The Adelaide Festival’s decision to dump Palestinian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah from its upcoming Writers’ Week gives us a grim foretaste of the Australian cultural landscape in 2026. The Festival’s evasive explanation for this blunt act of censorship was that “it would not be culturally sensitive” to give this Palestine advocate a platform in the wake of Bondi. No credible accusation of anything is made here, just vague handwaving towards cultural sensitivities: this is evidently all that is now required to justify the hounding of Palestinians and their allies from public life in this country.

This part of a trend: talk of ambience and vibes is coming to replace the use of politicised definitions of antisemitism as the preferred technique to silence solidarity with Gaza.

Higher education will inevitably be a focal point of renewed efforts to restrict free speech in 2026. Already, the disciplinary regimes prevailing at Australian universities have transformed them beyond recognition. Since October 7, university staff have been hit by a barrage of new policies designed to dissuade and punish those publicly opposing Israel’s genocide. Now, an expanding infrastructure of committees and state-sponsored training initiatives will ensure that the drive towards on-campus authoritarianism continues.

“Every time you see a chanting, vicious protest on a university campus, it’s telling you that anti-Semitism’s all right”. So says Emeritus Professor Greg Craven, who was tasked last February with reporting on Australian universities’ policy response to antisemitism. In a sane world, that outburst alone would disqualify him. No one who sees anti-Jewish hate in every pro-Palestine rally should be entrusted with adjudicating institutional responses to antisemitism at universities. But we don’t live in a sane world. The post-Bondi rush to blame peaceful anti-genocide rallies for ISIS terrorism is evidence enough of that. In the wake of the tragedy, we can anticipate that the Prime Minister will now receive Craven’s “report card” on universities with heightened deference.

To date, the Albanese government has shown itself only too willing to outsource policy-making to individuals and organisations seeking to suppress solidarity with the suffering people of Gaza. Its response to Bondi points in the same direction.

Chair of the government’s new Antisemitism Education Taskforce, UNSW Chancellor David Gonski, sits on the Advisory Board of the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) and co-chaired the organising committee of its Australian Mayor’s Summit Against Antisemitism. At the event, CAM distributed a brochure identifying the watermelon, the keffiyeh, and the slogan “Free Palestine” as antisemitic symbols. For its part, the Group of Eight has appointed former Monash Chancellor Alan Finkel to chair its own “Expert Oversight and Implementation Committee on Antisemitism”, made up of other former chancellors, the former director-general of spy agency ASIS, and the president of the Australasian Union of Jewish Students. Finkel believes that “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, a call for liberation across historic Palestine, violates the law. None of this bodes well for free speech on campus. 

Also receiving the government’s imprimatur in the wake of Bondi is a recently established research project: the Monash Initiative for Rapid Research into Antisemitism (MIRRA), led by Associate Professor David Slucki. Having thus far provided training programs at Monash, MIRRA will see its role expanded nationwide thanks to the government support. Given that MIRRA’s training regime is set to be embedded across Australian universities, it is worth examining its position in the debate on campus antisemitism. 

MIRRA and the UA definition of antisemitism

Slucki was one of the authors of the definition of antisemitism that Universities Australia (UA) endorsed last February, and which has since been incorporated into policy at most Australian universities. While presented as an alternative to the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition, the UA Definition still offers ample scope to brand expressions of anti-Zionism (a call for a single, democratic state spanning historic Palestine, for example) as antisemitic. The flaws in the UA definition have been picked apart elsewhere, most thoroughly by former New South Wales Magistrate David Heilpern, who describes it as “drowning in ambiguity and unintended consequences”.

Not surprisingly, therefore, the UA definition has done nothing to clarify the line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. In an awkward interview with David Marr on Late Night Live, Slucki was unable to say whether or not slogans like “Israel is a terrorist state” or “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” should be considered antisemitic. Given the centrality of these slogans to today’s debate, this is the first — and most obvious — test of any definition of antisemitism. The UA definition failed it.

