All shades of bigotry from antisemitism to racism dishonour humanity.
1. This Submission (reluctantly) accepts that the Letters Patent convening the Commission compel you to focus only on antisemitism in the context of social cohesion in Australia. So, it does too.
2. For most of my adult life, I have been a consciously biased supporter of Israel and the Jewish people. My stance is now changing, as I distinguish between Zionism and Judaism, which motivates me to pen this submission and offer my perspective on the principal issues as I have seen them unfold over the years.
3. Australia has not been as socially cohesive a society as is assumed. That would be correct only if the dispossession of the First Nations people and racisms of all stripes were excluded from the equation. In the Age of (dis)Information, fractures in the nation’s social cohesion are beginning to tell.
4. Antisemitism is not new in Australia. It has been a blemish on Australian society since Settlement. Today, antisemitism is more stark, and it must be erased – but it is one driver of social incohesion among many, and to elevate it above all others is itself a form of racism.
5. My central claim is that three distinct views of Jews are being dangerously conflated. Antisemitism is an irrational prejudice, unconscious in its roots. Jewophobia is conscious malice, and graver, because reason rarely cures it. Zionism is neither – it is a 140-year-old political ideology that, like any other, may be questioned.
6. To gather all three under one word shelters the genuine Jew-hater while maligning the conscience-stricken critic as a bigot. The remedy is a conduct-based definition anchored in hostility towards Jews as Jews – and the rejection of formulations that recast criticism of Israel or of Zionism as hatred of Jews.
7. Israel’s methodical genocide in Gaza and its destruction in South Lebanon are provoking anti-Zionism to unprecedented levels, undoubtedly contributing to rising antisemitism. However, the deeper problem lies in the deliberate conflation of Zionism with Judaism. By insisting that Israel speaks for all Jews, its advocates bind every Jew to the conduct of a state, then invoke antisemitism to deflect criticism of it – and go so far as to deny the Jewishness of those who dissent.
8. That conflation places diaspora Jews in the line of fire and is, in its policing of who counts as a “real” Jew, itself a form of antisemitism. The answer is to prise Jewish identity apart from the actions of the Israeli state, and to ask those who claim to speak for the community to weigh honestly how that state’s conduct is shaping Australian perceptions of Jews.
9. Measures that treat symptoms but inflame the disease must be avoided. One example is the banning of the expression “From the River to the Sea”, which, in effect, proscribes the words but leaves the malice untouched. The Antisemitism Envoy’s plan to embed a single-faith curriculum in secular public schools exceptionalises one history, invites a reciprocal claim from every other community, and sadly ignores the First Nations people. The IHRA definition that underwrites the plan is a creature of geopolitics, not of conscience. These should be discarded.
10. Instead, the focus should be on protecting the right to peaceful protest, keeping public institutions secular, pluralist, and alert to foreign interference, and making interfaith and intercultural engagement the condition for public support for religious schools of every faith.
11. The remedy is not to inoculate children against one bigotry while others fester, but to build, from childhood, a sense of empathy and respect for differences. Cultural Intelligence (CQ) offers a sharper, gilt-edged tool for bridging divides and fostering social cohesion from childhood onward. CQ embedded in educational and public institutions would teach a plural society to live with itself, and multiculturalism would mature into interculturalism.
12. The ad hoc, single-issue Envoys, whose very existence has sown division, should give way to a single, coherent framework for dealing with every driver of social incohesion. Antisemitism will not be erased by raising one community above the rest, but by treating all equally – and by teaching Australians the confidence to meet difference with curiosity rather than fear.
13. On a personal note, as a non-Jew, my personal and professional journey with the Jewish issues – and racism – has extended over sixty years. I hope that the small measure of my perceptions of the evolution and on-the-ground implications of Zionist ideology for the Judaic faithful would be of some assistance to you in your Enquiry on this complex subject.
