Submission to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion

Anti-Zionism Australia (AZA) is a diverse collective initiated by Jewish and Israeli Australians — including former Zionists — who reject Zionism as a racist, supremacist, nationalist ideology. Our opposition to Zionism is tied to our opposition to its main project — the State of Israel — and its crimes against Palestinians, as documented in International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinions, UN Commission of Inquiry (COI) reports, and other authoritative findings.

While not all AZA members are Jewish, we note that Jewish anti-Zionism predates the State of Israel; as Naomi Klein has put it, “our Judaism cannot be contained by an ethnostate, for our Judaism is internationalist by nature.”

The Commission has been urged by its main witnesses to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. This conflation stands to smear anti-Zionists — including Jewish and Israeli Australians — as antisemitic for opposing Zionism, a supremacist settler-colonial ideology with decades of practice of dispossession, occupation, apartheid and genocide of Palestinians.

The idea that Zionism is the default political ideology of all Jewish people is itself deeply antisemitic.

Before any evidence had been heard, Commissioner Bell asserted on 24 February 2026 that the IHRA working definition is “uncontroversial”, reaffirming this position on 4 May 2026 while acknowledging concerns that it “can be weaponised… to suppress criticism of Israel”. AZA contends that the definition is far from “uncontroversial” — for the following reasons:

1. The IHRA definition’s lead drafter, Kenneth Stern, wrote in 2019 that “rightwing Jewish groups took the ‘working definition’… and decided to weaponize it”. In September 2025, Stern reiterated that the definition “was never intended to be used as a de facto hate speech code”, and that “the debate about the definition is really about how to treat pro-Palestinian speech, not antisemitism writ large… not so much a desire to identify antisemitism, but rather to label certain speech about Israel as antisemitic. And this effort harms our ability to identify actual antisemitism.” (He also criticised the Special Envoy’s Plan: “It reads like the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 authoritarian companion, called Project Esther, outlining how to suppress pro-Palestinian speech.”)

2. In Wertheim v Haddad [2025] FCA 720, Justice Stewart held that “the conclusion that it is not antisemitic to criticise Israel is the corollary of the conclusion that to blame Jews for the actions of Israel is antisemitic; the one flows from the other.”

3. In Australia, a coalition of nine Jewish organisations signed an open letter in November 2025 opposing adoption of the IHRA definition, while globally, over 1,300 Jewish scholars and over 40 Jewish organisations have publicly opposed it as well.

4. The IHRA deems it antisemitic to describe Israel as “a racist endeavour”. However the ICJ Advisory Opinion of 19 July 2024 found Israel in breach of the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination, in particular Article 3 prohibiting racial segregation and apartheid. The UN Special Rapporteur on Counter Terrorism and Human Rights, Prof Ben Saul, confirmed that the IHRA definition is “inappropriate… vague and overbroad” and “not consistent with international human rights law”.

5. AZA member Nachshon Amir, a Jewish Israeli-born former IDF combat officer who served in the West Bank and Gaza during the First Intifada (1987–1993), has personally enforced what he can only describe as “a racist apartheid regime”: “I myself was part of it, and with my own hands carried out policies that treated Palestinians and Jews differently… as a 21-year-old junior officer, I walked through villages in the West Bank in the middle of the night and, at my own discretion and without any court order, entered the homes of random people in order to make their lives miserable… while humiliating fathers and mothers in front of their children. No one could carry out a similar act against a Jewish family, because that would be illegal.” Under example 7 of the IHRA definition, this Jewish former IDF officer’s factual account of the regime he enforced makes him an antisemite. Truth-telling is the foundation of social justice, and should never be criminalised.

6. One official Australian application of the IHRA definition is in the Special Envoy’s April 2026 handbook, Understanding Antisemitism in Australia, which classifies the accusation that Israel is engaged in “apartheid, oppression, racism and genocide” (p.75) as antisemitic. The handbook also asserts that “Antisemitism and antizionism are both expressions of hatred towards Jews” (p.76), and that claims of the IHRA definition being “designed to intentionally silence criticism [echo] antisemitic tropes of Jewish power and control” (p.64). However, Commissioner Bell herself noted concerns on 4 May that the definition can be weaponised. The Commission cannot in good faith adopt a working definition whose official Australian application treats criticism of that definition as antisemitic.

The Commissioner has expressed satisfaction that the pro-Israel bodies appearing in the first block of testimonies “represent the majority of Australian Jews”. We challenge this assertion.

1. Seven Israel-aligned organisations are all represented by a single firm, Arnold Bloch Leibler, pro bono: ECAJ, NSW JBD, JCCV, ZFA, NCJWA, AIJAC and the Dor Foundation. ZFA President Jeremy Leibler is a partner of that firm, a witness in the Commission, and a lead signatory of the joint statement that called for it to be launched. The ZFA publicly identifies these testimonies as “working to ensure a unified and strategic approach towards the Commission”.

2. The “majority of Australian Jews” claim is contradicted by recent academic research. Greenslade & Briskman (2026) surveyed 384 Australian Jews opposed to Israel’s actions in Palestine, finding the cohort to be demographically diverse, highly educated, and significantly active in Jewish communal life: “not marginal but rather… a complex and principled reorientation of Jewish identity”. Of these, 67% reported negative impacts within their families, 60% tension among friends, and 26% difficulties within Jewish organisations.

