The Royal Commission into Antisemitism was convened in the shadow of the Bondi Beach massacre of December 2025, when fifteen people were murdered at a Hanukkah gathering in what has been described as the deadliest antisemitic attack in Australian history. It was, on any reading, a rupture – not only because of its scale, but because it forced into the open a question that had been building, uneasily, for more than two years: how a country that prides itself on pluralism and civic ease had arrived at a moment where Jews could be targeted so explicitly, and so lethally, in public space.
That question does not begin at Bondi. Since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, and the subsequent war in Gaza, Australia has seen a sustained wave of anti-Israel and anti-Zionist protest – much of it framed in the language of human rights, some of it more strident, even incendiary. Alongside this mobilisation has come a marked rise in antisemitic incidents: abusive chants at early demonstrations, harassment of visibly Jewish individuals, vandalism of synagogues and community institutions, graffiti, threats, social and professional exclusion, and a steady current of online vilification. Some of these episodes have been highly visible; many more have been ambient, cumulative, and privately absorbed. For the Jewish community, the sense has not been of isolated but of a gathering atmosphere – a shift in what can be said, and done, about Jews in public without consequence.
It is into this unsettled landscape that the Commission steps. Its task is not only to examine the failures that allowed Bondi to occur, but to consider whether that attack can be understood in isolation at all – or whether it belongs to a broader pattern of escalating hostility, contested language, and fraying social norms. In that sense, it is as much an inquiry into civic culture as it is into security.
Andrew Wirth’s submission is written with precisely that broader frame in mind. He contributes not as a representative of any organisation, but as a Jewish Australian – the child of Holocaust survivors, a member of a contemporary community that now finds itself, again, thinking seriously about questions of safety and belonging. His purpose is not to collapse legitimate criticism of Israel into antisemitism, nor to deny the moral force of Palestinian advocacy. Rather, it is to interrogate the relationship between the forms that advocacy has taken in Australia since October 2023 and the lived experience of many Jews during that same period.
He is, in effect, asking the Commission to look not only at events but at environment. To consider whether the prevailing ways of understanding harm – episodic, attributable, legally discrete — are adequate to a phenomenon that may instead be cumulative, ambiguous, and socially mediated. And to ask, quietly but insistently, whether Bondi was an isolated act of hatred, or the most violent expression of a climate that had already, for some time, been forming in plain sight.
The complete submission is republished in full below. As it is very lengthy, In That Howling Infinite has used AI to provide a comprehensive summary.
Much of the testimony before the Royal Commission on Anti-Semitism and Social Cohesion dealt not with abstract politics, but with the way the Israel-Palestine conflict has spilled into everyday Australian life: schools, workplaces, music venues, synagogues and online spaces. Among the most striking evidence was that of singer and author Deborah Conway, who described cancelled performances, organised protest campaigns, doxing, online abuse and threats directed at her for publicly identifying as both Jewish and Zionist. Whatever one’s views on Israel or Gaza, her testimony underscored the increasingly blurred line between political activism, social intimidation and hostility directed at Jews as Jews – a tension that sat at the heart of the inquiry’s hearings. Conroy’ testimony and that of others is also republished below.
In That Howling Infinite, April 2026
Long story short …
Wirth’s submission is, at heart, an attempt to change the lens through which the Commission looks – away from the forensic habit of isolating moments (a chant, a placard, a lone actor, a single atrocity) and toward something more diffuse and disquieting: the social atmosphere in which those moments become possible. He writes as a Jewish Australian, and as the son of survivors, but resists the pull of memoir. The authority he claims is not moral witness so much as analytic patience – an effort to describe how a climate forms, thickens, and, eventually, breaks.
His central contention is that the harms experienced by Jewish Australians since October 2023 are systemic and cumulative. Bondi – horrific, unprecedented – is not treated as an aberration but as a point of condensation, where a long-gathering set of pressures became visible in a single, devastating act. To understand that act, he argues, one must look not for a clean causal chain (this slogan → this shooter → this event), but for patterns of probability: the way repeated exposure to certain forms of rhetoric, symbolism, and social signalling can lower inhibitions, sharpen antagonisms, and render violence imaginable to those already inclined toward it. The analogy he reaches for is telling: not criminal law, but climate science. You cannot attribute a single storm to climate change with precision; you can, however, describe the conditions that make storms more frequent, more intense, more likely.
From this premise, the essay unfolds in widening circles.
He first dismantles the idea of a singular “pro-Palestinian movement.” What exists instead, he suggests, is an ecosystem: formal advocacy bodies fluent in the language of human rights; looser activist formations oriented toward protest and disruption; and a penumbra of fellow travellers – ideological extremists, vandals, conspiracists — who share space, slogans, and emotional energy if not formal affiliation. These elements are not centrally controlled, nor are they uniformly motivated. That, in a sense, is the point. The diversity allows for elasticity: respectable actors can maintain a principled public face while disclaiming the excesses of the wider milieu (“a few bad actors,” “not representative”), even as those excesses contribute to the overall tone and impact of the movement. Plausible deniability is not a bug but a feature.
Language is the next terrain. Wirth is careful not to claim that particular phrases are intrinsically violent in a narrow, lexical sense. Instead, he insists that meaning is contextual, historical, and relational. Words arrive carrying baggage. “Intifada,” whatever its literal translation, is heard by many Jews through the memory of suicide bombings and mass-casualty attacks; “from the river to the sea,” however it is intended, resonates with anxieties about elimination; “Zionists are…” constructions collapse a vast and internally diverse population into a single moral category, often freighted with the most toxic imagery available. The key point is not that every speaker intends harm, but that in a crowded, emotionally charged public sphere, ambiguity is not neutral. It creates room for multiple readings, including the most hostile ones, and allows those who wish to intimidate to do so under cover of contestability. The same words can be defended as benign and experienced as threatening – and both facts can be true at once.
Central to this slippage is the term “Zionist.” In activist discourse it operates as a floating signifier: sometimes a political descriptor, sometimes a moral indictment, sometimes a proxy for a people. Wirth’s claim – backed by survey data — is that the overwhelming majority of Australian Jews feel some connection to Israel and many are comfortable with the label “Zionist” in a broad, cultural or existential sense. To target “Zionists,” then, is in practice to target Jews as they understand themselves, even if the formal claim is otherwise. The distinction between Jew and Zionist, while logically defensible, does little work sociologically. Indeed, he suggests, the insistence on that distinction can become a way of telling Jews what they are allowed to be – a curious inversion in a discourse otherwise attentive to self-identification.
The essay then turns to causation – or rather, to the limits of conventional thinking about it. The familiar retort to concerns about protest rhetoric is that no direct link can be proven between speech and a specific act of violence. Wirth concedes the point and then sidesteps it. In complex systems, he argues, causation is rarely linear or attributable. The relevant question is not “did this slogan cause this attack?” but “does a given communicative environment increase or decrease the likelihood of such attacks occurring?” Here he draws on the literature around “stochastic violence”: the idea that repeated, dehumanising or inflammatory messaging can, over time, prime a small subset of individuals to act, even in the absence of explicit incitement. Responsibility is diffuse; effects are real. It is an uncomfortable model for legal systems built on individual intent, but a familiar one in other domains of risk.
If this is the mechanism, the effects are not confined to headline events. A large portion of the submission is devoted to what might be called the low-grade, high-frequency harms: insults, exclusion, intimidation, the steady drip of being cast as suspect or illegitimate. Synagogues require guards; schools adjust routines; people speak more cautiously, or not at all. There is a contraction of presence — a subtle withdrawal from the public square. Wirth is at pains to stress that for every reported incident there are many more that never reach formal channels but accumulate in private memory, at dinner tables, in the small recalibrations of daily life. This is where his argument edges closest to the experiential without relinquishing its analytic frame: harm as something lived continuously rather than episodically.
Against this backdrop, he is sharply critical of two patterns in the public response. The first is the tendency, among some pro-Palestinian advocates, to dismiss Jewish concerns as bad faith – “weaponisation,” an attempt to silence criticism of Israel, a manoeuvre in a political contest. This, he suggests, substitutes motive-hunting for engagement with the substance of the claims. The second is the reliance on generalised anti-racism frameworks as a sufficient policy response. Such frameworks, he argues, are necessary but not sufficient, because antisemitism does not map neatly onto the paradigms those frameworks were designed to address. Jews are often perceived simultaneously as powerful and vulnerable, insiders and outsiders – a dual coding that allows hostility to evade categories built primarily around visible disadvantage. Subsumed into the general, antisemitism risks disappearing.