In its ambiguity, the UA definition serves not to fix the boundaries of antisemitism, but to widen the scope of what might be antisemitic. Slucki evidently believes that speech acts that are not obviously antisemitic may still, at some deeper level, express anti-Jewish prejudice. As he told Marr, “you can say something that’s not, in and of itself, antisemitic, it’s not antisemitic to say that thing, but it might come from a place that might be…”. The definition thus empowers institutions not simply to scrutinise words and deeds, but to divine an actor’s inner thoughts and intentions. Far from providing a tool to delineate antisemitism from legitimate pro-Palestine speech, the effect of this is to encourage a generalised suspicion towards all pro-Palestine speech. 

A definitional enterprise that masquerades as anti-racist politics while carving out protections for Zionism can only be a contradictory mess. Indeed, as others have pointed out, the definition is not simply internally contradictory, but potentially — by its own terms — an act of antisemitism. On the one hand, the UA definition enjoins us to recognize the diversity of opinion within the Jewish community. “It can be antisemitic to make assumptions about what Jewish individuals think”. Quite correct. 

Yet at the same time, the UA definition of antisemitism deems it necessary to highlight that “for most … Jewish Australians, Zionism is a core part of their Jewish identity”. What purpose does this proviso serve in a definition of antisemitism? Why underline this identification with Zionism, if not to suggest that one should, in fact, make assumptions about what Jewish individuals think and factor it into one’s interactions with them? 

Similar contradictions find their way into MIRRA’s publications. Just before Christmas, MIRRA issued its “Framework for Addressing Antisemitism in Australian Universities”. Written before Bondi, it offers a sense of what may now be coming down the pipeline at universities.

Echoing the UA definition, MIRRA’s framework calls for recognition of “diverse Jewish perspectives” in the curriculum — as is appropriate. Yet MIRRA cannot acknowledge the full diversity of those perspectives, since doing so would require legitimating anti-Zionism.

One plank of MIRRA’s proposed framework envisages new partnerships between universities and Jewish organisations. These are intended to encompass a wide range of activities: “programming, internships and community engagement, fostering cross-community participation”. Such “community partners” will also “offer consultation and support for awareness programs” to be introduced into universities. But which Jewish organisations might be deemed suitable partners? Is MIRRA willing to recognise diverse Jewish perspectives by offering space to anti-Zionist Jews in the fight against antisemitism?

It seems not. The only two examples MIRRA gives are the Australasian Union of Jewish Students and Executive Council of Australian Jewry, both leading Zionist organisations and both relentless in pressuring the government and universities to crack down on pro-Palestine activism. ECAJ still lobbies for the full package of Segal recommendations, including measures to terminate university funding should their response to antisemitism be deemed wanting. So much for “diverse Jewish perspectives”. While couching its work in language more palatable to its left-liberal audience at universities, MIRRA thus remains closely aligned with Australia’s Zionist lobbying infrastructure and seeks to extend its influence deeper into the university sector.

Culture wars

One point to be drawn from the above is that while Zionists have been vocal in support for instituting new definitions of antisemitism on campus, their enthusiasm for spelled-out definitions has its limits. Definitions, even those as problematic as the UA one, do offer some protection against scatter-gun accusations of prejudice. Even if we allow, as Slucki wants to, that an innocuous pro-Palestine slogan “might come from a place that might be” antisemitic, activists still have the right to defend themselves: to argue, for example, that their calls for a free Palestine really do reflect commitments to freedom and justice. Calls for objective definitions of antisemitism thus conflict with an equally prominent discourse that privileges subjective responses to pro-Palestine activism. In contrast to definitions, this grants Zionists carte blanche to brand support for Palestine as antisemitic, without offering a right of reply. 

This tension comes to the fore in MIRRA’s only substantial report to date, exploring “Antisemitism in the Cultural and Creative Industries”. The choice of focus is unsurprising, given the advances the Palestine movement has made in this sector, from the landmark Sydney Festival boycott in 2022, to the recent mass withdrawal from the Bendigo Writers Festival. 

