Nick Riemer’s analysis of the first block of hearings, forty-five hours and 756 pages of transcripts, from Australia’s Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is essential reading. It also provides a glimpse of the future that the highest institutions of the state have in store for Australian Muslims.

Witness after witness framed Palestinian flags, chants, even fund-raising cup-cake stalls for Palestine as examples of antisemitic hate, with some even framing Muslims’ everyday call for prayer, Allahu Akbar, as a threat to Jewish safety. One witness said that antisemitism was “diminished” at her Sydney public high school when it was named alongside Islamophobia.

These Islamophobic and divisive calls went unchallenged inside the highest federal platform for inquiry, given the Commission refused to hear from anti-Zionist voices — an exclusion that deserves to be investigated under the Racial Discrimination Act.

The outcome was shaped before the first witness spoke. The government convened its highest form of federal inquiry for one specific segment of the Jewish Australian community, adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism, appointed Gilbert + Tobin, a sponsor of the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce, without an open tender, and a gave a small pro-Zionist legal body a role in managing public submissions.

Riemer’s reading of the first hearing block distils its cumulative demand: Palestinian solidarity must be “neither seen nor heard” wherever Jewish people are present, what he calls “social and political apartheid”. A demand that aims to obliterate Palestinians as political actors in Australian public life, and with them, the Muslim communities whose solidarity with Palestine is inseparable from their religious identity.

This is the part that has not been stated clearly enough: the Royal Commission is about what the state is preparing to do to Australian Muslims — the community perceived as the domestic face of opposition to the settler-colonial project Australia is so invested in protecting.

 Zero-sum logic

This framing of Palestinian solidarity as antisemitism through government conduits was already underway before Bondi. Last September, more than eighty local councils attended the Australian Mayors Summit Against Antisemitism and were handed a report listing what they should treat as antisemitic: the watermelon, the keffiyeh, the phrases “free Palestine”, “settler colonial”, “open-air prison”. They also heard calls for strict monitoring and decisive action at the law enforcement and policymaking level.

After the Bondi Beach attack, I argued in the Middle East Monitor that the institutionalisation of “new antisemitism”, a definition that criminalises anti-Zionism, was functioning as the state’s latest apparatus for Islamophobia.

The mechanism is the institutionalisation of the settler-colonial zero-sum logic, founded on the principle of elimination at the service of domination. Settler-colonial projects sustain themselves by constructing narratives of endangered safety, whereby the mere existence of the Indigenous population is seen as a threat. Israel’s safety — and by extension Jewish safety given Israel’s acclaimed custodianship of the Jews in the world — is constructed as achievable only through the suppression of Palestinian existence, political expression, and solidarity.

This dangerous Zero-Sum logic is imported into Australia domestics policy, particularly though the state appointment of Segal as the Antisemitism Envoy. Consequently, just as the annihilation of Palestinians is framed as synonymous with Israeli security, the domestic control and disciplining of opposition to that annihilation is reframed as the fight against “antisemitism”, as the “new antisemitism”. Within this logic, Jewish safety, everywhere, becomes achievable only through the suppression of Palestinian political existence, resistance and opposition to colonisation — and, by extension, the criminalisation of Muslim identity.

What the Royal Commission’s first hearings have now provided is the evidentiary base for that logic, rendered in testimonies that echo unchallenged in chambers from which opposing voices were excluded, accepted as fact rather than tested as claim, before a federal inquiry heading toward binding recommendations.

The conundrum is this: Australia holds a liberal multicultural policy requires equal recognition to all citizens. It is also a settler-colonial state that recognises its own colonial genealogy in Israel’s, actively aids its elimination project, and holds deepening geopolitical and capitalist interests in that colonial entity. And so, how can Australia genuinely extend recognition and protection to a community whose solidarity with the colonised, integral to their religion, is being classifies as a “threat” to the eliminatory project of another citizenry?

We do not need to wait for the Commission’s final report to find the answer, it is already legible in how the state distributes recognition: generously to one community, conditionally and reluctantly to the other.