He extends this scepticism to legal doctrine. Courts, tasked with balancing free expression against harm, tend to look for discrete, demonstrable injuries traceable to particular acts. But if the harm is cumulative, ambient, and probabilistic, that evidentiary demand becomes almost impossible to meet. The result is a persistent gap between lived experience and legal recognition – a sense, on the part of those affected, that the system cannot quite “see” what is happening. This is not, in his telling, an argument against free speech so much as a claim that the existing conceptual toolkit is ill-suited to a new class of problem.
The question of representation threads through the latter part of the submission. Wirth does not contest the right of anti-Zionist Jewish groups to participate in the debate, but he cautions against treating them as broadly representative. Their prominence, he suggests, owes less to their numbers than to their utility: they provide a form of internal validation for those who wish to deny any connection between anti-Zionist activism and antisemitic harm. The risk, for the Commission, is that such voices — legitimate but minority – might be weighted in a way that obscures the concerns of the larger community.
All of this leads to a set of recommendations that are, in tone, more calibrative than punitive. He does not call for the suppression of protest or the prohibition of criticism of Israel. Instead, he argues for clearer moral boundaries around language and conduct; for accountability within advocacy movements for what they tolerate as well as what they endorse; for policy approaches that acknowledge systemic harm; and, crucially, for investment in education – a rebuilding of the shared understandings that make any legal framework meaningful. Law, in his formulation, can draw lines; it cannot, by itself, restore the sensibility that gives those lines legitimacy.
Running beneath the analysis is a quieter, more disquieting claim: that the deepest failure of the past two years has been one of recognition. Not simply a failure to prevent specific acts, but a failure of institutions — governmental, cultural, civic – to articulate, early and clearly, that Jews are a vulnerable minority entitled to the same reflex of solidarity extended to others. Silence, in this reading, is not neutral. It is read, by all parties, as permission.
The essay closes, as it began, with Bondi – not as origin but as revelation. A society that prides itself on its egalitarian reflexes is asked to consider whether, in this instance, those reflexes faltered; whether a movement framed in the language of rights allowed, in some of its forms, the targeting of a minority at home; and whether the balance between free expression and communal belonging has been misjudged. The question Wirth leaves hanging is not whether protest should be free – it must be – but whether it can remain so without eroding the conditions that make a plural civic life possible.
Author’s Note…
This opinion piece is one of several on the attitudes of progressives towards the Israel, Palestine and the Gaza war.
The first is Moral capture, conditional empathy and the failure of shock, a discussion on why erstwhile liberal, humanistic, progressive people from all walks of life have been caught up in what can be without subtly described as that anti-Israel machinery. Shaping facts to feelings – debating intellectual dishonesty– regarding the Gaza war, intellectual dishonesty is everywhere, on both sides of the divide, magnified by mainstream and social media’s hunger for moral simplicity and viral outrage. Standing on the high moral ground is hard work! discusses the issues of free speech and “cancellation”, and boycotts with regard to the recent self-implosion of the Adelaide Writers’ Festival, one of the country’s oldest and most revered.
As governments federal and state weigh the prohibition of potentially inflammatory phrases, we also consider syntax and semantics. Lawyers parse syllables and activists insist that what is heard is not what is meant, and what is meant is not what is said. The words hover, untethered from consequence, yet curiously heavy with it. If words can be made infinitely flexible, then meaning itself becomes negotiable; and if meaning is negotiable, then so too are responsibility and harm. See: Same old stone, different rock. What’s in a word? and What’s in a word? A world of meaning and of pain
There are moments when public argument stops being a search for truth and becomes a test of belonging. Facts are no longer weighed so much as auditioned; empathy is rationed; moral language hardens into a badge system, issued and revoked according to rules everyone seems to know but few are willing to articulate. One learns quickly where the trip-wires are, which sympathies are permitted, which questions are suspect, and how easily tone can outweigh substance.
What interests me here is not the quarrel itself – names, borders, histories—but the habits of mind it exposes. The ease with which conviction can slide into choreography. The way intellectual honesty is praised in the abstract and punished in practice. The curious transformation of empathy from a human reflex into a conditional licence, granted only after the correct declarations have been made.
Across these pieces I circle the same uneasy terrain: the shaping of facts to fit feelings; the capture of moral language by ideological gravity; the performance of righteousness as both shield and weapon. Cultural spaces that once prided themselves on curiosity begin to resemble courts, where innocence and guilt are presumed in advance and the labour lies not in thinking, but in signalling.
This is not an argument against passion, nor a plea for bloodless neutrality. It is, rather, a meditation on how quickly moral seriousness curdles into moral certainty – and how much intellectual work is required to stand on what we like to call the high ground without mistaking altitude for clarity.
The position of In That Howling Infinite with regard to Palestine, Israel and the Gaza war is neither declarative nor devotional; it is diagnostic. Inclined – by background, sensibility, and experience – to hold multiple truths in tension, to see, as the song has it, the whole of the moon. It is less interested in arriving at purity than in resisting moral monoculture and the consolations of certainty. That disposition does not claim wisdom; it claims only a refusal to outsource judgment or to accept unanimity as a proxy for truth.
On Zionism, it treats it not as a slogan but as a historical fact with moral weight: the assertion – hard-won, contingent, imperfect – that Jews are entitled to collective political existence on the same terms as other peoples. According to this definition, this blog is Zionist. It is not interested in laundering Israeli policy, still less in romanticising state power, but rejects the sleight of hand by which Israel’s existence is transformed from a political reality into a metaphysical crime. Zionism is not sacred, but its delegitimisation is revealing – because it demands from Jews what is demanded of no other nation: justification for being.
On anti-Zionism, it has been unsparing. It sees it not as “criticism of Israel” (which you regard as both legitimate and necessary) but as a categorical refusal to accept Jewish collective self-determination. What troubles it most is not its anger but its certainty: its moral absolutism, its indifference to history, its willingness to borrow the language of justice to license erasure. It is attentive to how anti-Zionism recycles older antisemitic patterns – collectivisation of guilt, inversion of victimhood, and the portrayal of Jews as uniquely malignant actors – while insisting, with studied innocence, that none of this concerns Jews at all. If not outright antisemitism, the line separating it from anti-Zionism is wafer—thin, and too often crosses over.
Running through all of this is a consistent stance: a resistance to moral theatre, an impatience with historical amnesia, and a belief that intellectual honesty requires limits – on language, on fantasy, and on the indulgent belief that one’s own righteousness exempts one from consequence. And a lifelong hatred of antisemitism. The new antisemitism looks a lot like the old hatred!
We are not asking culture to choose sides; we are asking it to recover judgment
See in In That Howling Infinite, A Political World – Thoughts and Themes, and A Middle East Miscellany. and also: This Is What It Looks Like, “You want it darker?” … Gaza and the devil that never went away … , How the jihadi tail wags the leftist dog, The Shoah and America’s Shame – Ken Burns’ sorrowful masterpiece, and Little Sir Hugh – Old England’s Jewish Question
A Royal Commission into Antisemitism: One Australian’s Submission
Australia is in the midst of a major enquiry into antisemitism- a Royal Commission- following the terrorist attack at Bondi Beach. The community has been invited to make submissions. Below, I share mine. It is analytical rather than personal and represents my attempt to understand the links between anti-Zionist protest and harms to the Jewish community.
Who I am
I write as an Australian Jew.
I am writing entirely in my personal capacity and do not represent any Jewish communal, political or Zionist organisation. I am an engaged member of the Jewish community and regularly attend a local “egalitarian orthodox” synagogue.
I am a child of holocaust survivors. My father survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps and death marches; my mother was hidden in a convent for the latter part of the second World War. All four of my grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz.
I strongly support the right of Australians to advocate for the welfare, human rights and self-determination of both Jewish and Palestinian communities. I have been involved in inter-communal dialogue both in Melbourne and in Israel-Palestine and am commited to a just outcome in Israel and Palestine.
