Inside the Australian Royal Commission turning anti-Zionism into a crime

In January 2026, the Prime Minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese, announced the establishment of a Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion following the deadly attack at Bondi Beach in December 2025, when two gunmen killed 15 people and injured 40 others. In Australia, a Royal Commission is an independent public inquiry of the highest form, rarely established for matters of public importance. It holds unique powers to subpoena evidence and documents, and its recommendations carry significant public and political weight, often informing legislative and policy reforms.  

The Commission began its work in February 2026, received more than 20,000 submissions, and heard more than 340 witnesses during nine livestreamed “hearing blocks.” These public events covered the lived experiences of Jewish people in Australia, what antisemitism is, the media, the arts sector, protests, security measures, radicalization, the education sector, including universities and schools, the healthcare sector, and more. The Commission is expected to deliver its report in December 2026, and its recommendations will set the tone on how the Palestine solidarity movement and speech on Palestine will be treated in Australia for years to come. The stakes could not be higher.

The Commission has proved itself to be a “predetermined exercise,” and an instrument for characterizing anti-genocide activism as “new antisemitism.” At a cost of $130 million for Australian taxpayers, it functions as a state-funded and sponsored mechanism for mainstreaming and legitimizing anti-Palestinian racism and genocide denial into public life. At its first public hearing, the Commissioner, former High Court Justice Virginia Bell, linked antisemitism to the question of Palestine by announcing that the Commission will adopt the IHRA working definition of antisemitism and incorporate it into its terms of reference. Subsequently, the conflation between Judaism and Zionism, and between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, has informed the work of the Commission. 

For Palestinians, watching the hearings has been a violent experience. While Palestinian organizations such as the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network and Jewish anti-Zionist groups and experts were denied requests to testify, the Commission let witness after witness hijack the language of antiracism and safety to vilify and demonize the Palestinian cause as antisemitic, spread racism against Palestinians, deny the genocide in Gaza, and defend the state of Israel. 

Seeing the Commission as mere capitulation of the Australian government to the Zionist lobby provides only a partial understanding of its functions. The Commission is part of the settler colonial enterprise and a product of a broader fascist turn and assault on democratic freedoms and international law in Australia and globally. The Zionist lobby and the government have both been alarmed by the rise in public support for Palestine and considered it a threat to be suppressed. Polls show that about 80 percent of Australians have a negative view of Israel (the highest rate in the West), with Australians holding some of the largest demonstrations in the West against the genocide in Gaza, including the historical march of over 300,000 over the Sydney Harbor Bridge.

Embedded in settler colonialism, the Commission erases the fact that the most enduring, urgent, and deadliest form of racism in Australia is anti-Indigenous racism, where the genocide against First Nations continues with alarming rates of death in custody and incarceration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders people, both children and adults. And yet, racism against Indigenous peoples is not treated as a national emergency, nor does it get the media attention that claims of antisemitism draw. While antisemitism exists in Australia and is on the rise, like other forms of racism, there is no compelling or independently verified evidence to suggest that antisemitism is prevailing over other forms of racism. 

‘Lived experience’ 

The Commission began its work by providing members of the Jewish community, overwhelmingly Zionists, an opportunity to testify about their “lived experience of antisemitism.” From day one of the hearings, the public heard Zionist witnesses sharing their feelings of being exposed to criticism of Israel and Zionism, and little about hostility or racism against Jews for being Jewish. Witnesses used this trauma-informed concept in cynical and manipulative ways to dehumanize Palestinians and Palestine solidarity and to deny the genocide in Gaza. This has sent the public a strong message, Nick Reimer argues, that genocide denial is a legitimate view. 

As Randa Abdelfattah writes, the focus on Zionist feelings is “a rhetorical shield to deflect from the reality of Palestinian genocide,” and pro-Israel witnesses minimize and deny Israeli violence against Palestinians. For example, in one of her three testimonies before the Commission, the Government’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jullian Segal, who is a career Israel lobbyist who held the position of the Chair of the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce and the President of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), the main Zionist organization in Australia, falsely claimed that the death toll in Gaza was “grossly inflated” and “inaccurate.” This blunt misinformation led the UN to issue a statement correcting the record. Repeating Israeli propaganda, Segal further described the alleged harm caused to members of the Jewish community when they watch negative coverage of Israel on the ABC, the national broadcaster. She therefore demanded that the ABC would report less about Gaza and instead air more positive stories about Israel (such as stories about Israel being an “amazing startup nation“), and that an oversight body would be established to ensure editorial “balance.” Another witness was Arsen Ostrovsky, the head of the Sydney office of the Australia-Israel Jewish Affairs Council. Ostrovsky has in the past stated that “there are no civilians” in Gaza and that they are “indistinguishable from the savages of Hamas.” 