3. 23 out of 36 witnesses across the first three days of public hearings characterised criticism of Israel, opposition to Zionism and/or Palestinian advocacy as antisemitic, including keffiyehs, Palestinian flags and “free Palestine” chants.

4. The Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN) was twice refused leave to appear, despite filing a 259-page submission with expert evidence from Profs Shaul Magid, Ilan Pappé, and Noura Erakat. The Loud Jew Collective (LJC) was similarly refused. The Jewish Council of Australia (JCA), whose executive has faced sustained attacks by the Zionist lobby, was granted only limited leave to cross-examine witnesses.

   1. The exclusion of LJC is even starker, given what they were refused leave to present. As Deepcut News reported on 27 May 2026, the LJC submission included expert evidence prepared by Dr Jordana Silverstein, a Melbourne Law School academic, author and historian specialising in Australian Jewish history. She attests that “the majority of the antisemitism [she has] experienced has come from Jewish Zionists” — and that she has “never experienced antisemitism” from the Palestine solidarity movement across decades of involvement. Her evidence includes an email reading “Do you think those who hate Jews will spare KAPO SHIT like you?”; another that “6,000,000 Jews perished in the Holocaust… yet your family survived. God surely works in mysterious ways”; and an Instagram campaign branding named anti-Zionist Jews a “MODERN JUDERÄTE” — likening them to the Jewish councils who were forced by the Nazis to administer the ghettos. This is documented, harrowing antisemitic abuse of Jews — and the Commission refused to hear it, because the victims are anti-Zionists and the abusers are not.

   2. What APAN was refused leave to argue goes to the heart of the Commission’s mandate. APAN is the peak national body of the Palestinian solidarity movement, and it explicitly identified itself as “uniquely placed to assist the Commission by decoupling antisemitism and anti-Zionism”. APAN’s expert evidence does not merely defend against the conflation; it overturns it. Professor Erakat affirms that anti-Zionism is “a form of antiracism”, that dismantling Zionism is “a call for decolonization”, and that Palestinians experience Zionism as the ideology driving a genocide designed to remove them from their own land. This is exactly the analytical framework the Commission needs to fulfil its mandate properly, brought to it by the one body best placed to do so — yet refused a hearing twice over.

5. The Commission’s witnesses include parties on the public record for race‑hate conduct against Jewish Australians. In February 2025, AIJAC National Chairman Mark Leibler publicly called anti‑Zionist Jews “vicious antisemites” and “repulsive and revolting human beings. Their relatives who were murdered by the Nazis – the role models for Hamas – will undoubtedly be turning in their graves.” Following a Racial Discrimination Act complaint to the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) by 20 Jewish Australians, Leibler apologised and deleted his tweet in June 2025. AIJAC has nonetheless appeared before this Commission as a representative voice of the community its chairman abused.

6. The Commission’s expert witness on “social cohesion” minimises the Gaza genocide — and magnifies the Nazi comparison as his survey’s “most problematic” finding. Commenting on his Crossroads25 survey in October 2025, Prof Andrew Markus set Gaza apart as “very different” from “the systematic annihilation of an unarmed population” — though by Israel’s own military data, at least 83% of those killed in Gaza were civilians (a rate that researchers rank alongside the Rwanda and Srebrenica genocides); his comments came six weeks after the UN COI genocide finding. His survey scored the statement “Israel treats the Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews” as antisemitic; when a third of Australians agreed with it, Markus singled that out as “the most problematic response in the survey”: “the fact that so many people do not see [the difference] is a real issue.” His survey scored that statement on Allington, Hirsh & Katz’s 2022 “Generalised Antisemitism (GeAs) Scale”, which counts hostility to Israel as antisemitism by construction, folding two “subscales” (“Judeophobic” and “Antizionist”) into one psychometric scale “consistent with the spirit of the IHRA Definition”. The latter subscale is based on Allington & Hirsh’s 2019 “AzAs (Antizionist Antisemitism) Scale”, built to “[abandon] the fiction of an essential difference between antisemitism and that form of antizionism promoted not only by the notionally leftwing [BDS] movement but also by right-wing extremists such as the white supremacist, David Duke”; its authors describe the Nazi comparison as “clearly antisemitic”, without weighing context at all (even more absolutist than the IHRA definition). However, when asked under oath whether the Nazi comparison is antisemitic, Markus contradicted his survey’s framework: “Totally depends on the context” (P-624). Markus also co-authored and publicly presented the flagship survey of the Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism (5A) — which lobbied Macquarie University to discipline Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah, and pressured La Trobe University and Bendigo Writers Festival to drop her. The Commission’s chosen expert on “social cohesion” is clearly not impartial — which not only undermines his evidence, but implicates him in the division he claims to measure.