I am a medical specialist in the public hospital system and an associate professor at at Melbourne University.
Aims of this submission
I am writing primarily to reflect on, and critically evaluate, common claims made in reference to the relationship between pro-Palestinian advocacy and harms affecting the Australian Jewish community.
My primary contentions are that:
- The adverse impacts of the protest movement need to be understood as a systemic and cumulative phenomenon- this includes chronic low level psychological harm, social exclusion and the generation of an atmosphere associated with a heightened risk of sporadic violence
- The heterogeneity of participants and their motivations, the ill-defined targets (Israel, Zionists or Jews), and the ambiguity of protest language and symbols, together make attribution of harm and intent difficult. This ambiguity and heterogeneity allow a protest environment that tacitly fosters exclusionary, vilifying and even violent behaviour while allowing protest spokespeople plausible deniability.
- Consequently, the courts and relevant legislation, which assess the protest movement on a “slogan by slogan” or “event by event” basis -that is, through the lens of individual cases – cannot adequately “see” the broad environment as experienced by the Jewish community. It is a case of forest and trees.
Background
The attack on December 14, 2025, was the worst act of antisemitic violence ever committed on Australian soil. Fifteen people were murdered at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach.
Some have drawn a straight line between the Bondi massacre and anti-Zionist incitement, particularly focusing on the slogan “Globalise the Intifada”. Anti-Zionist advocates, in contrast, attribute blame to the shooters’ ISIS connection and the influence of radical Sydney clerics, insisting that the Bondi shootings have nothing to do with peaceful anti-Zionist activism.
Yet this murder was, in the perpetrators own words, intended to condemn “the acts of ‘Zionists”. It seems implausible that this targeting of Zionists was entirely unrelated to two years of inflammatory anti-Zionist rhetoric or that hate speech played no role in pushing perpetrators, primed by fundamentalist influencers, to cross some threshold to action.
Most Jewish Australians view Bondi against a backdrop of over two years of escalating incitement and a hardening anti-Jewish atmosphere. The Opera House protest in October 2023 marked a turning point. Reported chants, including “Where are the Jews?” and “F*** the Jews”, suggested a real shift in what could be said about Jews in public, seemingly without consequence.
Since then, high-profile incidents, such as arson attacks on synagogues, have attracted significant media attention. Less visible are cumulative, psychologically harmful effects of effects of chronic “low level” stigmatisation.
Many find it hard to avoid the conclusion that this environment may have lowered the threshold for violence. A long-standing vulnerability has been brought into sharper focus, prompting calls for a precautionary response, including greater restraint in protest language.
The Bondi tragedy has produced grief, fear and anger within the Jewish community, alongside shock and sympathy across the wider Australian society. The subsequent critical national conversation has led to the present Royal Commission. Could we, as a nation, have done more to counter antisemitism and ensure Jewish safety? Why did our security services fail? Was anti-Zionist activism a contributing factor for Bondi?
If so, do we need constraints on forms of protest? Should constraints be established through legislation or, at a deeper level, through education and cultural change?
Debate over public discourse and anti-Jewish incidents
Palestinian advocacy organisations have condemned the violence at Bondi and expressed sympathy for the victims. However, Jewish expressions of fear or calls for reassurance and safety have typically been dismissed as “weaponising antisemitism”, silencing debate or even “defending genocide”.
Anti-Israel groups like US Jewish Voice for Peace and the Australian Palestine Advocacy Network insist their activism is guided by justice and human rights and rejects racism or violence. Those claims are in their mission statements. Jewish anti-Zionist commentators and groups have denied any possible relationship between the language of protest and the attack. “Zero evidence”, according to one commentator.
Consequently, they have criticised Jewish calls for safety and protections, and government proposals to restrict aspects of protest, as overreach or an attack on free speech rather than an attempt to provide community safety.
This insistence that no restrictions be placed on the language and forms of protests is accompanied by several claims that warrant critical evaluation:
- That the pro-Palestinian movement is peaceful and simply protesting injustice (including alleged genocide)
- That the language of protest, including terms such as “Globalise the intifada” is inherently non-violent;
- That public protest is directed against Israel and Zionists and not against Jews;
- That consequently activist speech cannot be linked with violence, or harms more broadly, affecting Jews
- That the imputation of violent connotations is simply an attempt to stifle free speech.
How might we reconcile this Jewish experience of harm with claims by Palestinian advocacy groups that the movement is non-violent and explicitly rejects antisemitism?
Below, I address a number of key questions and issues in turn.
1.The pro-Palestinian movement is a complex ecosystem and not accurately characterised as entirely peaceful
Palestinian advocacy groups stress that their activism is grounded in human rights. They claim that violence against Jews cannot be attributed to a movement that explicitly rejects antisemitism or the use of violence. This is a superficially reassuring but incomplete framing. It fails to acknowledge the range of actors (and agendas) within the pro-Palestinian advocacy community and beyond it, not all of whom necessarily share these peaceful ideals.
This heterogeneity is even reflected in the several labels used to describe the movement: pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel and anti-Zionist. While they may be used interchangeably, they represent very different agendas and targets: supporting the rights of a people, opposing the policies of a state and opposing, and often vilifying, those who can be linked with that state- that is, Jews.
A 2014 study of over 20 Palestinian civil society groups by the General Delegation Of Palestine in Australia captures the heterogeneity of the groups – likely a fraction of the number of groups active in 2026.
The study notes that Palestinian organizations “often have multiple desired outcomes and target audiences and undertake different kinds of activities.” The study explicitly distinguishes “advocacy groups” and “activist groups”. The former are the public facing, suit and tie wearing (my words) groups, that speak the language of human rights and engage in, to quote the study, “persuasion, lobbying and negotiation”.
“Activist groups”, in contrast, are described as “denunciative” engaging in “protest, street demonstrations, strike actions, public meetings” and whose desired outcomes are “diffuse and not necessarily … within defined policy and political parameters”. They “articulate messages in different forums, to different audiences” with different “tone, tenor, and language of the message”… “in language that resonates with their niche constituencies.” Of course we are now also increasingly aware of Islamist (and) influences in Australia which we now know to have been connected to the Bondi massacre.
Beyond explicitly Palestinian groups lies a wider ecosystem. It includes direct-action networks, unaffiliated vandals, right-wing extremists, Islamic fundamentalist groups and “old school antisemites”. They often mobilise around the same events, language and grievances or share physical and online spaces with non-violent advocacy groups. Their presence may shape how protests are experienced by those on the receiving end.
Speaking at the Lowy Institute lecture ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess observed that activist groups are often not “centrally controlled” or “uniformly motivated,” and may include “individuals who are increasingly willing to embrace or threaten violence to achieve their goals.”
This heterogeneity within the activist community allows for plausible deniability when violent or threatening behaviour is observed For example, after chants of “F-ck the Jews” and “where’s the jews” were reported at the Opera house protest, Fahad Ali of the Palestinian Action Groups dismissed this as reflecting a “small group of troublemakers” The same disavowal was made regarding a pro-Palestinian bikie group. This allows spokespeople to claim entirely benign aims while wider affiliates of movement take a more aggressive approach to members of the Jewish community.
To put it simply: claims that the Palestinian advocacy community is entirely peaceful is a very incomplete description of reality.
2.The language and forms of protest are not unambiguously peaceful, but rather contain phrases and symbols with the potential to be interpreted as violent by elements in the protest movement and broader society
The language and symbolism of protest span a wide range. Some slogans are political and entirely unobjectionable: “Stop the war,” “Free Palestine”.
Then there are the explicitly or implicitly violent slogans and symbols that often accompany protest. They include phrases such as “where’s the Jews”, “f*** the jews” “death to IDF” and “by any means necessary” as well as symbols (terrorist flags, pictures of the Ayatollah, the Jewish Star of David in rubbish bins) Symbols of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran can be understood as implying support for their violent and eliminationist goals (described here, here, here, here, here). This celebration of violence was evident immediately after the Hamas massacre at the Opera House protest and the Lakemba celebration (and indeed there was further language of celebration and an anniversary event at Lakemba a year later.)
