What can we learn from the first block of hearings recently held by Australia’s Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion? In its first eight days, the Commission heard from around fifty people, mainly Jewish, about their “lived experience” in the wake of October 7 and the Bondi massacre. Some of them are well known public defenders of Zionism. Some hold positions of responsibility in Jewish institutions. Others lost relatives at Bondi or in southern Israel during Hamas attacks, or were ordinary people simply there to tell their stories. In real time, they all showed how the perception and experience of antisemitism fits into the fabric of their lives — and how it can be deployed as an instrument of political struggle. Simultaneously personal and political, their testimony casts invaluable light on how pro-Israel politics is being constructed and defended in the present moment — not just rhetorically and ideologically, but also — and crucially — emotionally.

As one would expect with any cross-section of a social group, witnesses’ stories are diverse in content and narration. Hair-raising accounts of poisonous antisemitic interactions are juxtaposed with attacks on Palestine supporters, involving exaggerations, misrepresentations, incoherence and implicit, and sometimes overt, racism. As a result, the forty-five hours and 756 pages of transcript are important documents for the Palestine solidarity movement, and offer an unprecedented, organic glimpse of the roots and workings of Zionist ideology amid the ongoing genocide.

Permission to narrate

If their evidence is highly diverse, one thing unites all the witnesses: none of them describe themselves as non- or anti-Zionist. Overwhelmingly, they are offended by demands for Palestinian freedom or attempts to oppose the current war. At a moment when support for Israel has never been so controversial, the Commission could not find time to hear a single anti-Zionist Jew or Palestine supporter in its first forty-five hours of public sessions. More than four decades on, Edward Said’s famous observation that “permission to narrate” is denied to the Palestinian perspective has lost none of its currency.

The tone was set early when the Commissioner, the retired High Court judge Virginia Bell, made the controversial decision to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism. Notoriously, the IHRA singles out criticism of Israel as potentially antisemitic. Even with that definition presupposed, it is still bizarre that the anti-Zionist Loud Jew Collective was refused leave to appear: apparently, their views on antisemitism are of no possible interest. Also refused was the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network. APAN is the leading pro-Palestinian organisation in Australia and has many Jewish members. One might have thought that the Commission would want to hear what it had to say about the goals of “assessing the impact of antisemitism on the daily life of Jewish Australians”, or evaluating “metrics for assessing the prevalence of antisemitism in institutions and society”.

While these major actors were cold-shouldered, numerous non-Jewish witnesses were auditioned, including a high-school teacher in Tasmania — antisemitism among schoolchildren is a very frequent theme in witnesses’ testimony — and a Sydney university student who also happens to work for the Liberal Party. The teacher voiced complaints about her students’ rudeness and inattention during Holocaust lessons, while the student — employed by Liberal MP Julian Leeser — aired allegations of antisemitism at university. Hearing from these non-Jewish bystanders was, apparently, more important to the Commission than hearing what the Palestinians and their supporters — including Jewish ones — continually targeted in witnesses’ testimony might have to say about the antisemitism of which they are always accused.

Political apartheid

As these exclusions suggest, the hearings repeat the near-complete erasure of Palestinian experience that regularly characterises discourse about antisemitism in the global north. On the witnesses’ side, this manifests most concretely in an almost universal failure to even recognise what Palestinians are currently going through. Witnesses often complain about the lack of sympathy to them shown by the Australian public, but most show barely a skerrick of empathy — let alone any sympathy — with Palestinians. There is an immense silence in the testimony about the genocidal gravity of the destruction of Gaza. Indeed, the very accusation that Israel is perpetrating a genocide is, according to one witness, the new version of the ancient and antisemitic accusation of deicide once levelled by Christians against Jews.

It has clearly never even occurred to some witnesses that Israel’s actions in Gaza might play a role in the changed political and social climate since the start of the genocide: “for some reason”, one witness says, “post-7 October, wide-scale antisemitism… has been normalised”. For some reason. Another witness describes the criticism of Israel after October 7 as emerging “without any provocation”. For others, criticism of Israel has nothing to do with what is happening in Gaza: “You know”, says one, “we’re just talking about having a country”. Instead, pro-Palestine protests in Australia are assumed to be shows of support for the murder of Jews, with the Hamas attacks seen as having unleashed a spree of jubilatory Jew-hatred. The Opera House protest is read not as what it overwhelmingly was — a dread-filled, pre-emptive “rally for a free Palestine” with the slogan “No war on Gaza!” — but as a celebration of the Hamas attack, “a day of pride and a day of joy”.