Astonishingly, for someone who has put their name to the UA definition and has now been held up by Anthony Albanese as a national authority in “recognising antisemitism in universities”, here Slucki along with his co-authors dispenses entirely with any definition of antisemitism. One participant in their study argues that “if someone…feels that [something] has happened to them, then that has happened to them”. If I feel I am the victim of antisemitism, that is to say, then I am the victim of antisemitism. End of story. The report’s authors concur with this: “illustrative examples demonstrating the impact of recent incidents in the sector may be more effective than definitions that emphasise intention”.

Of course, on this basis any encounter with anti-Zionism can end up branded as antisemitism. At one point in the report, “we support solidarity with Gaza” is cited as an example of an opinion that was experienced as antisemitic. So, too, are public expressions of solidarity with Gaza in the cultural sphere, such as the statement put out by the Sydney Myer Scholarship fellows.

This framing is justified in language that will be familiar to anyone who has spent time at universities recently: elevating Jewish “lived experience,” adopting a “trauma-informed” approach etc. The report points to “a concern among Jewish stakeholders that they are not entrusted with defining the parameters of antisemitism.” As one participant puts it, “we’re the only minority who are told what is and isn’t discrimination”

This is an often-aired complaint from Zionists: that they alone are denied the right to define their experience of discrimination. It is misguided and misleading. Australian society does not, as a general rule, give nationalist devotees of a foreign state the final say in what constitutes discrimination. If a Chinese Australian claimed that their sense of Chinese identity was inextricably bound up with patriotic feelings towards the People’s Republic of China, would we allow them to define calls for revolution against the CCP, or expressions of solidarity with Uyghurs, as racist? Clearly we would not. The suggestion would rightly be viewed as ridiculous.

Far from being victims of a double standard on this point, Zionists are the benificiaries of one. Only in the case of Israel do prevailing definitions of prejudice take in political criticism of a state or government. Slucki, as the author of one such definition, should know that.

While seeking to position itself on the cutting edge of anti-racist scholarship, in the end MIRRA cannot avoid coming into conflict with that scholarship. Among the conditions that it claims contribute to antisemitism, the report highlights the dominance of post-colonial and de-colonial thinking in the cultural sphere, complaining that this has encouraged “the framing of anti-Israel discourse as part of a global post-colonial endeavour”. Apparently, scenes of IDF troops evicting Palestinians from West Bank villages, or planting flags in the ruins of Gaza, have nothing to do with this framing. Indeed, for the report’s authors, Israel seems to bear no responsibility at all for the growing public perception of it as a colonial entity. While war-mongering Israeli politicians openly proclaim their right to settle all of historic Palestine, MIRRA invites us instead to psychologise the progressive thinker. In one particularly bizarre passage, the authors speculate that the failure of the Voice referendum in late 2023 led Australian cultural figures to sublimate their decolonial impulses into anti-Israel agitation. In higher education, meanwhile, the popularity of “decolonising pedagogy” is said to have provided a smokescreen for anti-Zionist views, which exist in a “symbiotic relationship” with antisemitism. 

The only difference between this and the tawdry culture-war attacks on academia that regularly feature in the pages of The Australian or on the airwaves of Sky News is the slightly more scholarly-sounding prose in which it is couched. As we have seen, a focus on the effect of pro-Palestine speech extends the scope of what can be considered antisemitic well beyond the already highly permissive UA definition of antisemitism. To take up this slack, new categories are required: for this, MIRRA’s term of choice is ambient antisemitism. 

Ambient antisemitism is a term gaining currency as a way to describe anti-Zionist activism that cannot easily be accused of antisemitism, but is said to be experienced as such. Citing the work of the UK’s Institute for Jewish Policy (IJP), MIRRA defines it as “a climate marked by anti-Israel hostility that, while not necessarily inherently antisemitic, creates an environment that feels unwelcoming and unsafe for many Jewish stakeholders”.