Slogans such as “Zionists are baby killers” and “all Zionists are terrorists” are clearly intended to, or can reasonably be expected to, incite hatred towards those who support Israel’s existence or are affiliated with Israel, regardless of their views on the conduct of the war.
In between are phrases whose meaning is contested, such as “from the river to the sea” and “globalise the intifada.” Many have expressed concern that such phrases are coded calls for violence or for the elimination of the Jewish state. Palestinian advocates have emphasised the innocent meaning of “river to the sea” and “Intifada” (here, here, here) and some go so far as to argue that attributing violent intent to such slogans is Islamophobic.
It is frequently explained, for example, that “intifada” simply means “shaking off” political oppression and is not inherently violent. But language does not operate through dictionary definitions alone. For many Jews, the word “intifada” evokes, and is inseparable from the Second Intifada — a sustained campaign of terrorism that killed more than 1,000 Israelis. That history inevitably shapes how the term is heard. As Susan Benesch of the Dangerous Speech Project explains, the experience of speech as “inflammatory” depends on the speaker, the audience, the medium and the context.
“Globalise the intifada” may carry one meaning in an academic lecture and quite another in a mass street march. Its impact can shift with the size, tone and location of a protest; with accompanying slogans (“death to the IDF,” “by any means necessary”); and with symbols associated with Hamas or Hezbollah. Such language may land very differently in demonstrations held immediately after the Hamas attacks of 2023 or in the wake of the Bondi terror attack. It will be experienced differently in the public square and outside a synagogue.
The activist community is not an army of philologists. Whatever the linguistic origins of “intifada”, its meaning is contested and may be interpreted differently by different groups. As the Palestinian led report mentioned above states, in some circumstances “…human rights and international law arguments can lose their meaning in inflammatory and, at times, ideological criticisms.”
It is that very ambiguity that allows those who do seek to intimidate (or even provoke violence) to use it with plausible deniability. As Susan Benesch states “One cannot make a list of words that are dangerous, since the way in which any message will be understood – like its effect on an audience – depends not only on its content but on how it is communicated…. The very same words can be highly inflammatory, or benign.”
3.The use of the term Zionist as the target of protest implicates most Jews despite claims by protesters that they are not antisemitic and do not target Jews
Activists claim to target Zionists and not Jews.
The problem is that the vast majority of Australian Jews are Zionists- if you target Zionists you are generally targeting Jews.
A 2023 Australian survey reported 80-90% of respondents indicated personal connectedness with and concern for Israel and 77% identified as Zionist. Most Australian Jews have cultural, religious or historical connections to Israel and support for the security and safety of its citizens, including for many Jews, close family. Some use the label Zionist to describe this connection. It is often an element of cultural identity and for Australia’s substantial post-Holocaust community, it carries connotations of “refuge”. For many Jews, this sense of connection does not imply endorsement of specific Israeli policies or leadership.
Anti-Zionists are well aware of this deep connection between Jews, Israel and Zionism, yet work hard to maintain the fiction that their activism does not target Jews.
They do it by presuming to tell Jews about their identity. (Something that would be considered offensive if directed at other groups. Jews are told that they are a disembodied “faith group” with no sense of peoplehood or organic connection to Israel. Palestinian advocates showcase the tiny minority of antizionist Jews who agree with them. Anti-Zionists insist that Zionism and Judaism are distinct noting that “Not all Jews are Zionist” or “being Jewish is not identical to being Zionist”. This distinction is technically correct but doesn’t negate the connection of the vast majority of Jews with Israel.
Indeed, the identification of Zionists and Jews in the mental landscape of some activists is evoked by the use of classic antisemitic tropes in antizionist discourse. They speak of “…the Jewish Lobby and the Zionist Lobby infiltrating” with their “Tentacles”, of powerful elites(including Jewish Law firms) and conspiracist notions “We already know that Zionists are parasitic upon progressive spaces. It is under the guise of progressivism that Zionists launder their genocidal colonialism, while weaponising their influence to amplify occupation propaganda and steer cultural narratives away from Palestinian liberation.”
Thus, though the protest movement insists its focus is Israel and its policies, the use of the term Zionist does much unrecognised work in redirecting hostility from Israel to Jews. This reflects the multiple and conflicting resonances of the term Zionist in protest culture. In protest messaging, the term “Zionist” is a placeholder for a catalogue of evils: colonialism, racism, apartheid and genocide. It can be loaded with the most inflammatory rhetoric: Zionists as “child killers,” “Nazis” or “genociders.” It functions loosely as a political descriptor, a moral accusation and a marker of identity.
These dual resonances – Zionist as object of hate and Zionist as Jew – ripple through disparate communities, tacitly “criminalising” even the most benign connection with Israel and indirectly reinforcing antipathy towards Jews, without ever explicitly naming them. When “Zionist” functions simultaneously as a term of vilification and as a label many Jews apply to themselves, political critique almost inevitably slides into group-based hostility. The effect is to generate antipathy toward Jews without ever explicitly naming them.
It is not surprising that in some community sectors, a simple public expression of concern for the safety of Jews in Israel may be enough to evoke all the hostility now reflexly associated with the term Zionist. This leaves many Jews uncertain how to speak publicly at all.
Many Australians who support Palestinian rights in good faith may not recognise how protest language may facilitate this “slippage” of anger from Israel to Zionists, to Jews. This slippage blurs the boundary between political critique and hostility toward the Jewish community.
A distressing incident in 2025 illustrates how boundaries between antisemitism and the language of anti-Zionist protest can blur. Year-5 Jewish students on an excursion were reportedly subjected to a barrage of insults from older students from another school including: “dirty Jews”, “baby killers”, and “Free Hezbollah”.
It is tragic that the Bondi attackers, allegedly motivated by opposition to “Zionists”, murdered Jews.
4.The reflex denial of any possible links between protest and violence is based on simplistic and outmoded understandings of causality in complex social systems
In response to Jewish community concerns about protest language and community safety, it is common to hear the reply that the relationship between speech and a specific terrorist act cannot be “proven”. This is technically true, but misleading. In complex systems, causation is a statistical concept.
It is widely accepted in the broader community that certain harms operate probabilistically: for example the relationship between climate change and extreme weather events is well recognised even though one cannot prove causation for an individual bush-fire or storm event. The same applies to the relationship between smoking and individual cases of lung cancer.
Similarly, there is a substantial literature supporting the view that the risk of harm from hate-speech is also probabilistic and operates at a population level. This is true, even though we cannot attribute a given event (such as Bondi) to a specific persons, actions, slogan or protest event.
This phenomenon has been described as “stochastic terrorism” or “stochastic violence”. This has been defined as “…the use of mass communications to stir up … lone wolves to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are … individually unpredictable”. This literature recognises that violent acts are likely related to the emotional and cognitive effects of activism in the media and on the street. Psychological and linguistic studies and a recent major metanalysis of 55 studies on the impact of media messaging all describe similar mechanisms. This literature describes how rhetoric circulates within communities and can lower the threshold for violence in primed individuals. In these systems no one need explicitly call for violence, and no one is individually responsible. Risk arises through cumulative effects rather than direct incitement.
Susan Benesch of the Dangerous Speech Project describes dangerous speech as “Any form of expression (e.g. speech, text, or images) that can increase the risk that its audience will condone or commit violence against members of another group.” She further notes that “Hate speech … uses derogatory group slurs, metaphoric language, exaggeration, images, and symbols. … Its public expression ….allows like-minded individuals to find an echo chamber for their shared beliefs. And it has real and painful consequences for victims.”
Mike Burgess, speaking a month prior to the Bondi massacre, said that “Since October 2023, we’ve seen more provocative protests and a notable uptick in intentionally disruptive and damaging tactics by anti-Israel activists, including multiple acts of arson, vandalism and violent protest…” and “The conflict in the Middle East …. prompted protest, exacerbated tension, undermined social cohesion and elevated intolerance (making) acts of politically motivated violence more likely. …. Inflammatory rhetoric and provocative, disruptive actions had been normalised, and the normalisation of violence and hatred against one community had created a permissive environment for similar behaviours in other communities.”
This is not an argument about direct causation or “collective blame”, but the debate over language and anti-Jewish violence requires the recognition of this well described sociological phenomenon and constructive engage with its policy implications.
