Royal Commission into what, exactly?
Why combatting antisemitism alone doesn't work.
Access published edit 9/1/26 in The Australian Financial Review.
A royal commission must happen, and it must confront antizionism.
Campus witch-hunts and synagogue torching. The assaulting of Jewish children to the murdering of 15 people on Bondi Beach. On a tram back from a cricket match, a friend mouths the word ‘Jewish’ in conversation—so as not to attract attention.
Calls for a Federal Royal Commission cannot be ignored.
The Commonwealth has both the authority and the moral mandate to respond. Australia’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition in 2019 has not protected Jews from vilification. Nor has the Australian Racial Discrimination Act 1975, only useful when discrimination is proven to be race-based. Both have failed for the same reason: they are calibrated to respond to a dated mode of anti-Jewish vilification.
Identifying and addressing contemporary anti-Jewish vilification requires recognising that Jews are not merely a “race”, and that antisemitism is not the only mechanism that vilifies and kills Jews. An analogous example of a failed strategy might have been asking for a Royal Commission into anti-Judaism in Germany, 1930.
Antizionists are not engaging in critique. They’re calling for the elimination of a state, with no conception of reality beyond recycled, fashionable libels. All libel systems are responses to prevailing moral concerns. The Jewish entity is always cast as the inverse of any context’s most valued attributes.
By treating antisemitism as the sole test for anti-Jewish harm, we have created a category error: one that prevents us from addressing the majority of anti-Jewish vilification today: antizionism.
Even if the IHRA definition were legally enforceable—even if writers’ festivals and universities had been legally compelled to avoid antisemitic vilification—it would still struggle to address the core libels animating a form of vilification they’re not designed to tackle.
What a Royal Commission must take into account is that modern anti-Jewish vilification targets Jewish people by constructing the Jewish state as an entity born in irredeemable sin and deserving of elimination. Traditional frameworks for handling traditional antisemitism are not working because they are not designed to deal with antizionism.
Historically, anti-Jewish libels and conspiracies adapt to their contexts’ prevailing moral norms. Anti-judaism vilified Jews for centuries on the grounds that their religion threatened Christian or Islamic political and moral authority. To be a Jew was not only to subvert the state, but to subvert common decency.
In the 19th century, antisemitism replaced theological concerns with racial concerns. Coined by Wilhelm Marr, it was presented as a modern, scientific response to Jewry. Antisemites distanced themselves from the immorality of antijudaism. Jews were castigated for being ethnically foreign, Levantine aliens—accused of dual loyalty, racial impurity and subversion. These libels culminated in the Holocaust, among innumerable preceding pogroms.
If history stopped there, a federal royal commission into antisemitism and our pre-existing Racial Discrimination law could be sufficient. But it did not. Anti-Jewish vilification has evolved beyond race, and so too must the tools we use to fight it.
Today, the most consequential form of anti-Jewish harm is antizionism: an eliminationist obsession that targets the legitimacy of Jewish self-determination rather than Judaism or Jewish genetics. Antizionism is not critique of Israeli policy, just as antisemitism is not critique of Jews. Both are movements concerned with the illegitimacy of Jewish existence—one individual, one collective.
Antizionist libels centre on colonialism, genocide, and apartheid—all of which are recycled decade after decade, irrespective of Israel’s government or actions.
These libels are not a response to what Israel does, but that Israel is, and are well documented in the dovetailing of Soviet antizionist propaganda and Islamist antizionist propaganda, throughout the mid-20th century and into your social media feeds today. The creators and disseminators of this propaganda continue to denounce ‘Nazism, antisemitism, and all forms of racism’.
By allowing “antisemitism” to monopolise how anti-Jewish hatred is understood, Australia has limited its ability to respond to vilification that bears little interest in the Jewish ‘race’. Those who grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust feel they must wait for antizionism to “cross the line” into antisemitism. Why should hostility toward Jews require commentary on Jewish biology before it is recognised as bigotry?
