Controversial political decisions, made under pressure, can often inadvertently produce contrary outcomes. The proceedings of the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and the public commentaries have prompted public scrutiny of the ways and means of Zionist organisations’ influence in shaping Australian policies. The connection between Israel’s conduct in West Asia and the rise in antisemitism has come into sharper focus. Did the proponents of the Commission misjudge badly?
1. Looking back over sixty years, I would nominate three political storms that have shaped the Australian psyche beyond its self-image of an embattled island surrounded by fish and by Asian hordes: the Vietnam War and the consequent streak of opposition to Australia’s unquestioned alliance with the United States; the demolition of the White Australia policy in favour of multiculturalism; and now the polarising debate over factors allegedly destabilising Australia’s social cohesion. The first two are lodged into the national character. The third will be a long innings.
2. Prime Minister Albanese established the Royal Commission only after sustained pressure from a well-connected and well-funded Zionist lobby. Two streams of public discourse gave respectable cover for doing so: criticism of his government’s supposed inaction on combatting antisemitism, and a widely shared sense of a ‘fair go’ – that if it was indeed rising, something ought to be done about it.
3. Six months on, two unintended consequences have emerged from the Commission’s proceedings and from the public commentaries surrounding them. Neither consequence was sought by exponents of its convening. Neither can now be undone.
4. The first is the exposure of a long-veiled vein in Australian polity: In the shadows of the Commission’s deliberations, the reach and the methods, financial or other, of Zionist political influence have come into full display – an influence out of all proportion to the 0.4 per cent of the population that Jewish Australians represent. Notably also, the claim that such influence is exercised on behalf of a monolithic Jewish community is unequivocally false. Organised Zionist advocacy bodies do not speak for Jewish Australians in toto.
5. The second is a matter of causation. An inquiry convened to establish why antisemitism is rising here is cementing the perception that the international conduct of the self-proclaimed Jewish State of Israel may be one of the reasons for it.
6. Blind Freddie can see that the reasons for any ‘rise’ in antisemitism are deeper than the ingrained Jewophobics among Australian Christian Europe’s descendants and Muslims. It is beyond that: critical realities about Israel’s military actions across West Asia are permeating Australian public consciousness. Awareness now reaches past the Gaza genocide, Lebanon and Iran to the less familiar – the brutalities surrounding Israel’s birth in 1948, the distinction between Judaism and Zionism, the apartheid architecture of its rule over the Palestinians, and the half-century project of destabilising West Asian states to secure regional hegemony.
7. Inevitably, Israel’s manifest breaches of international laws and humanitarian obligations are drawing sharper scrutiny. The claims of rising antisemitism do not provide an alibi to Zionist Australians for uncomfortable truths and unbearable images. The damage already done to Israel’s standing among younger Australians is one measure of how little that alibi is worth.
8. An intriguing question: Did Albanese calculate that a Royal Commission would expose the reach of Zionist ideology in Australia’s political bloodstream?
9. There is one notable parallel. In 1950, Robert Menzies legislated to ban the Communist Party of Australia. The High Court struck down the legislation, and the subsequent referendum to override that judgment was lost – outcomes that Ming KC had every reason to anticipate. Yet the publicity surrounding the whole exercise imprinted the menace of communism upon the public mind more deeply than any statute could have. The defeat was constitutional; the propaganda victory was total.
10. There is a further point that deserves more notice than it has received. Australia is arguably the first country in the Western world to examine the disparate factors bearing on antisemitism – and, by implication, on Zionism – at a single independent and impartial forum. Elsewhere, from the United States to the European Union, the debate is captured before it begins: subsumed into partisan positioning and refracted through competing lobbies, including Islamic ones.
11. In a country this compact, information – and disinformation – flows fast and embeds quickly. Awareness sharpens and opinions form, right or wrong. Still, Australia retains the capacity for a reasonably calm and rational discourse on controversial issues.
12. Did the powerful Zionist organisations make a strategic miscalculation in forcing Albanese’s hand? With their considerable resources, antisemitism could have been sustained indefinitely as a cause célèbre; Jillian Segal’s July 2025 plan had already secured acceptance of several of its recommendations, including an IHRA definitional framework. Instead, a forensic national inquiry is emboldening worms out of the woodwork.
13. Whatever the Prime Minister’s motives, the Royal Commission is bringing to the fore in public consciousness a plethora of issues – not antisemitism alone, but wider issues confronting Australian multiculturalism today. Is this what the Zionist lobby desired?