Anti-Palestinian racism dominated the public hearings. Palestine signifiers (keffiyehs, flags, watermelons), posters, slogans, protests, and criticism of Israel and Zionism were given as examples of antisemitism and causes for Jewish “unsafety.” Palestine solidarity protests were described as attacks on Jews rather than as political protests against the actions of a state (a political entity). Witnesses shared the difficulty of “walking around the CBD [Central Business District]” because it is “hard to avoid the Palestinian flag,” or going to a concert where the performer chants, “Free Palestine.” Another shared how “the stickers I pass on the way to work, the word ‘Israel’ is used as a demonized word, and it’s the way that the word ‘Israel’ was used that made me feel offended, humiliated.” Anti-Arab racism was also allowed to be expressed, time and again, with one witness describing how threatened they felt seeing “a bunch of people with Arabic words on their shirts.” 

Colonial inversion has been at the heart of the Commission’s discourse. Those who support or deny genocide are presented as victims of racism, while those who oppose genocide are cast as racists and antisemites. Zionist feelings about and interpretations of Arabic words trump their actual meanings and histories. And so, aspirations for liberation from settler colonialism are interpreted as calls for genocide against Jews.

This colonial inversion has a material effect. The state of Queensland already criminalized the slogans “from the River to the Sea” and “globalize the Intifada” in the name of protecting Zionist feelings. 

In the context of universities, a major focus of the Commission and a target of the Zionist lobby for years, witnesses described campuses as epicenters for antisemitism in Australia. One student lamented that “campuses throughout Australia are full of posters and ads and, you know, call for actions about the Palestinian issue.” A second student complained that they felt unsafe walking on campus and seeing a “Palestinian bake sale,” and a third talked about an “information night about how my university is complicit in genocide.” Other witnesses described how they felt uncomfortable, confronted, or intimidated walking through campus when seeing posters denouncing the genocide. A witness who identified as Liat said that “The cumulative, intimidatory effect of an environment saturated with such symbols [such as Palestinian flags and keffiyehs], combined with the slogans of violent or hateful import, produces conditions in which antisemitism becomes an accepted mode of expression.”

None of these examples constitutes antisemitism; they do, however, constitute anti-Palestinian racism. Yet the Commission allowed these testimonies to be heard, and in doing so it has given, Louise Adler notes, “equal weight to actual events and feelings,” whre anxieties are “established as reality.” During the evidence, the Commission did not question whether Jewish-Zionist students and staff were, in fact, unsafe (rather than feeling unsafe). At most, the majority of testimonies represented the discomfort of Zionists with seeing the country they love and associate with being criticized. As discomforting as it might be for them, this is not equivalent to being subject to racial hatred, racial discrimination, or racism. 

Still, university leadership has bought into the narrative of rising antisemitism. In the lead up to the Commission, and in response to political pressure by the government and the Special Envoy, universities adopted a series of repressive restrictions on freedom of speech, ranging from banning the display of posters, restricting protests, and suspending various “students for Palestine” groups. In their testimonies at the Commission, several university presidents apologized for “failing to protect the psychosocial safety” of Jewish students and staff. While they testified, more than 40 civil society groups, including Amnesty International, the Human Rights Law Center, and the National Territory Education Union, called on Australian universities to protect the right to peaceful protest, freedom of expression, and academic freedom on campuses, describing this moment as a “crisis for the protection of political expression within Australian universities.”

Zionism as an identity 

For years, the Zionist lobby has been seeking to cement Israel and Zionism as essentialist features of Judaism and advocating for the recognition of Zionism (and now also “Israeli”) as a protected identity under Australian anti-discrimination laws. If it succeeds, criticism of Zionism (and of Israel) will constitute racial discrimination. The Commission might bring the pro-Israel lobby a step closer to this goal. 

Witnesses spoke about Israel and Zionism as core elements of Jewish identity, whereby any criticism of both amounts to racial injury. For example, Dr. Andy Smidt, a speech pathology academic at the University of Sydney, claimed in her testimony that, “If the Jews on campus, primarily as the Jews in Australia, do identify with Israel as part of who they are, then any attack on Israel is an attack on the Jews…And so it’s not about conflating. It’s about the fact that they are connected. They’re undeniably inextricably connected.”

 Zionists want to eat the cake and have it too. They seek to provide immunity from criticism to persons who express support for Israel or Zionism simply because they are Jewish. In his testimony, for example, Julian Leeser, a liberal Federal MP, complained that he is subject to antisemitism due “to conflating Jewish Australians as being responsible for the actions of the Israeli government.” Leeser is the former chair of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies and was an Executive Member of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, and he spent most of his career, including as an elected official, defending Israel. But he demands we accept that holding him accountable for his political positions is an act of racism. 

