy to be offended.
What matters is the environment it creates and who is the target.
If Jews are publicly branded as terrorists – or Nazis – the public is morally licensed to doxx, exclude, harass, and harm them. The violence that follows is not random. It is logical. It flows directly from the premise. That is why the harm of Antizionism is not a feelings question. It is a safety question. And until the law catches up to that, we are prosecuting the symptom and ignoring the disease.
Queensland has gone a step further and banned specific chants such as ‘From the river to the sea’ and ‘Globalise the Intifada’ when used to menace, harass, or offend. But as I’ve written before, banning specific phrases is a game of whack-a-mole. The ridiculous Johnny Farnham pro-Palestinian cosplay from a month ago is a case in point. Here was the Brisbane pro-Palestinian movement dressed in 1980s outfits, mullets and all, waving Palestinian flags and singing ‘Like a River to the Sea’. If you missed it, imagine the reverse. Jews donning mullets and dancing in 1943 to convince the Nazis to stop the genocide of Jews. This is how we know this is not a serious movement (and there is no genocide). Bottom line, the phrases will continue to change but the ideology doesn’t.
There are three legislative options as I see them if we are to truly bring safety back to Jewish Australians.
First, amend 18C to explicitly include political ideologies that function as vehicles for ethnic vilification – the test being whether the ideology, in practice, targets a specific ethnic group. Antizionism clearly does. It targets Jews.
Second, name Antizionism explicitly, but this is the weakest option. Legislators will resist naming a political position as illegal, despite Antizionism masquerading as political critique.
Third, strengthen the incitement threshold. Antizionism doesn’t need to be illegal, but when it functions to mark Jews for violence, harassment, or discrimination, that conduct becomes prosecutable. We didn’t outlaw racism. We made its specific expressions prosecutable. That is the point.
We pushed Antisemitism to the fringes once before. We disproved its pseudoscience. We criminalised its expressions. So too will we do the same for Antizionism. We will disprove its pseudo-critique. We will criminalise its expressions. I simply pray it will not be after more mass murder.