7. The Commission’s expert witness on antisemitism treats criticism of Israel as antisemitic by default — and denies the Gaza genocide. Dr Dave Rich MBE (UK Community Security Trust director of policy) made his name as part of the antisemitism campaign that ended Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership. In October 2025, he called the UN COI’s genocide finding “as shoddy and partisan as every other attempt to pin the genocide label onto the Jewish State”, implying that some of the murdered 18,430 Palestinian children were “armed fighters, killed in military combat”; he also obscured Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war as a “failed strategy of trying to control food supply” — though months earlier, leaked Israeli cabinet transcripts confirmed it was deliberate policy since at least March 2025. Despite all of this, he was chosen to deliver the March 2026 keynote launching the Special Envoy’s national schools antisemitism program. He then appeared before the Commission as the sole witness on Block 1’s final day — by video link from London, beyond the practical reach of s 6H penalties that bind Australian witnesses to truthfulness. There, he called genocide accusations against Israel “a rearticulation in modern terms of that very old idea about the Jews” (P-712); said documentation of Palestinian child killings carries “traces” of medieval blood libel — “the idea that Israel goes out of its way to deliberately kill Palestinian children, that those children are not just victims of war but are targets of this Jewish desire to murder children” (P-708); when asked to accept UNICEF’s figure of at least 21,000 Palestinian children killed in Gaza, answered “For the sake of argument, let’s say yes” (P-736); falsely told the Commission that ICC-wanted Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant was “talking about Hamas specifically” when he said “we are fighting human animals” while ordering a complete siege on all of Gaza (P-734); and dismissed Kenneth Stern’s role as IHRA’s lead drafter as “not as much as he makes out” (P-740), though Stern has directly refuted this exact revisionism with documentary evidence. The Commission’s chosen expert on antisemitism cannot be trusted to identify it.

Across the entire first block of hearings, the Commission did not hear a single anti-Zionist Jew, Palestinian, or Palestine supporter.

In an inquiry expressly examining whether anti-Zionism equates with antisemitism, the Commission has excluded the principal Palestinian voice in Australia from giving its testimony, as well as an anti-Zionist Jewish voice. That is not consistent with examining the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Rather, it embodies it.

Accusing Jewish anti‑Zionists of antisemitism exposes the incoherence of equating anti‑Zionism with hatred of Jews.

The perpetrators of the Bondi mass shooting are believed to be ISIS‑inspired, and no evidence has ever connected the attack to the Palestine solidarity movement. JCA’s December 2025 petition urged leaders to “stand strong against those… weaponising the Bondi massacre to push bigotry, hatred and division”, warning that this “makes the real fight against antisemitism harder”; this Commission inherits that risk.

Jewish AZA members consistently report that their experiences of antisemitism in Australia have overwhelmingly come from the far right and the Zionist establishment — not from the Palestine solidarity movement — as they attest in their personal submissions:

1. Dr David Glanz, a Jewish anti-fascist organiser of fifty years who lost countless relatives in the Holocaust, was one of the 20 complainants to the AHRC against AIJAC Chairman Mark Leibler over his abusive tweet invoking “their relatives who were murdered by the Nazis – the role models for Hamas”. Glanz attests: “I have experienced antisemitism fomented by the far right, never by supporters of Palestine”; in his decades of anti-fascist work, “those organisations which defend Israel and its action were nowhere to be seen. Indeed, I have been the victim of doxxing and abuse from Zionists.” This includes in The Australian, which printed his photo with the front-page headline “PRO-GAZA GHOULS” when covering Anti-Zionism Australia’s 22 December 2025 speak-out against this very conflation. We note that veteran journalist John Lyons wrote in 2021 that AIJAC Executive Director Colin Rubenstein is the only person apart from the Murdochs who “can tell the editors of The Australian what they can or can’t use”.

2. Nachshon Amir, a Jewish Israeli-born former IDF combat officer, attests: “I have never felt unsafe or uncomfortable because of my being Jewish… The only people from whom I have felt and experienced hatred and hostility are Zionist Jews.” He adds: “As an Australian, I feel the adoption of the IHRA definition is an attempt to silence me, and an explicit threat to freedom of speech. As a Jew, I feel frustration, anger and grief.”

3. Veronica Sherman, a Jewish Israeli citizen who served two years in the Israeli Air Force, attests: “In 2014 I realised that I had been lied to about Palestinians… I finally understood the power dynamic of us Israelis being the oppressors in the context of the Palestinian people.” That year, she wrote a pseudonymous article in The Age “simply saying that as a Jewish mother I wished that the killings in Gaza would stop”; the editor told her they had received “hundreds of letters of complaints from Australian Jews… Apparently my article was antisemitic.” Since 7 October 2023, “I’ve been called a Kapo. I’ve had death threats. I get told I’m a self-hating Jew. That I should go to Gaza and be raped & killed. That my ancestors would be ashamed to see me now.” Meanwhile, “I have been welcomed and embraced by the Palestinian and Muslim community… the response is overwhelmingly warm and loving.” Sherman has also been the target of a sustained attack campaign alleging she “isn’t Jewish”, first in July 2025 after she burned her Israeli passport in Canberra, then again the day of the UN COI’s genocide determination, then again the day after the Bondi massacre, then again days later after she publicly refuted the claim; the Royal Commission stands to legitimise this discursive violence that makes Jewish identity conditional on loyalty to Israel.