Many of the witnesses cannot tolerate any expression of opposition to Israel’s war on Gaza. Jewish people must be completely quarantined from calls for Palestinian freedom: including Jews among the addressees of those calls, or even articulating them in spaces where Jewish people might see or hear them, is antisemitic, since it constitutes “targeting” Jews for Israel’s actions. Some witnesses insist that criticism of Israel is, nevertheless, permissible; it’s just that it can never be made where any Jewish people might hear it. The overall message is clear: wherever Jewish people are present, expressions of solidarity with Palestine must be neither seen nor heard. This can only mean the obliteration of Palestinians as political actors in Australia. It is, to all intents and purposes, a call for a form of social and political apartheid.

Lived experience of what?

At the very outset of hearings, the Commissioner emphasised her opinion that “some of the criticisms of the IHRA definition proceed on a misconception”. In every case, she said, whether something was actually an example of antisemitism, rather than just alleged to be one, had to be determined “in its overall context”. Yet, in the first block of hearings, witnesses’ claims that what they had experienced as antisemitism was in fact antisemitism were rarely probed or contested. Witness after witness identified calls for a free Palestine, the Palestinian flag, posters, badges, the keffiyeh, protests and their “regalia”, Palestine campaign information booths or cake stalls, or Arabic words on t-shirts, as antisemitic. For one witness, even criticism of the IDF is antisemitic because all Israelis have to serve in it (a claim that conveniently ignores the exemptions given to Palestinian Israelis and ultra-orthodox Jews). Far from being assessed in their “overall context”, these claims were not challenged. Yet the fact that something may have been “experienced as antisemitic”, whatever exactly that means, in no way guarantees that it was antisemitic. This principle is essential to uphold: not doing so means discarding the very distinction between actual and alleged antisemitism.

There is no doubt that the evidence presented to the Commission includes nauseating examples of unambiguously antisemitic acts. After Bondi and the various arson attacks, it is more than understandable that Jewish people are concerned for their safety, just as Muslims in New Zealand were after the Christchurch massacre. But the spine-chilling instances of antisemitism recorded in their testimony make the allegations against Palestine solidarity even less convincing.

On the first day of hearings, a woman whose name was withheld described her experience at the Sydney protest at Town Hall Square on October 9. This was the demonstration that later marched to the Opera House, where protesters were falsely alleged to have chanted “Gas the Jews” — a libel regularly repeated in the course of the hearings. The witness tells us that “one of the Jewish organisations” had earlier warned its mailing list to leave the CBD early in order to avoid the protest, consistent with the pro-Israel lobby’s presupposition that any displays of solidarity with Palestine can only be antisemitic. On her way to the station, she stopped to observe the protest, and, she told us, “began to feel incredibly uncomfortable,” feeling that she “shouldn’t be there and …it wasn’t a safe place to be a Jewish person”:

I found — I found myself standing next to a couple of middle‑aged men and looking around me at the people, and I just — I had a sense that this would become — this could become very uncomfortable very fast. The — there — there weren’t any clear signs of what was to come later that evening, but, you know, there were Palestinian flags and it was clear that — that this was going to be a passionate affair for the attendees. And, as a Jewish person we have — and we have had many generations of discrimination, and there is a bit of a sixth sense when things are going to be potentially uncomfortable or — or even dangerous for us, and I just started feeling a rush of adrenaline and — and a really strong feeling that it wasn’t the right place to be a Jewish person.

This feeling, the witness tells us, came over her during the Welcome to Country — a part of the protest, that is, that precedes the main political business, and focuses on Indigenous connection to land. The witness does not mention anything antisemitic, or perceived as so: all we are given to justify calling the demonstration out as antisemitic is an appeal to a “sixth sense”.

The antisemitism exception

Many of the witnesses are convinced that antisemitism is more than just one particular form of racism among others. According to one of them, antisemitism is “more significant and more serious and more dangerous if it gets left unchecked” than other kinds of racism. This judgement is, of course, validated by the very existence of the Royal Commission itself, given that no similar inquiry has been devoted to the many other forms of racism prevalent in Australian society. The same witness’ elder daughter, who also appeared, felt that antisemitism at her Sydney public high school was “diminished” by being mentioned along with Islamophobia: fighting racism, it would seem, is a zero-sum game. A third witness claims that treating antisemitism as racism racialises Jews as Hitler did, apparently ignoring the central proposition of contemporary antiracism — namely, that all racial categories are instances of racialisation, and that antiracism specifically means refusing the racialisation of social groups on biological (or any other) grounds.