The inadequacy of frameworks premised on direct causation is not merely theoretical but regularly surfaces in permissive court findings regarding the right to protest near synagogues, or to display language vilifying “Zionists”.
5.The harms to the Jewish community are not limited to dramatic violent acts but include chronic psychological and social harm
Bondi was a tragic event that finally shocked our community into recognising and responding to a problem that had been evident to most of the Jewish community for two years.
Pro-Palestinian/ anti-Zionist activism had invaded “intimate” Jewish spaces, with mobs outside synagogues or at recreational spaces in Jewish neighbourhoods. There has been vandalism of Jewish homes, schools, synagogues, community centres and of the offices of a university academic. Jews in the arts and other sectors of our community have been marginalised and doxxed and private businesses intimidated and shut down. There have been death threats to Jews and Jewish organisations.
A steady drum beat of vilification: “baby killers”, “genocidaires” and “Nazis” has created a charged and heated atmosphere in which many Jews have come to feel unwelcome or unsafe. For every act that hits the media there are countless stories, often related over the Sabbath dinner table, of personal slights, off-hand comments and slurs. There has been endless on-line hate. This incitement has been marked by episodes of violence, acts of arson and now murder.
The dramatic rise in incidents negatively impacting Australian Jews since October 2023 has been well documented in Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) incident reports, as have Jewish experiences of antisemitism (2024 survey ) and antisemitic attitudes held by non-Jewish Australians (2021, 2025, ASECA survey).
Hate speech itself can be profoundly harmful psychologically. This is true for Jews in Australia (and) the US Jewish community just as it was for the indigenous community during the voice debate. For some antizionists, the intimidation and marginalisation of Jews is not a by-product of activism but rather a specific goal. ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess, commenting on anti-Israel activists observed: “Directly or indirectly, their actions can marginalise, stigmatise and frighten sections of the community.”
A 2024 survey conducted in the weeks after the start of the Gaza war (including approximately 8% of the adult Jewish population) reported that 64% felt that antisemitism was a big problem, far higher than in a 2017 survey. One in five had personally experienced an insult or harassment because they are Jewish and a similar number was less open in showing their identity in public. Similar findings have been reported in the UK, Europe and the US.
This is particularly sensitive in Australia’s post Holocaust community. As Jeremy Waldronwrote of hate speech: “It does this not only by intimating discrimination and violence, but by reawakening living nightmares of what this society was like—or what other societies have been like—in the past. In doing so, it creates something like …a sort of slow-acting poison, accumulating here and there, word by word…”
6.Jewish community calls for support and safety reflect genuine grass roots concerns and are not simply political attempts to stifle legitimate debate as often claimed by anti-Zionist groups
Against the overwhelming evidence of adverse Jewish experiences, non-Jewish and Jewish pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist groups regularly attempt to downplay the issue by:
- disputing definitions of antisemitism, survey methodology and measurement.
- dismissing communal concerns as “weaponising” antisemitism
- claiming Jews are simply conflating antisemitism with criticism of Israel.
- claiming that antizionist slogans and activism have nothing to do with Jews because “not all Jews are Zionists” or “Zionism and Jewishness are not identical”. Such claims, while true, are facile and in no way negate the experiences and views of the vast majority of the Jewish community who have strong connections with and concerns for Israel and are targets for antizionist activism
- focusing on antisemitism from the political right, distracting from the complex and cumulative effects of anti-Zionist speech and activism from the progressive left, religious fundamentalist and anti-Israel groups.
The pattern is one of disputing and distracting rather than engaging with patterns of fear, withdrawal and marginalisation.
This approach stands in opposition to recommendations in the AHRC Framework which stresses that the approach to racism should be “community-centric” and recognise that racism as a “complex and shifting phenomenon”.
7.Claims that antisemitism can adequately be addressed through existing “universal” mechanisms are not supported by evidence
Anti-Zionists resist specific policies to respond to antisemitism, casting their lot with generalised anti-racism frameworks. They reject the Special Envoy’s report on antisemitism, in part for reasons of free speech. The claim that the AHRC Framework is sufficient as the primary mechanism to deal with antisemitism is flawed.
While society-wide approaches to racism are essential, Indigenous Australians, migrants, women, LGBTQ+ communities, Muslims and Jews all have different histories of oppression and face different challenges.
The need for targeted measures for antisemitism is not about moral priority but relates to its specific dynamic. Jews are often not recognised as a minority let alone a vulnerable one, because they are coded “white” and linked with power, money, conspiracy and influence. There is growing ignorance of antisemitism’s history, its genocidal expression within living memory. A UN report highlighting the lack of awareness of antisemitism’s modern manifestations.
It must also be noted that the AHRC document was framed and developed primarily to deal with indigenous disadvantage. Its preamble it states that: “racism operates by racialising various groups of people negatively to maintain the dominance of groups racialised as white….”. This strong conceptual frame around issues of colour raises questions about its suitability as the sole vehicle for addressing antisemitism.
The assertion made by Jewish anti-Zionists, that “general anti-racism” measures, including the AHRC Framework, will be effective for antisemitism does not reflect what is known about antisemitism nor about the AHRC Framework.
As human rights law academic Kenneth Marcus has observed, when antisemitism is subsumed under generalised frameworks of disadvantage, it often disappears from view.
The Special Envoy’s plan, while open to criticism, is consonant with Global Guidelineswhich have been endorsed by over 40 states and regional groups, and consistent with UN recommendations that addressing antisemitism requires specific strategies in addition to general anti-racism measures.
In public statements the JCA has argued that calls to curb the most hostile forms of anti-Zionist speech risk making Jews less safe, by exposing them to blame for increased state repression. It is worth asking whether reframing such calls as political manoeuvres rather than expressions of communal fear does not itself heighten that risk — by casting concern for safety as bad faith.
8.Minority Jewish voices substantially misrepresent the concerns of the wider Australian Jewish community
The Jewish Council of Australia (JCA) has expressed the intention to engage with the Commission, as is their right. However, public positions taken so far by the JCA and other anti-Zionist Jewish groups raise concerns about the nature and impact of their likely submissions.
The JCA presents itself as an expert voice that provides a counterbalance to allegedly unrepresentative communal leadership bodies such as the ECAJ.
While Jewish peak bodies are not directly elected by the whole of community (what community peak bodies are?), they include a wide range of community organisations across the country and are closely aligned the community’s concerns regarding safety and connection with Israel. Concerns regarding community safety are widespread and a deep connection to Israel and concern for Israel’s welfare are shared by around 90% of Australian Jews. Around three quarters self-identify as Zionist.(2017, 2023 and 2024).
The JCA and other anti-Zionist groups have a small number of high-profile spokespeople, however their views are unlikely to reflect more than a small minority of a Jewish community of over 110,000. The JCA claims over 1,300 supporters. However, many claimed supporters are anonymous and signing on to their website entails endorsing values such as human rights, freedom and equality. not necessarily the anti-Zionist nature of the group. It is far from clear that their those who have signed endorse the JCA’s view that antisemitism is unrelated to progressive and antizionist activism.
This doesn’t delegitimise their participation or views but should have bearing on the weight given these views at the Royal Commission.
Anti-Zionist Jewish positions are often cited by the broader anti-Zionist advocacy community and by segments of the media and civil society. This is not because the JCA is representative of the community, but rather because their views suit the agenda of those who seek to vilify the Jewish community without restriction.
This “spoiler effect” is not without precedent.
The recent referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, though set in a different political context, is illustrative. Tanya Muscat and Katharina Wolf from Curtin University described how “No” proponents “… were selectively framed by media to present a picture of broad Indigenous opposition, thereby neutralising support for the Yes campaign…(this) illustrates the need for communication strategies that are not only inclusive, but genuinely representative and responsive to the diversity within Indigenous communities.”
The Commission should be alert to the risk that anti-Zionist Jewish voices, amplified beyond their representative weight, may obscure the genuine concerns and aspirations of the wider Jewish community.
9.Jewish vulnerability is not adequately recognised in legal and progressive cultural frameworks
Over the last two years or more, hostile speech targeting Jews has circulated, escalated and become normalised in a manner that seems unimaginable were this another minority.
Cautious responses across government, media, legal and other civic institutions have contributed to a permissive environment in which hostile language and behaviour have gone unchallenged.