4. Dr Keren Tova Rubinstein, a Jewish Israeli-Australian academic with Holocaust-survivor relatives, attests to decades of ostracism for dissenting on Israel. At one leftist Jewish organisation, critics of Israel “were continuously kept out of the umbrella body for Australian Jews because of our stance on Israel, with Zionist Jews repeatedly and falsely labelling those of us who don’t support Israel as self-haters, charlatans, unethical, unprofessional and the tired old refrain: antisemitic.” At one university, the Jewish Studies department head was “intent on shaping and controlling both research and teaching to ensure only pro-Israel scholarship came out of that campus. When I told him I was examining Israel’s ‘new historians’ – Israeli historians critical of Israel’s colonialist foundations – he insisted their work had been debunked.” This led to her “being skipped from department meetings without explanation, or literally snubbed in the elevator”; when she reported this, she was told that “several bullying complaints had already been lodged… but that nothing could be done about these as he was personally appointed by the private sponsors of the Jewish Studies department”, and she was advised “to leave the university instead of expecting him to act ethically.” At another university, the department head “told me both by email and in person that ‘there is no room for you in Jewish Studies’.” These academics, she writes, “expected me to have a particular political position which goes against every fibre of my being as a human being with living relatives who’ve survived fascist genocide.” This is the capture of education in microcosm, reflecting a broader campaign of exclusion across mainstream Jewish institutions: purge dissenting Jews from Jewish Studies itself, to present a manufactured pro-Israel orthodoxy as the authentic Jewish voice.

Similar experiences are reported beyond AZA’s membership. Several members of Jews Against the Occupation ’48 (JAO48), an anti-Zionist Jewish group, have attested to a sustained pattern of harrowing antisemitic abuse from Zionists and the far right:

1. Judith Treanor writes in her own submission that “the antisemitism I experience comes from Zionists and far-right supporters of Zionism because of my outspoken opposition to the actions of the Israeli state”. Since speaking out, she has been called “kapo”, “self-hating Jew”, “fake Jew”, “not a Jew” and “terrorist supporter”; as she puts it, “the hostility I face is directed at me because I am a Jew who refuses political conformity.” Jepke Goudsmit independently records the same pattern in her own submission, with Zionist counter-protesters hurling “Fake Jew”, “Kapo”, “Traitor” and “I hope you all get raped” at peaceful Jewish demonstrators.

2. After JAO48 held a Holocaust Remembrance Day vigil on the steps of Sydney Town Hall in January 2025, the Australian Jewish Association (AJA) publicly branded the participants “degenerates”. A “Jews of Sydney” Facebook group shared photographs of those members without consent, drawing comments such as “fake Kapo Jews”, “Not my Jews”, and “Disgusting, despicable apologetic Jews”.

3. In February 2025, three JAO48 members aged 55–79 — Treanor, Michelle Berkon and Suzie Gold — were threatened with arrest and given move-on orders for peacefully protesting outside Emmanuel Synagogue in Woollahra, where then-Opposition Leader Peter Dutton was speaking. Police told them they were “causing fear and alarm”.

4. At JAO48’s September 2025 family-friendly solidarity event in support of the Global Sumud Flotilla, Never Again Is Now co-founder Mark Leach told a television interviewer that the Jewish organisers were “a handful of people who cosplay at being Jews”. This became the subject of an AHRC complaint: “A mediation session was arranged but Mr Leach later withdrew from the process. We were left with no practical pathway except expensive litigation.”

5. At a JAO48 memorial for the Bondi victims, members wearing keffiyehs were abused by fellow Jews, as Berkon reports in the submission LJC was refused leave to present: “there were people yelling, ‘We hope Hamas rapes you to death and cuts off your head’… One of the worst, which I’ve heard several times, but it never loses its impact, is: ‘It’s a pity any of your family survived the Holocaust’. When a Jew can say that to another Jew, you know there is something astonishingly wrong, something profoundly twisted has happened.”

6. After Berkon was filmed being escorted from the Bondi Beach memorial by police for wearing a keffiyeh on 16 December 2025, both she and Treanor (who had publicly confirmed that Berkon is Jewish) became targets of a death-threat campaign, which Senator David Shoebridge referred to the Australian Federal Police Commissioner. Treanor received messages through her business website (signed “Brenton Tarrant”, after the Christchurch mass murderer): “Ypu [sic] deserve a bullet in the head you rancid old Muslim apologist cunt… thanks for revealing your bitch friends name… Gonna make hunting the bitch down and puttinh [sic] a claw hammer in her skull even easier.” Berkon was also doxxed — her home address published online — and branded a “terrorist” by a UK account in a post viewed over a million times. This led Treanor to install security cameras outside her home.

7. At JAO48’s flotilla solidarity event “From Gadigal to Gaza” at Coogee Beach in May 2026, “approximately 30 Zionist agitators lined up on the promenade, chanted obscenities with no regard for the children present,” and called the Jewish participants “Hamas terrorists”. After the event, Treanor was approached and threatened by some of the agitators; one read out her car registration and said “We’ll remember that”. When she made a statement to the police regarding the incident, “the individuals denied making the threats and the matter went no further.” This left her with “little confidence that threats and intimidation directed at anti-Zionist Jews are treated with the same seriousness afforded to other forms of antisemitic abuse” — and suggests discriminatory asymmetry of enforcement.

On 3-5 September 2025, the US-based Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) convened the Australian Mayors Summit Against Antisemitism on the Gold Coast. Representatives of over 80 Australian local councils received a leaflet titled “Antisemitic Symbols since October 7”, expressly adopting the IHRA as its “guiding framework” and classifying these as antisemitic: the keffiyeh, watermelon, calling Gaza an “open-air prison”, and phrases like “free Palestine” and “all eyes on Rafah”. Speakers at this summit included the Special Envoy Jillian Segal, Defence Minister Richard Marles, Human Rights Commissioner Lorraine Finlay, then-Leader of the Opposition Sussan Ley, Nationals Leader David Littleproud, and former PM Julia Gillard.

