Media release: City of Melbourne cancels Jewish Israeli woman’s seminar over “potential protest activity”
Public library’s “safety” cancellation of Anti-Zionism Australia seminar is censorship – and another nail in the coffin of Australian democracy
Media Release Saturday 20 June 2026
The City of Melbourne has cancelled a venue booking for a free public seminar at its Kathleen Syme Library and Community Centre two days before it was due to begin – citing nothing more than “safety and security concerns” it will not explain, after “matters raised with councillors and senior management”. The message is unmistakable: dissent is now erased from public space at the say-so of anyone who complains.
The seminar – an educational talk on Christian Zionism – was to be given by Veronica Sherman, a Jewish Israeli citizen and former Israeli Air Force soldier. For opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Sherman has been branded a “fake Jew” and sent death threats by Zionists. The City of Melbourne has now done their work for them.
The council does not claim the organisers did anything wrong; all that changed was “community concern”. It points to “potential protest activity”, but names no actual threat – and no one behind it. Yet a gathering led by a Jewish Israeli speaker, attended by Jewish and Israeli Australians, cannot be antisemitic – and Palestinians have no reason to want it shut down. The only people who do are Zionists. By cancelling, the council has handed them a heckler’s veto over who speaks in a public library.
This was the sixth seminar in the series; the first five passed without incident. The booking was made weeks ago, vetted and approved, the access key handed over. If safety were the real concern, the council’s own terms had solutions: require security at the hirer’s cost (clause 40), or refuse entry to any troublemaker (clause 12). It used neither. It did not ask for a guard, a risk assessment, or a new date. It cancelled outright – by phone, at seven o’clock on a Friday night, two days out. That timing is the tell: no safety precaution, but a tactic calculated to leave no time to find another venue and no choice but to scramble. This is what it now means to hold an anti-Zionist event in Australia: not a refusal you can fight, but a late-night call timed so you can’t.
The City of Melbourne is a public authority, bound by the Victorian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities to protect free expression and peaceful assembly, and by the Equal Opportunity Act 2010, which makes political belief a protected attribute with no “safety” exception.
The council is no bystander. In September 2025 it paid for its own Deputy Lord Mayor Roshena Campbell and Councillor Rafael Camillo to attend the Combat Antisemitism Movement’s Gold Coast summit, convened to push the widely discredited IHRA definition of antisemitism. There Campbell complained that “in Victoria we operate with one hand behind our backs when it comes to protests”. A council whose Deputy Lord Mayor travels to that summit, then cancels an anti-Zionist seminar on “safety” grounds, is not protecting the public, but censoring it.
Veronica Sherman, the cancelled speaker: “I am a Jewish woman and a former Israeli soldier. A public library has cancelled my talk over ‘potential protest activity’ – yet the threats I receive come from Zionists, not Palestinians. So who made my talk ‘unsafe’? If the council now believes Zionists are the danger, I thank it for coming around to our point of view.”
Dr Keren Tova Rubinstein, AZA member: “If a government body can erase a lawful talk from a public library over a concern it won’t even explain, then no one’s speech is safe there. This is censorship by anonymous complaint, and it should alarm every Australian who claims to value democracy. This is not social cohesion. It is speech apartheid.”
Anti-Zionism Australia calls on the City of Melbourne to reinstate the booking and to state, in writing, who made the decision, on what rule, on what “safety” basis, and why it reached for cancellation over the lesser measures in its own terms.