In part this has happened because concerns expressed by Jews regarding antisemitism are often understood primarily through the lens of the Israel–Palestine conflict, where they are interpreted as attempts to “silence protest”. They are also contested through disputes over definition or methodology.
At a deeper level, Jews are not widely recognised as a vulnerable minority, despite being one of Australia’s smallest communities and carrying profound collective trauma within living memory. Jews are targeted by “the right” as “non-white” and conspiratorial (with replacement theories proliferating, particularly in the US) as well as by progressives who characterise them as white, European, powerful and conspiratorial. This antipathy from both sides of the political spectrum is not experienced by other minorities, and other vulnerable groups typically do not offer solidarity to the Jewish community.
Existing legal and anti-discrimination mechanisms are designed to deal with harms attributable to individual people and events. As discussed above, much of the harm associated with the protest movement can be understood as cumulative in nature, with risks being statistical. This framing is more akin to climate change than to individual criminal behaviour and so grappling with the cumulative effects and diffuse responsibility of mass movements needs alternative conceptual approaches and mechanisms of mitigation and redress.
The NSW Court of Appeal’s April 2026 decision striking down the Public Assembly Restriction Declaration scheme found that it imposed an impermissible burden on the implied constitutional freedom of political communication. The courts framework assumes that harms from political expression are discrete and traceable, and that a more precisely targeted instrument is always available and always superior.
The stochastic violence framework challenges both assumptions. Where harm operates through cumulative population-level exposure and threshold effects, demanding tight causal specificity as a condition of constitutional validity is demanding something the nature of the harm structurally cannot provide. Where the relevant risk is ambient and systemic rather than incident-specific, a broader precautionary mechanism may be more — not less — consistent with the underlying harm theory than a narrowly targeted one would be.
Legal mechanisms designed to adjudicate individual acts, individual intent and individual causation are poorly suited to harms that are diffuse, cumulative and probabilistically distributed across a population.
The Commission should draw two conclusions from this. First, that the safety concerns motivating the legislation were genuine and documented. Second, that the gap between what existing legal frameworks can address and what the harm actually requires cannot be closed by litigation. It requires policy development grounded in the empirical literature on dangerous speech and probabilistic violence — to develop regulatory responses that are both constitutionally defensible and adequate to the harm being addressed. That is precisely the kind of deeper recommendation this Commission is positioned to make.
10. This is not just another free speech/protest issue- the current protests are the first large-scale human rights protest movement in Australia that explicitly or implicitly targets an Australian minority community
The claim that anti-Zionist protest stands in the tradition of great Australian civic activism deserves scrutiny. Australia has a proud history of protest in the cause of human rights.
Opposition to the Vietnam War targeted government military policy. The anti-apartheid movement targeted a foreign regime. Activism for LGBTQ+ and Indigenous rights targeted discriminatory laws and the Australian state. In each case the object of protest was governmental policy or the policies of a foreign state.
No Australian minority community was targeted, vilified or made to feel unsafe in its own country as a direct consequence of the protest itself.
The anti-Zionist protest movement is different. Its stated target is the Israeli government but, as argued above, the language and conduct of significant elements of the movement extend — through slippage and cumulative normalisation — from Israel, to Zionists, to Jews. The people bearing the cost are not governments or institutions. They are Jewish schoolchildren, Jewish academics, and Jewish families whose synagogues have been vandalised and whose neighbourhoods have been subject to intimidatory protest.
A human rights movement that targets a vulnerable minority undermines its own foundational premise. This not simply the case of speaking truth to power but rather a large movement directing its forces at a vulnerable minority.
Powerful and effective advocacy for Palestinian rights is entirely legitimate and possible without dehumanising language, without intimidation in Jewish communal spaces, and without slogans carrying violent resonances for a community that has known genocide within living memory.
Some notes from personal experience
My parents came to Australia to escape European antisemitism. It was largely a successful migration, and this country has been good to our family and to the Jewish community more broadly.
Antisemitism has nonetheless been a sporadic presence throughout my life. As a child I heard comments about Jews and money. Walking to synagogue in a kippah I have had “bloody Jews” shouted from passing car windows on several occasions. A close friend was beaten in a football ground car park while wearing a kippah . A few years ago a tradesman stormed out of my home after apparently noticing a Jewish artefact, shouting in the street as he left: “the Nazis should have finished you off.”
This was unpleasant but had never risen to the sense of a systematic anti-Jewish campaign.
Since October 2023 something has changed.
Partly it is what has been said and done — the graffiti, the vandalism of Jewish centres, the tearing down of hostage photographs from public walls. Partly it is what has not been said. I have watched colleagues receive institutional solidarity after attacks on their communities over time After October 7th 2023 I received communications from institutional leaders that mentioned Gaza, mentioned the conflict, but did not mention Jews, did not mention what had happened to Israeli civilians and did not acknowledge what the Australian Jewish community was living through. That silence communicated something profound.
I have watched security guards at synagogues and Jewish schools become so normalised that we have largely stopped remarking on it. Soon after October 7th 2023 a Jewish nursing home in Melbourne started to employ guards at the entrance. My uncle, a Holocaust survivor, needs guards to protect him from antisemitic attack in Melbourne in 2026.
The sense that there has been a tectonic shift in attitudes towards Jews is widely shared in my community, and it deserves to be taken seriously.
Conclusions and recommendations
The concerns currently being expressed by Australian Jews do not turn on Bondi.
Rather, Bondi has served to crystallise awareness of the sustained and normalised hostility toward a minority community. This has operated through language, symbolism, social pressure and physical intimidation in a civic environment that has consistently failed to recognise, constrain or respond to it with the seriousness applied to harms affecting other minorities.
There is a moral accounting that has not yet been done. For two years, government and civic institutions sent a series of signals — largely through acts of omission— that shaped the environment in which hostility toward Jews escalated and became normalised. Just two early examples were the silence after the Opera House protest in October ’23 and our Foreign Minister’s refusal to visit the Nova memorial while in Israel. The has been a continuing absence of clear public statements about what forms of protest and language are acceptable — not legally, but morally.
This continuing silence and apathy were read, by the Jewish community and by the protest movement, as tacit acceptance of unconstrained forms of protest. The failure of government to reinforce moral and civic norms has had consequences that no subsequent legislative response can fully undo.
A Royal Commission that focuses narrowly on security failures at Bondi, without grappling with this broader institutional failure of leadership, will fail.
The protest movement should address its own accountability. Palestinian advocacy organisations that present themselves as defenders of human rights carry a particular responsibility. Tolerating, excusing or deflecting attention from dehumanising language directed at Jews is a contradiction the Commission should name directly. “We reject antisemitism” in a mission statement is not accountability. Genuine commitment to human rights principles requires actively calling out vilifying language when it appears, refusing to share platforms with those who use it, and accepting that the credibility of a movement is shaped by what it tolerates as much as by what it explicitly endorses. The question the Commission should put to these organisations is not whether they intend harm, but rather whether they effectively provide cover for unacceptable conduct incompatible with the protection of human rights.
The Commission will hear from minority Jewish voices who are seeking to limit scrutiny of anti-Zionist activism and minimise the widely held concerns of the community they claim to represent. Anti-Zionist Jewish voices are amplified not because they reflect Australian Jewish experience but because they are useful to those who wish to deflect that scrutiny. It would be a serious failure if the genuine and widely held fears of over 100,000 Australian Jews were obscured by a small, unrepresentative minority whose positions are largely indistinguishable from those opposing any restraint on anti-Zionist activism.
The Commission should weigh the asymmetry of what is at stake. On one side of the balance sits some degree of restraint in the most inflammatory language and protest forms — forms that reasonable people can recognise as serving no legitimate advocacy purpose. On the other sits a community that has spent two years reporting fear, concealing identity in public, withdrawing from civic life, and watching its institutions firebombed while being told that its concerns are weaponisation, overreach, or simply the price of free speech. Freedom of speech is a central value. So is the right of a minority community to exist in civic space without being treated as a legitimate target. These are not equivalent considerations, and recommendations that treat them as symmetrical will not address the harm.