1. As Wendy Bacon reports in Michael West Media, CAM has rallied alongside “One Nation, anti-immigration and Islamophobic crusaders”, and its CEO “was previously head of the New Media Desk at the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit… Australia is just one of 60 countries where CAM uses tactics including social media, lobbying politicians and convening conferences to relentlessly pursue its goal of entrenching the IHRA definition of antisemitism into policy at all levels of government, including outlawing BDS campaigns… It aims to discredit and dismantle the pro-Palestinian movement and promote a culture based on ‘Judeo-Christian’ values.” This is inherently discriminatory and alarming.

Solidarity with Palestinians should not be equated with hatred towards Jews. This does not accurately capture antisemitism, nor does it enhance the safety of Jewish Australians. Indeed, that equation performs the precise move the IHRA itself classifies as antisemitic: “holding Jews collectively responsible” for Israel’s documented crimes.

Despite the fact that we live in a time of unprecedented anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic hatred, the Commission’s terms of reference insist on looking at anti-Jewish hatred as a unique, separate, elevated, “special” case of racism. This contrasts with the AHRC National Anti-Racism Framework, which addresses all forms of racism through a universal whole-of-society approach.

When the Commission’s “social cohesion” expert witness, Prof Andrew Markus, was cross-examined on 12 May 2026, he made many notable concessions and revelations about his Crossroads25 survey’s Generalised Antisemitism (GeAs) Scale and his Scanlon Foundation Mapping Social Cohesion surveys (which stretch back to 2007):

1. His Mapping Social Cohesion surveys show negative attitudes rising toward every faith group since 2023. The rise was steeper toward Muslims (27% to 35%) than toward Jews (9% to 15%). By 2025, negative sentiment toward Muslims was more than double that toward Jews. When cross-examined on this directly, Markus retreated into obfuscations invoking “margin of error… significance” (P-639). When Peggy Dwyer SC, counsel for the Jewish Council of Australia, asked whether “people who hold racist views towards one group tend to hold racist views towards other groups” — and whether “that might be an interesting thing to know in terms of understanding social cohesion and how we foster it?” — Markus obliged: “Definitely.”

2. Cross-examined under oath, Markus made notable concessions about his chosen antisemitism scale, which undermine his survey’s reliance on it. On whether the Nazi comparison constitutes antisemitism, he echoed his earlier concession that it “Totally depends on the context”, stating: “it doesn’t mean they’re antisemitic. It means there’s a question: What is going on there? And the answer might well be: They’re humanitarian people and they’re concerned, et cetera, which is not going down the path of labelling them as antisemitic” (P-629). Later, he agreed with Ms Dwyer SC’s incisive point that “it’s certainly possible to be critical of Israel and not be antisemitic… But in terms of classical antisemitic stereotypes or Judeophobia… it’s hard to imagine that you could be Judeophobic without being antisemitic” (P-637).

3. On his “Judeophobic” subscale — the one that measures actual anti-Jewish prejudice — One Nation voters scored highest (17%), and Greens voters lowest. Conversely, the Greens voters led the anti-Zionist subscale, built from criticism of Israel. Ms Dwyer SC then reiterated: “And what your report shows there is that it’s certainly possible to hold anti-Zionist views without holding Judeophobic views?” “That is right” (P-638). So the Commission’s own expert found real anti-Jewish hatred concentrated on the hard right — not on the Palestine-solidarity left.

4. On 14 May 2026, Dr Dave Rich made similar concessions under cross-examination — albeit from a very different perspective. When asked simply whether it is antisemitic to debate Israel’s conduct in Gaza as genocide, he appeared to equivocate: “some of the contributions to that debate I would say are antisemitic and some aren’t” (P-735). Ms Dwyer SC pressed further: “in today’s age, it’s important to allow for that debate without shouting someone down as antisemitic or racist if they don’t express themselves perfectly or if they are angry?” “Yes.” Further still, in an exchange published by the Jewish Council: “But do you accept that someone could be making a comparison with the horrors of the Nazi era to say we cannot let that happen again?” “Yes” (P-735). The Commission’s chosen expert on antisemitism — who denies documented genocide and starvation warfare — was forced to concede that opposition to Israel, even in the sharpest terms, does not inherently constitute anti-Jewish hatred.

Anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic sentiments are a direct threat to “social cohesion”. We insist that exceptionalising Jews above all other people by treating Jewish suffering as a separate and elevated case is the one of the biggest threats to social cohesion that Australia faces at this moment. It goes against the very heart of the idea of human equity and equality, and goes directly against the stated aim of strengthening “social cohesion”.

1. This double standard runs through the testimony. On 4 May 2026, Rabbi Benjamin Elton of the Great Synagogue affirmed that violence against Jews must never be “finessed as having certain causes or a certain background which means that it should be downplayed and not taken as seriously” (P-84). The next day, ECAJ co-CEO Peter Wertheim performed exactly that pivot for Palestinian suffering: “But let’s — let’s just take a step backwards and understand that this was an attack that had been initiated by Hamas, which happens to be the most powerful organisation, still, in the Palestinian community in Israel and perhaps beyond” (P-205). The “finesse” they rightly forbid against Jews — selective contextualisation to justify atrocity — they demand against Palestinians.