Within forty-eight hours of the Bondi attack, seven Muslim youths were violently arrested and released the next day without charge. NSW police physically dragged Muslim worshippers mid-prayer during protests against Isaac Herzog’s visit to Sydney. The IHRA definition was adopted and Segal’s sweeping recommendations, months before were heavily criticised across the board for their draconian reach were fast-tracked into law through the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Act 2026, passed through Parliament in a single day with limited consultation, introducing institutional interventions across criminal law, national security, migration, school curriculum, and university funding.

Meanwhile, the Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia, Aftab Malik, handed down his report in September 2025 with fifty-four recommendations. By May 2026, the government had not responded. The Islamophobia Register recorded a 619 per cent rise in incidents since October 2023, and a 740 per cent spike in the fortnight after the Bondi attack. Yet while the 2026 Budget allocated $604.2 million over five years to combat antisemitism, including $124 million in security funding directly to the ECAJ, $131 million for the Royal Commission, and $42.9 million in mental health supports for the community, zero dollars were invested in the fight against Islamophobia, which didn’t rate a single mention. As Malik warned, “God forbid the government will wait for another Christchurch“. But when Christchurch did happen, killing fifty-one Muslim worshippers at the hand of an Australian terrorist, it generated none of the above — no Royal Commission, no envoy with fast-tracked legislation, no dedicated budget.

What comes next for Australian Muslims

Australian Muslims are not new to being disciplined by the state through the language of safety and cohesion. After September 11, the War on Terror established social cohesion and Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) frameworks as the primary instruments through which Muslim political subjectivity was surveilled, conditioned, and contained. The “good Muslim/bad Muslim” binary was organised around cultural and political axis. The apolitical Muslim — moderate, culturally visible, institutionally compliant — received funding, consultations, and recognition. The religiously visible and politically engaged Muslim, particularly whose politics implicated the state’s allyships, was managed as a radicalisation risk. The Islamophobia of that period was assembled through integrationist governance: the management of Muslim culture, theology and political expressions through the racialised trope of “Islamic radicalisation”.

What is now being reassembled under the banner of fighting antisemitism is a shift in the figure of the “bad” Muslim: from the radical Muslim to the antisemitic Muslim. And under the IHRA definition, the “antisemitic” Muslim is any Muslim who expresses solidarity with Palestine.

These are the early iterations of a racial hierarchy form of governance organised around a zero-sum logic. What the Commission is building toward, if its first hearings are any indication, is the construction of one community’s safety through the desolation and criminalisation of another’s, particularly Australian Muslims.

The institutional infrastructure for this recalibration is already in place. In Victoria in September 2025, Premier Jacinta Allan institutionalised the social cohesion pledge she had introduced after the December 2024 attack on the Adass Israel Synagogue, alongside restrictions on pro-Palestine protests, as a “Social Cohesion Values Commitment”, making state grants for multicultural organisations conditional on agreeing to loosely framed values. A coalition of twenty-two civil society organisations, including anti-Zionist Jewish and Muslim groups, as well as the independent review convened by the Victorian government, warned it would coerce communities into silence on matters of political conscience.

Once social cohesion frameworks are read through the IHRA definition, solidarity with Palestine will become a form of antisemitism, effectively criminalising Australian Muslim organisations’ public support of Palestinian liberation and their condemnation of Israel’s colonial aggression. To avoid repercussions, Muslims would be required to renounce a political commitment that is part and parcel of their religious identity in order to remain within the boundaries of the new definition. For example, under this logic, the Muslim Vote Matters and The Muslim Vote movements, which mobilised tens of thousands of Australian Muslims to withdraw electoral support from politicians complicit in the Gaza genocide, may now be labelled as antisemitic conduct instead of democratic participation.

The zero-sum logic that the Royal Commission’s witnesses have voiced through the IHRA definition is a colonial act of oppression. The state is currently accepting it unchallenged, and it will soon inform the recommendations of the country’s highest federal inquiry.

If the state succumbs to that logic, as every indication suggests it will, Muslim political solidarity with Palestine risks becoming not merely unrecognised but structurally criminalised. The full institutional protection of one community will come to be constitutively built on the misrecognition of another.

Image: Palestine solidarity rally, Sydney, 23 October 2023 (Nicholas Gannon)