For several witnesses, the special status of antisemitism means that it must never be contextualised. “When there is violence against Jews”, Benjamin Elton, the Chief Minister of the Great Synagogue in Sydney said, “it [must] not [be] finessed as having certain causes or a certain background which means that it should be downplayed and not taken as seriously”. He continues by criticising “Yes, but” responses to antisemitic actions. This, he says, “is a phrase that should not be permitted about antisemitism any more than prejudice against LGBT people or members of ethnic groups”. To explain or contextualise antisemitism, for Elton, is to excuse it. Did anyone recall Elton’s words when, the following day, Peter Wertheim, co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, gave evidence? Wertheim, who supports Israel’s continuing ‘security control’ over the West Bank — that is, the occupation — for as long as Hamas are the strongest Palestinian faction, told the Commission that “There’s a lot of sympathy for Palestinians as a people in my community. I don’t want anyone to think that we’re impervious to human suffering wherever it occurs. That’s not the case”. He then added exactly the but that Elton condemns in discussions of antisemitism:

But let’s — let’s just take a step backwards and understand that this was an attack that had been initiated by Hamas, which happens to be the most powerful organisation, still, in the Palestinian community in Israel and perhaps beyond.

Other witnesses continually assert the ‘one-sided’ or ‘unbalanced’ emphasis on Gaza by supporters of Palestine. Antisemitism, in their mind, only has one side. Condemnation of it cannot be diluted by any attempt at explanation or understanding. Sympathy with Palestinians, on the other hand, must immediately be qualified and corrected with a “yes, but”’. One witness — who works for a union — describes what is happening in Gaza as “an absolute truth and … a greater harm” than what happened on October 7. Hers was a sole voice, but her appreciation of the magnitude of the attack on Gaza did not prevent her also complaining about pro-Palestinian posters in her workplace.

A mutating virus

As well as accounts of lived experience, the hearings also took testimony from Jillian Segal, the government’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, and from several antisemitism researchers. Their most important argument concerned antisemitism’s varying nature, its status as a “virus” or “illness that has morphed and mutated over time”, as Segal put it on day four. The purpose of this familiar and long-standing argument is to identify anti-Zionism as the “new” antisemitism. This interpretation of anti-Zionism has been thoroughly internalised by the “lived experience” witnesses, most of whom simply presuppose that anti-Zionism is intrinsically antisemitic. Almost everyone ignored the existence of Jewish opposition to Zionism. Deborah Conway said that the idea of anti-Zionism “is, in fact, a genocidal impulse” — an interpretation that turns anti-Zionist Jews into supporters of a genocide of their co-religionists.

According to one expert witness, the Dor Foundation’s Tahli Blicblau, antisemites often simply “replace” the word “Jewish” with the word “Zionist”. It was never explained how we are supposed to verify this claim. Modern anti-Zionism is a form of antiracism that opposes anyone committed to an exclusivist Jewish ethno-state in historic Palestine, whether they are Jewish or — as is far more often the case, globally speaking — Christian. Why should anyone accept that this political position is actually a “morphed” or “mutated” version of antisemitism, a prejudice that holds exclusively against Jews? When someone says “Zionist”, how exactly do you know that it is meant to replace the word “Jew”?

To say that one thing has “replaced” or “morphed” or “mutated” into another requires us to be able to identify a single persisting entity on both sides of the “mutation” that guarantees that, under its new outward appearance, the mutated version is the same thing as the old one, but in a different form. This is exactly what Zionists are unable to do. You cannot establish that contemporary anti-Zionists are actually antisemitic by simply asserting that anti-Zionism is the mutation into which antisemitism has “morphed”. In the past, like today, some people were antisemitic — and today, like in the past, some people are anti-Zionist. No doubt the two groups overlap. But there is no reason whatsoever to collapse the distinction between them, and to think that these people must in any sense be the same.

The complement of the “mutation” argument is the idea that antisemitism is a constant, “something that” — in the words of Alex Ryvchin, the other co-chief of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry — “will pursue the Jewish people no matter where we go”. (Last year Ryvchin denounced the marchers across the Harbour Bridge as “extremist by nature”.) The idea of the permanency of antisemitism allows Zionists to attribute an unchanging antisemitic content to expressions that, in fact, have long lost any antisemitic resonance. The consequence is that if antisemitism morphs, it only does so additively: new ways of being antisemitic, like anti-Zionism or accusations of genocide, are constantly being developed, but all the old tropes retain their antisemitic force, even when no one understands them any more. On this profoundly pessimistic view, the set of antisemitic concepts only ever gets bigger.

The left in the dock

For antisemitism expert Dave Rich, heard on the last day of hearings, anti-Zionism is not antisemitic when it is espoused by “strictly orthodox Jews”, but it is antisemitic when it is espoused by Marxists. This is one instance of a wider hostility to the left in many witnesses’ evidence. One witness highlights her work with the union movement and with progressive politics more generally; Peter Wertheim is at pains to note that he has given legal representation to unions. Mostly, however, the left is presented to the Commission as the main culprit for the rise of antisemitism. The Tasmanian high school teacher claims that her students’ antisemitism is fuelled by left-wing attitudes. Tahli Blicblau draws attention to antisemitism as a “a kind of mainstream, if usually minor tradition within left‑wing thought”. Several witnesses specifically indict accusations of Israel’s settler-colonialism and racism as left-inflected antisemitic hate speech. Even if some witnesses are careful to showcase their progressive credentials, it is clear that the political left is in the dock, not the right.