Several AZA members have personally experienced abuse, harassment and at times police hostility while wearing keffiyehs and other symbols of Palestinian solidarity; none of this falls within the Commission’s terms of reference.

Furthermore, we cannot achieve “social cohesion” by suppressing opposition to Israel and ignoring the genocide in Palestine that we are still collectively witnessing. While centring much of the Commission’s discussion around groups whose central political project is to support the State of Israel and its ruling political ideology of Zionism, the Commission’s terms of reference fail to mention Gaza, Palestine, or the conduct of the Israeli state elsewhere in the region, and the impact this has on the many Australians with connections to Palestine/Israel.

Palestinians still die from Israeli violence on a daily basis. The UN Commission of Inquiry has found that Israel is responsible for genocide in Gaza, and that Israeli President Isaac Herzog, PM Benjamin Netanyahu, and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant “incited the commission of genocide”, while the ICJ found that Israel has systemically obstructed humanitarian aid.

The UN Special Rapporteur OPT’s report “Gaza Genocide: A Collective Crime” documents diplomatic, military, economic and so-called “humanitarian” complicity in the genocide by countries around the world, including Australia. The Genocide Convention obliges Australia to “employ all means reasonably available… so as to prevent genocide so far as possible”, with the threshold being “the capacity to influence effectively the action of persons likely to commit, or already committing, genocide” (Bosnia v Serbia [2007] ICJ Rep 43 at [430]).

However, in February 2026, while this Commission was on foot, the Albanese government hosted Isaac Herzog at Parliament House. At the 10,000-strong Sydney protest against this visit, NSW police used pepper spray, mounted police charged at crowds, and First Nations peoples were targeted, as well as Muslim worshippers and peaceful elderly protesters, as documented by Amnesty International Australia. The Commission cannot credibly inquire into Australian social cohesion while ignoring Australia’s complicity in hosting and offering police protection to a head of state named by a UN body for inciting an ongoing genocide.

Furthermore, Australia is bound by the Apartheid Convention; Article II(f) defines as a crime of apartheid the “persecution of organizations and persons, by depriving them of fundamental rights and freedoms, because they oppose apartheid.” With the ICJ finding that Israel’s practices amount to apartheid, the police violence documented above engages Article II(f); so would any restrictions on anti-apartheid speech this Commission may recommend.

All of this makes the approach taken by the Royal Commission — separating and elevating anti-Jewish hatred above all other forms of hatred — deeply problematic, and directly at odds with the Commission’s stated aim of contributing to “social cohesion”.

Capture of inputs and conflicts of interest: Gilbert + Tobin were appointed to assist the Commissioner without an open tender, despite being a major sponsor of the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce (AICC); the AICC has also received funding from multiple weapons companies — including Elbit Systems, named in UN reports for its complicity in the Gaza genocide. The Jewish Centre for Law and Justice (JCLJ), openly identified by the ZFA, was appointed joint operator of the National Legal Advice Service to support prospective submitters. These are clearly biased appointments that create a grave conflict of interest, fatally undermining the integrity of the Commission.

Inadequate timeline and premature findings: The Commission has approximately 11 months to report, yet Commissioner Bell has herself said this work “could well be the work of years, not months”. The interim report was issued on 30 April 2026, four days before public hearings began on 4 May 2026. Consequently, preliminary findings have been reached before public evidence has been heard. As Dr Scott Prasser, expert on Australian Royal Commissions, opined, the Commission “should have been talking to some people, preferably in public hearings, before we have any sort of interim report… it’s rushing the process.”

Pre-emptive legislation targeting the views under inquiry: The Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Act 2026 passed both houses on 20 January 2026, only 11 days after this Commission was established, and only three hours after the Bills were introduced, after allowing less than 3 days for public consultation on 144 pages. Consequently, the Law Council of Australia warned of “drafting errors, inconsistencies and unintended consequences”. When read alongside the Special Envoy’s handbook, this Act targets a substantial range of political speech directly within the Commission’s scope, before it has even heard the evidence to make such a determination. This is the “chilling effect” which the IHRA definition’s own lead drafter warned against.

Markus’s instrument is the conflation in miniature: Markus’s Crossroads25 survey measured antisemitism with the GeAs scale, whose “Antizionist Antisemitism” (AzAs) subscale is built entirely from statements about Israel; not one of its six items mentions Jewish people. The trick is the wording: by phrasing many items like a classic antisemitic trope — “supporters control the media”, “a bad influence on our democracy” — a citizen summarising the public record gets the same score as a bigot reciting a canard. This reverses the ordinary burden of proof: to avoid being accused of bigotry, a person might feel expected to produce the documented evidence behind their assertion on the spot — which a survey allows no room for, and few can do off the top of their head. However, the Victorian Magistrates’ Court recently held that freedom of political communication “belongs as much to the obsessive, the emotional and the inarticulate as it does to the logical, the cerebral and the restrained”. In any case, the AzAs subscale treats all critics of Israel — evidenced and emotional alike — as antisemitic. Each of the following six AzAs items, then, punishes a legitimate position, conceals a documented wrong, or does both:

1. “I am comfortable spending time with people who openly support Israel” (reverse): Discomfort in the company of vocal supporters of a documented genocide is a response to an abhorrent political stance, not to anyone’s Jewishness. As stated earlier, this central sleight of hand — equating “Israel supporters” with “Jews” — is itself a deeply antisemitic premise. It also implies that no conduct by the state could justify that unease — not even genocide or apartheid. That is not measuring prejudice; it is measuring loyalty to Israel.

