Australia’s plan to adopt definitions of racism amounts to enforcing Zionism

Australia is currently holding a Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion to make recommendations in response to the attack on the December 2025 Chabad Hannukah by the Sea event, which resulted in the murder of 15 people. The hearings so far have been dominated by people whose ‘lived experience’ of antisemitism is based on its conflation with anti-Zionism or support for Palestinians.

Against the backdrop of the Royal Commission, the Australian government announced that “universities will be required to develop their own definitions of racism towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples under new national standards aimed at strengthening responses to racism on campus.” The government’s declaration of what it calls “a new anti-racism standard” ties this mandated definition of anti-Indigenous racism to the adoption of “definitions of antisemitism and Islamophobia.” While, to date, universities have been allowed to choose whether to adopt antisemitism definitions such as the IHRA working definition (IHRA-WDA) or not, the packaging of anti-Indigenous racism, Islamophobia, and antisemitism under a new mandate to devise definitions of all three removes the autonomy universities have enjoyed until now. 

The government’s apparent concern for the egregious racism experienced by Indigenous students is particularly perverse as a mechanism to install what the Palestinian sociologist Ihab Shalbak calls “mandatory Zionism” across the institutions. The Australian Human Rights Commission’s Respect at Uni: Study into antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism and the experience of First Nations people report, published in February 2026, found that “81 percent of First Nations respondents had experienced direct or indirect racism at university.” Importantly, it did not conclude that adopting definitions of racism was a necessary or adequate response to the gravity of its findings. On the contrary, it noted First Nations participants “expressed concerns about prescribing definitions without broader structural change” and recommended that, instead of adopting racism definitions, universities should “prioritize building racial and religious literacy and intercultural capability, ensure procedural fairness and address racism holistically.”

It appears clear that, despite commissioning the study, it is the report’s rejection of definitions of racism that has led the government to sidestep its recommendations and instead mandate them. Antisemitism was prioritized in the announcement, with Education Minister Jason Clare stating, “there is no place for antisemitism or any type of hate in our universities or anywhere else.”

In the final chapter of my 2025 book, The New Racial Regime, ‘Against Definitions’, I argued that, faced with the adoption of Zionist instruments such as the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, the last thing we should do is demand that institutions such as universities adopt definitions of other types of racism. Such demands represent a failure to understand the terms of what Anna Younes calls “the war on antisemitism.” The aim of mandating the IHRA-WDA is anything but dismantling antisemitism. Rather, as I wrote in The New Racial Regime, its “role is to generate the antisemite the west requires for its own reproduction” by displacing antisemitism from its European Christian roots and tying it to Arabs and Muslims (Palestinian in the first place) and then to anyone who resists Zionism. 

As a repressive tool, the IHRA-WDA’s role, together with anti-hate legislation, is to define Zionism as a protected identity category and to criminalize anti-Zionism, which is naturalized as a racial property embodied by Arabs and Muslims. It is important to understand the racialized symmetry of this transmutation of politics into identity: Zionist identity is naturalized in the legitimate, rational Jewish body and opposed to the illegitimate, irrational, and violent anti-Zionist. 

An additional blurring of the boundaries of the identity category of anti-Zionist mirrors the Zionist refutation of Palestinian identity, thus extending its categorial boundaries to Arabs in general. In the context of global Islamophobia, moreover, the importance of Islam as a driver of the resistance to Zionism and the racist identification of this form of anticolonial resistance with the “reactionary Islam” of Isis and Al Qaeda, allows these boundaries to be extended further still to incorporate Muslims as the longstanding internal and external enemies identified by the West as in need of containment and collective punishment by any means necessary. 

The response to the government’s definitions mandates should be a refusal to be co-opted into the agenda of mandatory Zionism as envisaged by its Special Envoy on Antisemitism, Zionist lobbyist and funder of the far-right, Jillian Segal. Sadly, we are already witnessing capitulation with the foremost progressive Jewish organization, the Jewish Council of Australia, appealing to its members to call on university Vice Chancellors to adopt definitions of antisemitism that adopt a ‘middle ground’ position, such as the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA). The JDA has been exposed by Palestinian scholars, including Samer Abdelnour, for failing to entirely disconnect speech on Israel and Zionism from antisemitism, conceding points to the IHRA-WDA. In my view, the JDA is a Zionist definition of antisemitism whose primary aim was to help its almost entirely Jewish and Israeli signatories from being identified with the ‘extremes’ of Zionism. Before 2023, this may have been understandable, as Abdelnour remarks; after the commencement of this phase of the Zionist Entity’s genocide in Gaza, it should be seen as unconscionable. 

The Australian government’s agenda of mandatory Zionism has less to do with the power of the Israel lobby or a special concern with antisemitism in whatever way it is defined. Rather, the problem can be summarised in simple terms: Zionism = Australianism and vice versa. The Bondi killings provided the tragic opportunity to further the settler colonial project whose exploitative and extractivist aims require the capacity to criminalize dissent, be it in Australia or Palestine. For that reason, it is extremely perverse to use anti-Indigenous racism as a vehicle for further mandating Zionism as a tool of colonial domination. We cannot both applaud the government’s admittance of the existence of racism against Indigenous people and critique its increasingly draconian actions against those who stand up for Palestine. We must see clearly through what Dylan Rodríguez refers to as the “counterinsurgency machine.” In solidarity with Indigenous peoples resisting ongoing colonization, staff and students at Australian universities should refuse capitulation to the colonial state’s racism definitions mandate. 

Alana Lentin
Teacher and writer Alana Lentin is a European anti-Zionist Jewish woman who is a settler on Gadigal-Wangal land. She is the author of “The New Racial Regime and Why Race Still Matters” and a founding collective member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.