This has had legal consequences. In Wertheim v Haddad 2025, statements made by Muslim preacher Wissam Haddad accusing Zionists of controlling the media and politicians were considered political commentary. On matters of anti-Jewish vilification, the courts are trained to locate racial vilification—encapsulated under antisemitism. The ruling only solidified that where harms caused to Jews are not race based, they’re fair game.
Some examples of fair-game statements made by Haddad include references to “The terrorist state of Israel”, “Zionist-backed media agencies”, and that “Right-wing politicians have stepped into backing Israel because Israel holds their leash.” Scroll back up to Wilcox’s cartoon if you want to see what that last one looks like in watercolours.
This ‘fair-game’ attitude towards antizionism has shaped an environment in which Jews are shot for being ‘zionists’, and where Australian artists like Matt Chun take to social media to tell his 24,000 followers that “we don’t mourn fascists”.
The same misclassification problem is highly visible on Australian campuses. At the University of Sydney, staff and students publicly defended the right to advocate for the “elimination” of the Jewish state while rejecting the adoption of “antisemitism definitions” on free-speech grounds. Jewish staff who described exclusion and hostility on campus were dismissed as attempting to “weaponise antisemitism”.
This episode is instructive not because it is extreme, but because it is ordinary: eliminationist rhetoric directed at Jewish self-determination is being treated as reasonable political discourse. And now, a ten-year-old girl is dead.
Institutional assent of this bigotry is no different to the institutional assent of those who burned Jews alive for their religion, nor to the institutional assent of those who have beaten, raped executed, tortured, and gassed Jews since.
All first-year philosophy students are introduced to an evidentiary flaw called ‘the appeal to authority fallacy’ (argumentum ad verecundiam). This occurs when someone claims something is true solely because a respected person said it. There are many snake oil salespeople with academic credentials as their are geniuses. There are also more ‘academics’ than ever before.
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Academic ‘knowledge’ is built on peer review. In many humanities disciplines, this cultivates a self-referential, circular knowledge-creation and consolidation network bolstered entirely by concentric appeals to authority. The critical mass of antizionist libels in the academy has institutionalised a form of bigotry reminiscent of the institutionalisation of Germany’s most upstanding antisemites.
A state-based Royal Commission, such as that contemplated in New South Wales, cannot resolve these issues. They are far-reaching and systemic. Only a Federal Royal Commission can examine the national mechanisms through which contemporary anti-Jewish hatred is produced, normalised and amplified.
Without explicit acknowledgment of antizionism’s role in anti-Jewish vilification and violence, the scope of the much-needed Royal Commission may be too narrow.
A Royal Commission cannot be bound to antisemitism, but must fearlessly locate all sources of contemporary anti-Jewish hatred, understand the mechanisms that allow it to spread, and establish legal and educational responses. Without specific attention to antizionism the Royal Commission runs the risk of simply documenting Jewish vulnerability while leaving its primary driver—antizionism—untouched.
Language is one of the few tools at our disposal to develop clarity and reduce harm. Antizionism, not traditional antisemitism, is the greatest threat to Jewish safety.
From the purging of a million Mizrahi Jews in the 20th century to the exile of 13,000 Jews from Poland in 1968; the murdering and mutilating of Jews in Munich, 1972, to the blowing up of hundreds in Argentina 1994; from October 7 to Manchester, Colorado, to Washington; and from hushed tones on a tram to the silence at Bondi. Antizionism has, for decades, been misdiagnosed, mistreated, and allowed to metastasise while we treat for antisemitism instead.
I have tremendous faith in this country. I believe that a Federal Royal Commission must be empowered to examine the distinct form of anti-Jewish vilification that appears before us today, as opposed to focusing solely on its last iteration. If we cannot be thorough, how can we hope to be delivered from more heartache?
The appropriate scrutiny of antizionism will depend on the federal government’s willingness to listen to us.
If there was ever a time to start, it’s now.
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Great article Josh. You have really encapsulated the issues.
Excellent essay! Thank you for so accurately describing the nature and dangers of anti Zionism.