2. “Israel has a right to exist as a homeland for the Jewish people” (reverse): While international law has no concept of a state’s “right to exist”, it does declare that “All peoples have the right of self-determination” — all peoples, including Palestinians. Holding Israel to the same rule as every other country is the opposite of antisemitism.

3. “Israel is right to defend itself against those who want to destroy it” (reverse): Self-defence is a legal term of art: the right to wage a war, under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. The ICJ’s 2004 Wall opinion [139] held that a state cannot invoke Article 51 against threats from territory it occupies; its 2024 advisory opinion [93] confirmed that Gaza was and remains occupied; therefore, Israel’s war on Gaza is indefensible, in law as in fact. Moreover, “Israel has a RIGHT to defend itself” is an instruction from a leaked 2009 hasbara manual, The Israel Project’s Global Language Dictionary; the manual coaches spokespeople to “use rhetorical questions to gain permission from the audience for Israel’s actions.” So this item scores Australians on a line scripted by the perpetrator’s publicists. In any case, “self-defence” is the perpetrator’s standard propaganda: no genocide has ever been announced as one; each was reframed as security, survival, or necessity, and Israel’s plea before the World Court is no exception. To disagree with this item is to affirm the conclusion reached by UN authorities and hundreds of human rights groups: that this is not self-defence, but genocide. This subscale item does not test for antisemitism, but for deference to the perpetrator’s script.

4. “Israel and its supporters are a bad influence on our democracy”: Our Federal Court found that the Israel lobby influenced our public broadcaster to unlawfully sack Antoinette Lattouf for sharing evidence of Israel’s war crimes. Former Foreign Minister Bob Carr has described that lobby as a “foreign influence operation designed to put the interests of Israel above the interests of Australia and its foreign policy.” Pro-Israel groups have consistently lobbied for laws that stifle free speech. Of particular concern: an anonymous “public servant with a high-level security clearance” warning that, under the IHRA definition, APS staff may fear “career repercussions if they report foreign interference from the State of Israel, such as suspicious behaviour we would otherwise usually report as potential espionage”. This subscale item silences as bigots the very people best placed to report the influence it denies.

   1. This fear is not fanciful: in February 2026, Israeli President Herzog was secretly hosted at ASIO headquarters — a visit without precedent for any head of state, as ASIO’s Deputy Director-General conceded at Senate estimates (while taking on notice whether Mossad officers accompanied the visit); meanwhile, NBC News reported on 6 June 2026 that the Pentagon had raised Israel’s counterintelligence threat level to “critical”, its highest designation.

5. “Israel can get away with anything because its supporters control the media”: In Australia’s second-most concentrated media market among studied democracies, where four corporations own 84% of newspaper revenue, AIJAC employees can secure opinion pieces in national newspapers, and its Executive Director can decide what The Australian publishes; that broadsheet gave Israel’s chief propagandist an admiring profile to explain, six weeks into the genocide, how he gets media to discredit Palestinian casualty figures; our largest newspapers obscure Israel’s atrocity crimes through editorial blackout; and “our ABC” spent over $2.6M in taxpayer money defending its decision to unlawfully sack a journalist for sharing evidence of those crimes — while humanising Israelis more than Palestinians and restricting the word “genocide”. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s next report will interrogate the role of media during this genocide. To treat awareness of this public record as bigotry is not to measure antisemitism; it is to immunise media influence from the scrutiny a healthy democracy requires.

6. “Israel treats the Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews”: Israeli philosopher Prof Yeshayahu Leibowitz, an Israel Prize laureate, called Israel’s conduct in the occupied territories “Judeo-Nazi” in the 1980s. Israeli newspaper Haaretz quoted a morally-injured Israeli soldier in 2024: “it looked exactly like we were actually the Nazis and they were the Jews.” Former Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon publicly stated in early 2026: “The ideology of ‘Jewish supremacy’, which has become dominant in the Israeli government, resembles Nazi racial theory”. These are only a few of many such statements by Israeli Jews. Even as Markus himself concedes that it “Totally depends on the context” whether the comparison constitutes antisemitism, his chosen subscale does not, nor does his survey, nor its findings. An instrument that cannot make that distinction is not measuring antisemitism, and this Commission should not rely on it.

In many ways, Markus’s chosen “Anti[-Z]ionist Antisemitism” subscale is a microcosm of this Royal Commission’s violations, both procedural and substantive. In both, the inputs are restricted, the evidence prejudged, and the answer predetermined — the opposite of everything a fair hearing requires. Both manufacture the antisemitism they claim to identify, and both shield Israel’s crimes from the criticism that would hold it accountable. Having defined that criticism as bigotry, each can only find what it was built to find.