This is not a call for censorship, silencing debate or banning protest. It does not equate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Nor is it a concern about mere Jewish discomfort relating to robust debate. The case for Palestinian rights is legitimate and can be made powerfully without language that dehumanises, without slogans that carry violent resonances, and without forms of protest that target Jewish communal spaces. The question is not whether advocacy is permissible. It is whether the most harmful modes of that advocacy are necessary to it.
What is at stake is not comfort but belonging: whether Australian civic spaces remain places where minorities can live, speak and participate without being treated as objects of collective hostility.
No regulatory or legislative response will be adequate without investment in the civic and educational foundations that make such responses meaningful. The past two years have exposed not only a failure of law and policy but a failure of shared understanding — across institutions, media and the general public — about what antisemitism is, how it operates.
Regulation addresses behaviour but education is needed to address the conditions that make certain behaviours seem acceptable. Any set of recommendations that omits this foundation is treating symptoms. The Commission should recommend that addressing antisemitism be incorporated into school curricula. The media and public institutions require structured guidance on recognising hate speech that operates through political framing.
The Commission is accordingly asked to consider the following recommendations:
- Recognise the systemic nature of the harm. The cumulative, probabilistic character of harm from hate speech and inflammatory protest language should be acknowledged explicitly. A framework built solely around adjudicating discrete incidents and provable individual causation will continue to fail the Jewish community as it has failed it for the past two years.
- Develop regulatory responses adequate to systemic harm. The NSW Court of Appeal’s invalidation of the post-Bondi protest restrictions indicates the limitations of current judicial processes to address the nature of harms experienced by the Jewish community. The Commission should recommend policy grounded in the empirical literature on speech and harm —that are both constitutionally defensible yet adequate to the nature of harms experienced by the Jewish community.
- Require accountability within the protest movement. Advocacy organisations that claim to reject antisemitism and violence bear a corresponding responsibility to actively call out vilifying language and intimidatory conduct within the broader protest ecosystem they share. Passive disavowal after the fact is not accountability. The Commission should consider whether organisations and individuals that claim human rights credentials while tolerating dehumanising language directed at Jews should continue to receive public legitimacy, funding or institutional support.
- Reject the adequacy of generalised anti-racism frameworks as the sole response.The AHRC Framework was developed primarily around racialised disadvantage and the experience of communities of colour. Antisemitism has a distinct dynamic — Jews are simultaneously coded as white and powerful by progressives, and as foreign and conspiratorial by the right — and is rendered invisible by generalised frameworks. Specific strategies, consistent with Global Guidelines endorsed by over 40 states and with UN recommendations, are warranted and should be implemented alongside, not instead of, broader anti-racism measures.
- Weigh community voices accurately. The Commission will hear from Jewish anti-Zionist groups whose positions diverge sharply from those of mainstream communal organisations and most community members. Their right to participate is not questioned. However the weight accorded their submissions should be proportionate to genuine representativeness, and the Commission should be alert to the amplification of minority Jewish voices to serve interests other than accurate representation of the Jewish community.
- Invest in education and civic foundations. The Commission should recommend that antisemitism — its history, its specific character and its modern manifestations — be reflected in institutional training.
- Demand moral leadership, not only legal mechanism. The most important failure of the past two years has not been legislative. It has been the failure of government, universities, media and civil society to say clearly and repeatedly that Jews are a vulnerable minority community entitled to the same recognition, solidarity and protection extended to other minorities; that their fears are legitimate; and that certain forms of language and protest are not made acceptable by being coded. No other minority is expected to bear resentments originating in distant conflict or in the acts of isolated individuals.
The “I’ll ride with you” movement, which supported Muslims who were feeling vulnerable to backlash following the Lindt Café siege, exemplifies our community’s capacity to recognise and respond to minority vulnerability with solidarity. No equivalent solidarity was extended to the Jewish community in the wake of October 7th, or in the two years of escalating hostility that followed.
Randa Abdel-Fattah’s claim that “Zionists (i.e. most Jews) have no right to cultural safety” exemplifies the cloud that has hung unanswered over the Jewish community for far too long. This slogan, and the tragic downstream effects when such views become normalised (and even celebrated in some sectors), represent the deep challenge before the Royal Commission and the Australian community more broadly.
Fifty-six witnesses were called in the Royal Commission on Anti-Semitism and Social Cohesion last week, sharing how “Nazi style slurs” are being hurled at children in schools that now look more like prisons due to increased security concerns in the wake of Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
Conway, a Jewish Australian, told the commission several of her shows have been pulled over the last few years, claiming an Australian actor, who she did not name inside the hearing, had sent letters to venues stating “Deborah Conway is a self-confessed Zionist and a supporter of genocide”.
The letters also allegedly included words to the effect that if they were to platform her “you are complicit in genocide”.
“I think some of the venues found that incredibly disturbing and they pulled back,” Conway said.
Conway revealed the name of the actor she has accused of running the campaign while speaking outside the hearing, however NewsWire has chosen not to name the woman.
“She signed her name very boldly and openly and she was proud of the letter she had written,” Conway claimed outside the hearing on Monday.
Deborah Conway Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw
Conway also detailed how in another instance, 70 people wearing balaclavas rocked up to a venue hitting pots and pans together, and said if they went ahead with one of Conway’s shows “we will make sure that we turn up with 300 people, and we will make sure that business is very hard for you”.
“So they pulled it, which I don’t blame them — I would too,” Conway said.
The musician also copped a flurry of online abuse after she and a group of about 600 Jewish creatives were doxxed in February 2024.
“I hope your entire family dies in an air strike and you have limbs amputated without aesthetics — I assume he means anaesthetics,” Conway read to the commission on Monday.
“I hope that after this happens you have no access to clean bandages, antibiotics or food.”
Anti-Zionism a ‘genocidal impulse’
Conway described anti-Zionism as a “genocidal impulse”, telling the hearing that “when people chant from the river to the sea … that is a call to end the entity of Israel”.
“I want there to be peace, I want there to be a two-state solution, I want everyone to just relax. Let everyone eat their hummus and get on with it,” Conway said.
“But unfortunately … we’re not living in the land of unicorns and rainbows.”
She said she can’t bear the idea of young artists who are being targeted and vilified for believing Israel should be allowed to exist.
“That’s their crime, and that’s a crime that I think is completely beyond the pale,” she said.
“When they say Zionism equals Nazism … genocide … and then they end up with a sign that goes in the bin.
“They’re throwing us all in the bin. It’s not going to end well.”
Conway is an Australian singer and songwriter. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw
‘Larger than life’: Tribute to slain Rabbi
The father of a 14-year-old who survived the Bondi attack with bullet wounds paid tribute to Rabbi Eli Schlanger who died in the Bondi attack on December 14 last year.
The speaker was present at the Chanukah by the Sea event where two gunmen allegedly opened fire, killing fifteen people.
“He was so happy, it was an amazing event ‘til the minute before,” the man said.
He described Mr Schlanger as “larger than life” and “an amazing human being” who was always ready to help.
His 14-year-old daughter was shot while shielding children during the attack, with the man saying his daughter had asked him afterwards “(Dad) why they hate us so much, why they want to kill us?”
The speaker also told the royal commission a Jewish community member brought their Mezuzah — a religious scroll placed at the door of Jewish Homes — to see if it was intact and correct.
Once he opened it he found a “Free Palestine” scroll in it instead of the religious verse.
‘No friends left’: Jewish 15yo targeted online
A 15-year-old Jewish boy, known only as ABB, detailed how he had been bullied since the end of 2024 and was targeted in a Minecraft chat group comprised of children from his school.
A Jewish teenager says he was targeted with anti-Semitic abuse while playing the popular online game Minecraft with kids from his school. Picture: Supplied by Telltale Games
Someone had written “I hate the Jews” in the chat group at one stage, but his stomach turned “upside down” after someone commented “rabid filthy rotten gut-wrenching grotesque rabbi yamaka wearing bank owning iron doming Hashem following Jew” on another occasion.
“It made my stomach turn upside down, I really just had to step away from my computer for a little bit and then, when I came back, I think I just closed and logged off for the day,” the teen said.
The children continued with the abuse after the 15-year-old confronted them at school and “told them to stop because it was destroying my mental health”.
He didn’t tell his parents right away because he thought he could handle it, “but it just got out of hand”.