Animosity to the left is accompanied by considerable hostility to Islam. In one case, in an all-too-familiar discourse heavy with Western supremacism, Jews are presented as the canary in the coal mine of a threatened Occidental civilisation:

And I think that’s an important point that is not often discussed is, yes, Jews are targeted, but very often the West is targeted and our democracy, our values, our freedom, Christian, women, the LGBT communities, they all have been targeted in Europe across the last two decades. And I think it’s important to make that note because, you know, very often I feel like people think this is an issue between Jews and Islam, but I think it concerns everyone, and that’s not something I hear a lot here in Australia.

For the same witness, the cry “Allahu Akbar” — the Muslim profession of faith meaning “God is the greatest” — constitutes a threat to Jewish safety.

Contributions of this kind are the exception in witnesses’ testimony, but a highly uncritical Australian nationalism is everywhere. “Australia is the land of a fair go, equality, dignity, fairness, democracy, all the things that we respect and value”, one witness declares. Another sees the Opera House protest, the Harbour Bridge march and the Bondi massacre as having the result that those three “symbols of Australia” now “symbolise hatred to us and our community”. The country is regularly painted as having been a safe haven from genocide, until October 7 or Bondi. The genocide of its Indigenous population is almost never mentioned. Indeed, Aboriginal history is mostly casually ignored: the Vice-President of Newtown Synagogue casually asserts that Jews have been worshipping in Newtown for “hundreds” of years. That historical fantasy was, perhaps, just an accidental slip of the tongue, but it was not noticed or corrected, and, in its very spontaneity, it functions to project European presence back in time, and naturalise it at the expense of Aboriginal people: according to its own website, organised Jewish life in Newtown only started in 1883, and the synagogue itself was founded in 1918.

Jews as Jews

The ubiquitous allegation that Palestine solidarity is antisemitic is spurious and should be rejected. What leads witnesses to make it appears to be a conception of antisemitism as any act that a Jewish person perceives as hostile. If an act is directed against someone who happens to be Jewish, that alone makes it possibly — or probably — antisemitic.

This conception is impossible to maintain. Antisemitism must be understood as hostility to Jews as Jews. Otherwise, hostility expressed against other characteristics of a Jewish person (for instance, a Jewish Zionist’s support for the occupation of Palestine) will be counted as antisemitic, and any criticism of a Jewish person for anything will be open to the same accusation. This is exactly what is found in the evidence before the Commission.

Dave Rich explicitly rejects the “Jews as Jews” definition of antisemitism, on the ground that it is too limiting, and ignores coded or inexplicit antisemitism. Rich is, of course, correct that antisemitism can sometimes be coded, but he is wrong that this fact disqualifies the “Jews as Jews” definition: coded antisemitism is still prejudice or hatred of Jews as Jews — it just doesn’t “admit” it, and dresses itself up as something else. Antisemites in the 1930s who attacked “communists” as a covert way to attack “Jews” were still motivated by a hatred of Jews as Jews: that is precisely what made them antisemitic, whether or not they were willing to say so aloud.

Another antiracism fail

Amidst all the exaggerations, entitlement, misrepresentations, ideological instrumentalisation and incoherence, the evidence presented to the Royal Commission contains clear examples of horrifying antisemitism. These are scars on society; they make sickening reading. But they will not be combatted by being treated as more serious or more worthy of response than the equally deep scars inflicted by racism against other racialised groups.

While the Royal Commission sits, Israel continues to murder and starve Gazans as they try somehow to survive. Since the genocide is, indisputably, the necessary overarching context for a discussion of antisemitism in Australia at the present moment, it is perverse that the Commission has refused to hear from the Palestine solidarity movement — the very people whose opposition to the genocide, Zionists claim, is at the source of attacks on Jewish people today. No objective attempt to get at the truth about antisemitism in 2026 could reasonably block its ears to Palestine supporters, many of whom are themselves Jewish. In choosing to completely ignore them, the hearings have reflected Albanese’s intention in establishing the Commission in the first place: placating the pro-Israel lobby, rather than actually diminishing racism or increasing social cohesion, was always the plan. This, in itself, is a flagrant and powerful example of the racism to which Palestinians in this country are relentlessly subject. In setting the Commission in motion, the government has provided a massive public platform for the political forces supporting the Gaza genocide, and, once again, significantly set back the cause of antiracism in Australia.

Image: Wikimedia Commons