This move to widen the reference of the word “antisemitism” beyond demonstrably antisemitic speech or conduct has predictable corollaries. A glance at the IJP’s publications shows that it includes pro-Palestine stickers and “media reporting that feels unbalanced” as examples of the phenomenon. Also ambiently antisemitic are “calls for legal, political and economic sanctions against Israel” (ie BDS). In July, EU Antisemitism Coordinator Katharina von Schnurbein criticised bake sales for Gaza as an instance of ambient antisemitism. Reported feelings of anxiety and discomfort are enough to trigger the use of the term: no further investigation — or empirical evidence — is required.

While not using the language, it is precisely the logic of “ambient antisemitism” that lies behind decisions such as the Adelaide Festival’s dumping of Randa Abdel-Fattah. No actual claim of antisemitism was made here: the mere anticipation of discomfort was enough. The concept of “ambient antisemitism” is tailor made to stigmatise and exclude anti-Zionist voices such as Abdel-Fattah’s. Indeed, for some lobbyists, the two are synonymous: anti-Zionism simply is ambient antisemitism. As the President of the New Zealand Jewish Council has written, “today’s ambient antisemitism — or antizionism if you prefer — is a pernicious hate movement.” 

Just like the UA Definition, the discourse of “ambient antisemitism” now looks set to become part of the machinery of repression at Australian universities. Already, Jillian Segal has written to Australian vice-chancellors instructing them to “measure levels of ambient anti-Semitism” at their institutions. Given MIRRA’s adoption of the term, it is likely that it will form part of its on-campus training programs. Should it be embraced by administrators, the notion of “ambient antisemitism” will pose a far-reaching threat to intellectual freedom on campus. It is, as Professor Amos Goldberg of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem puts it, a “clearly totalitarian term”. 

Leadership training

As we have seen, in the wake of the Bondi massacre, MIRRA has found its niche in state-sponsored institutional leadership training. As Slucki tells us, “my focus has been on vice-chancellors, executive teams and boards, but we really want to get to department-level leaders, school-level leaders, student-facing teams and front-line staff”, Given this ambition, the section of its report into the cultural sphere on “leadership” warrants particular attention. 

What sort of “leadership” is MIRRA currently promoting in the cultural sector? Here, the report describes an incident in which an industry figure came across the phrase “Free Palestine” in a draft publication:

[It was] decided to remove the paragraph [which included the statement] “Free Palestine”. And my chair said: “I think that’s antisemitic, because the Free Palestine movement that he belongs to calls for the annihilation of Israel, so we’re not going to include it”. (Stakeholder B30)

One could hardly imagine a cruder act of managerial fiat: an authoritarian gesture that erases a call for liberation and enforces ideological conformity. Yet MIRRA praises this intervention as a “positive institutional response,” one that exemplifies “nuanced decision-making” and “principled leadership”. A cultural commissar simply decreeing “Free Palestine” to be antisemitic is here presented as a case study in how to “identify and navigate nuances.”

For all its liberal pretensions, MIRRA thus ends up in the same place as the most right-wing elements of the Zionist lobbying spectrum. In extending its censure to the core slogans of Palestinian liberation, it finds common ground with groups like the Combat Antisemitism Movement, who — as mentioned above — deem “Free Palestine” to be an antisemitic symbol. And yet MIRRA is the initiative that will now receive government support to provide leadership training to all Australian universities. We can only wonder, will this vignette feature in the slide deck that it is preparing to take to its training sessions?

As I write, talk of banning slogans in Australia is centred on the case of “globalise the intifada”, which is now being interpreted as a criminal offense in the UK. But if anyone thinks that bans will stop at “globalise the intifada”, they should think again. Sooner or later, they are coming for all of our slogans. The UA definition of antisemitism, Greg Craven’s “report card”, the Antisemitism Education Taskforce, MIRRA and its talk of “ambient antisemitism” — all of this points towards a future of ever-expanding ideological monitoring, in which antisemitism ends up defined as whatever Zionists say it is. To their shame, Universities Australia have signalled their embrace of this agenda, praising the government’s choice to throw its weight behind MIRRA. They clearly do not care whether intellectual freedom at Australian universities survives the Gaza genocide. Those of us who do must step up the fight.