“I walked into their room and said I have no friends left,” the teen told the hearing.
His mother, ABD, said her son had “tears in his eyes” as he told them how his friends had locked him in a part of the game and left him alone to die.
“Appalled”, ABD said her stomach drops knowing how her son had “normalised” and had to “make his peace” with the ordeal.
“(He) accepted it as part of his school life,” she said.
His parents said the school handled the situation really well and held an investigation, with three of the children also apologising to ABB.
However if ABB is near the group too long at school they tell him to leave, the boy said.
“Every time I go up to them, because some of my other friends sit with them … if I stay there for a little too long, they’ll be like ‘get out of here’ or something like that,” ABB said.
ABB also told the hearing of how a group of Year 12s recently shouted something along the lines of “Hitler was right to kill them all”.
“I turned around expecting to see somebody staring at me or pointing at me but I found it was just a group of Year 12 boys who were just talking amongst themselves using it for general conversation,” he said.
The October 9, 2023 rally at the Opera House has been described as a critical turning point in the rise of Jewish hate during the inquiry. Picture: NewsWire / Jeremy Piper
The boy’s father, ABE, said he no longer recognises this country, telling the hearing people used to be “a lot more tolerant”.
“All of those Australian idioms that we have for people having a fair go, that seems to have been lost,” he said.
“I would like to see something come out of this commission where we can chart the course back towards that Australia, or that attitude that we had in Australia.”
Propaganda fuelling ‘disunity’ and ‘discord’
Rabbi Daniel Rabin, who is part of a synagogue in Caulfield in Melbourne, said “we wouldn’t be sitting here if this was just about criticism of Israel”, telling the hearing Australians are being fed propaganda which is fuelling the disunity the country is experiencing.
Mr Rabin acknowledged that criticism of Israel is OK, but “huge lies” are circulating, telling the commission the word “genocide” is being “thrown into everything”.
“It’s the seeping through of this propaganda that’s found it’s way everywhere,” he said.
Rabbi Daniel Rabin Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw
“I think there are those who naturally have this hateful mission, but I think it’s affecting many regular Australians who are being fed this narrative, which I think is causing so much of the disunity and this discord that we are finding ourselves in at the moment.”
He recounted a campaign of abusive calls his synagogue had received, with the phrase “baby killers” seeming to be the favourite.
“When you say somebody is a baby killer … I can’t think of anything more grotesque to say about a person,” he said.
“It’s actually mind boggling that people are accusing us of that and then calling our synagogues … it’s hurtful, it’s disgusting.”
Mr Rabin spoke of having eggs and anti-Semitic slurs thrown at him before October 7, 2023, but the abuse has increased in the wake of Hamas’ attack.
Just days after the attack a car passing by he and his 10-year-old son shouted out “horrific things” he didn’t feel comfortable repeating at the inquiry.
“Having my 10-year-old son with me, of course he looked at me and he said ‘Why do these people hate us?’” he said.
“And that was very confronting … very difficult to explain to him.”
Fifteen people were killed in the Bondi attack in December 2025. NewsWire / Flavio Brancaleone
Jewish musician’s career and business destroyed after doxxing
Jewish musician Joshua Moshe told the hearing how his life started to fall apart after he was doxxed, with he and his wife both receiving hate messages and threats.
The couple’s homeware shop in north Melbourne was vandalised with boycott stickers and graffiti in the wake of the doxxing, while photos of them both taken from their social media accounts and plastered with “Zionists” and “Boycotting”.
At one point he received a photo of his son along with a voicemail that said “You racist motherf***er better keep watching your motherf***ing back”.
The abuse forced the couple to close up their shop and move to a different spot in the city. “This was devastating to experience … ongoing torrent of messages.. I was feeling extremely anxious, devastated, feeling like my life was starting to unravel,” Mr Moshe said.
Musician Joshua Moshe Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw
Musician Joshua Moshe and his partner Maggie May Moshe spoke with the media outside the hearing on Monday. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw
A saxophonist and composer, Mr Moshe was part of an award-winning band for seven years up until the doxxing incident, when he found out via social media that he’d been kicked out of the band.
The band had posted an online post — which they recently issued an apology for — which said the group was “disgusted, deeply shocked and betrayed”, claiming Mr Moshe had made comments in a Zionist WhatsApp group.
“We explicitly condemn any form of Zionism, racism, bullying anti-Semitism and prejudice of any kind,” the post said.
Mr Moshe said the Zionism that he believed in was that Jewish people deserved a home in some part of their ancestral homeland.
ECAJ researcher targeted with ‘horrifying’ anti-Semitic caricature
Executive council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) research director Julie Nathan described the “horrifying” moment a sexualised caricature of her was shared on the internet.
The caricature was accompanied with the words “Julie simply desires to be filled with Aryan seed”.
“It’s very much a sexualisation, so you have this Jewish caricature, this is the feminine version of it, with the long, curly hair, and the long fingernails … It was horrifying to see” Ms Nathan told the royal commission.
Executive Council of Australian Jewry research director Julie Nathan says trying to keep track of anti-Semitic incidents online is ‘like trying to count the stars’. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw
Ms Nathan, who authors the Jewish group’s annual report on anti-Semitism in Australia, said a new form of anti-Semitism has emerged since October 7, 2023 telling the hearing there was a 316 per cent rise in anti-Semitic incidents in Australia according to their 2024-2025 annual report.
“We’re getting much more brazen and much more confident coming out and not ashamed or worried about it being anti-Semitic and inciting violence against Jews,” she said.
Online posts or publications are not included in the report “because there are so many it’s uncountable”, Ms Nathan said.
“It’s like trying to count the stars,” she said.
Pro-Palestine material is also not counted as anti-Jewish, with Ms Nathan explaining a “free Palestine” sticker would only be considered anti-Semitic if it was stuck on a synagogue or a Jewish school, for instance.
“Israel is a state like any other state, and just as we in Australia are free to criticise our government, our country … we accept that, and even though people may lie about things or may use offensive language,” Ms Nathan said.
“We accept that as being, you know, political discourse or political language. It’s only when it crosses the line into anti-Semitism, that’s when we will count it as anti Semitic.”
The incidents, which are all personally reviewed by Ms Nathan, are recorded under six different categories including: physical assault, vandalism, verbal abuse, hate messages, graffiti and material such as banners and stickers.
She spoke of some people on social media screenshotting the annual report and making fun of it, saying: “We’re doing well boys, let’s keep the momentum going”.
Chief executive officer of The Dor Foundation Tahli Blicblau sPicture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw
Fireworks in the street is Israel was ‘counting its dead
Fireworks in the streets as Israel was “still counting its dead” in the wake of Hamas’ 2023 attack “set the tone” for the normalisation of Jewish hate in Australia, the leader of a Jewish organisation has told a hate inquiry.
Many pointed to the Sydney Opera House protest on October 9, 2023, as a critical turning point in the rise of Jewish hate; however, Dor Foundation Tahli Blicblau chief executive instead submitted that scenes at a Western Sydney protest the day prior were pivotal.
“The events of October 7 were described as a day of pride and courage,” Ms Blicblau told the royal commission on Monday.
“Cars were driving through Western Sydney setting off fireworks … that glorification of violence that night at a time when Israel was still counting its dead really set the tone for a permissive environment in which glorifying violence was accepted and permissible.”
Picture: Gaye Gerard /NewsWire
Research from the Jewish body, which was established in 2024 to combat anti-Semitism, has revealed that most Australians can’t recognise anti-Semitic tropes.
Radical ideologies had converged in such a way that anti-Semitism was slipping into public discourse easier, Ms Blicblau said.
“They’re shrouded just enough in language, often of human rights, to be acceptable,” she said.
“Most Australians can’t recognise anti-Semitic tropes when they see them, so they’re presented with these hateful tropes and because they don’t recognise it as being anti-Semitic, it’s more likely to become normalised and accepted.”
Ms Blicblau also spoke to the role of online spaces in helping move anti-Semitism away from “shameful radical fringes”.
“The role of the internet and social media allows these hateful comments to reach millions of people within milliseconds, so in order to combat the new form (of anti-Semitism) … we need to operate there,” Ms Blicblau said.
The hearing continues
In That Howling Infinite 