Clearly, the claim that Israel (a state) and Zionism (an ideology) are a form of identity because they matter to Jewish people is ludicrous; the support for Israel and Zionism is a choice and not an intrinsic element of Judaism. Feeling deeply committed to a state and a political ideology does not make it an identity, even if the claim is that it is felt as such. Feelings do not put Israel or Zionism above critique. Moreover, while the lobby insists that most Jewish people feel a strong attachment to Zionism and Israel, evidence suggests otherwise. The question of how many Jews support Israel or endorse Zionism matters less. Even if it was the majority, this would not make this genocidal, colonial, and racist ideology and state legitimate. History shows that fascist, supremacist, and oppressive regimes and ideologies enjoyed wide popular support at one stage or another in history. 

The Zionist lobby, and the Commissioner herself, have treated the propaganda trope about “Israel’s right to exist” — a right that does not exist in international law for any country — as the barometer for drawing the line between what is deemed to be an acceptable speech on Palestine and what is not. In an attempt to be seen as reasonable or measured, members of the Zionist leadership distinguished between criticizing the current Netanyahu/Ben-Gvir government — which can be a legitimate act “in certain circumstances,” thus leaving the door open to narrow this space, too — and the questioning of the Israeli state and regime itself as racist and, therefore, illegitimate. This means that any discussion of the colonial, racial, and genocidal character of the state of Israel or of demands for decolonization and the dismantling of its racial supremacist regime in favor of an inclusive and equal political entity becomes antisemitism. 

David Slucki, the Director of the Australian Center for Jewish Civilization at Monash University, presented an even more extreme view. Asked if calling for a binational state that recognizes the self-determination of both Jews and Palestinians is problematic, Slucki replied that it could be considered antisemitic, given that this would change the character of Israel, and therefore Israel in its current form would cease to exist. To Slucki, Israel’s right to exist trumps the universal principle of equality and the human rights of Palestinians, and maintaining a Jewish supremacist regime is legitimate and necessary because it is the only political future that guarantees Israel as a Jewish state. The real material consequences for Palestinians, the daily violence, the genocide, seem to matter less for him. This extreme is being mainstreamed into Australian institutions, as Slucki and his Center provide training on antisemitism across the country, including to university leadership, conduct and integrity officers, and campus security. 

Reinforcing antisemitism

There is a real concern that the Commission will adopt many of the demands that the Special Envoy made, including imposing the IHRA definition on most aspects of public life, oversight and sanction of public broadcasters over their coverage of Israel, intervening into curriculum design in schools and universities, and powers to defund universities that fail to tackle antisemitism. The Special Envoy and Zionist groups also demand arming private Jewish individuals in the Community Security Group (in a country where gun laws are extremely restrictive). And while the Australian government has been making painful cuts to essential welfare services that severely affect the most disadvantaged, the public saw the government pledge $604.2m over five years (starting from 2025-26) as part of its response to the Bondi shooting. 

The prominent Australian writer Richard Flanagan has warned against this, stating that the Special Envoy “has made very clear that every aspect of Australian life over which the government has leverage the Special Envoy now also wishes to have leverage — and solely on her terms, which, given her record, are likely to be terms that please Israel, a foreign nation.” 

The work of the Commission so far, and its potential recommendations, are unlikely to reduce antisemitism primarily due to its refusal to deal with the two main sources of contemporary antisemitism: the far right and Zionism.

As the submissions by Loud Jew Collective and the historian Jordana Silverstein from the University of Melbourne, who specializes in Australian Jewish history, show, most antisemitism that anti-Zionist Jews experience comes from Jewish Zionists. Neither Silverstein nor Loud Jew Collective was invited to testify at the Commission. 

Louise Adler, the former director of Adelaide’s Writers’ Week, who has been forced to resign from her position after being targeted by Zionist organizations for being an anti-Zionist Jew, noted that if the Royal Commission was serious about understanding the nature of antisemitism and what causes it, it would have to look toward Australia’s Israel lobby, “the leading proponents of the conflation of antisemitism with antizionism.”

The exceptionalization of antisemitism over other forms of racism and its treatment as the worst form of racism — in a country built on anti-Indigenous racism and where minorities experience rampant racism — risks fueling antisemitism.

Genuine antiracism policies demand an acknowledgment of the interconnectedness of different forms of racism. Likewise, the Zionist organizations’ labeling of most Australians as antisemites because they oppose Israel’s genocide, and the insistence on associating Jews with Israel — a state that is committing genocide under the pretense of protecting Jewish people — is not making Jews any safer.

The Commission has already caused immense damage by dehumanizing Palestinians and their allies. Palestinians and the Palestine solidarity movement in Australia are facing state-funded and state-sponsored persecution, McCarthyism, and anti-Palestinian racism. The Zionist logic that underpins the Israeli state and that seeks to erase Palestinians from Palestine is now being imported to Australia, where Zionists are asking to create spaces that are free from Palestine and Palestinians.

Meaningful antiracism work draws not on exceptionalism but on solidarity between different struggles. It centers Indigenous peoples, Indigenous sovereignty, and Indigenous liberation.