Specific factual claims read into evidence in the first hearing block are contradicted by the public record. At the Commission’s own invitation, witness Nir Golan recited his LinkedIn post asserting indifference to a series of antisemitic attacks: “no response… no outrage… no headlines… no national alarm… no consequences… silence” (P-161). Former magistrate David Heilpern checked each claim in Michael West Media: in fact, the Prime Minister condemned the Maroubra preschool firebombing on site the next day, then convened National Cabinet over it; the Bankstown nurses who threatened Israeli patients were suspended immediately, deregistered within days, and barred from the health system for life; the three synagogue attacks ran as front-page news nationwide; the Lewis’s Kitchen arson, once ASIO attributed it to the Iranian regime, prompted Australia’s first expulsion of an ambassador since World War II; and the Dural caravan “explosives” were declared an elaborate hoax by NSW police. As Heilpern — a magistrate of 22 years, and the son of a Holocaust survivor — writes: “The point of every inquisitorial process is to get to the truth, and not to allow falsity to stand, let alone invite its repetition on oath.”

1. The most consequential of these claims — that chants of “gas the Jews” were heard at a Sydney Opera House protest — traces back to AJA publishing and captioning the footage in two clips, one labelled “UNCUT VERSION – SHOCKING ‘Gas The Jews’ on the steps of the Sydney Opera House”. RMIT CrossCheck’s analysis identified signs the audio had been edited, and police found with “overwhelming certainty” that the phrase chanted was “where’s the Jews”, not “gas the Jews”. Furthermore, police stated that AJA’s captions were “an opinion of someone putting those subtitles on there”. AJA and Sky News never retracted these disproven claims, which continue to be put before this Commission as fact — while the communities they smear are afforded no right of reply.

Deepcut News reported further inaccuracies put to the Commission uncorrected. Vic Alhadeff (of ECAJ and SBS) recounted a Sydney Writers’ Festival heckler decrying “the Jewish tentacles” (P-185), but his submission and his Jewish Independent account recorded only the words “the ‘tentacles’ of Australia’s ‘Israel lobby’.” ZFA President Jeremy Leibler placed the Opera House protest “before Israel had responded, before Israel had done anything” (P-324) — but, by the day before, Israel had already cut Gaza’s electricity, killed over 400 Palestinians and displaced over 120,000, with Gallant declaring “complete siege” that day. Léa Levy asserted that ABC “never talked about Israelis’ pain” (P-154), but Deepcut cited examples “here, here, here, here, here, here, and here”, and its joint analysis found consistent pro-Israel bias. Julie Nathan told the Commission that “no other country in the world is compared to Nazi Germany, only Israel” (P-517) — but antisemitism expert Dr Rich called that analogy common days later (P-710), and Deepcut noted it “has been levelled at Russia, the United States, Iran, Syria and Iraq among others.” Blake Shaw testified that “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been going on for centuries” (P-253), but it began with British colonisation after World War I.

As noted earlier, expert witness Dr Dave Rich made many false claims — among them, that Israeli Defence Minister Gallant’s “human animals” incitement referred only to Hamas, though Gallant said it while ordering a “complete siege on the Gaza Strip… no electricity, no food, no fuel”. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants in November 2024 for “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare” and crimes against humanity, finding “reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant each bear criminal responsibility as civilian superiors for the war crime of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population.” Both remain at large.

The Commission has the following two obligations of natural justice: (a) that its findings be supported by evidence of probative value, and (b) that it lets affected parties answer any proposed adverse finding, and fairly considers conflicting evidence (Mahon v Air New Zealand [1984] AC 808 at 820–821).

Witnesses who “intentionally give evidence that the person knows to be false or misleading with respect to any matter, being a matter that is material to the inquiry being made by the Commission” face up to five years in prison under s 6H of the Royal Commissions Act 1902.

Should this Royal Commission unquestioningly rely on any such misrepresentations, it would make a mockery of its natural justice obligations, squander $131.1 million in taxpayer money, and further erode public confidence in Australia’s “highest form of inquiry on matters of public importance”.

More damningly, it would escalate the accountability-theatre pattern condemned by Prof Gary Foley (consultant to the 1988 Royal Commission into Black Deaths in Custody) — by perverting the Royal Commission into an engine of impunity for the “crime of crimes”, amplifying genocide enablers in order to smear and silence genocide opponents.

This Royal Commission was established in response to a real and grievous antisemitic attack. Since then, it has been captured by a single ideological bloc of Zionist lobby groups, urged to brand Jewish anti-Zionists and Palestinian Australians as antisemites, and corrupted to retroactively justify the criminalisation of their views.

By adopting the IHRA definition, conflating Judaism with Zionism, exceptionalising anti-Jewish hatred above other forms of racism, and accepting evidence contradicted by the public record, it will fail not only its statutory duty but also its purported mandate: it risks making Jewish Australians less safe, and entrenching the anti-Palestinian racism it has already emboldened.

It is consolidating the conditions under which hundreds of thousands of Australians opposing genocide and apartheid (including AZA, JCA, LJC, and APAN) continue to be recast as bigots — all to make peaceful solidarity a crime.

Nevertheless, the Royal Commission can still prevent or reverse these harms, by heeding the following recommendations.

Anti-Zionism Australia recommends that the Royal Commission:

1. Reject the IHRA working definition of antisemitism — which has been shown to be unfit for purpose — as a basis for any finding or recommendation that it makes.

2. Affirm that anti‑Zionism is not antisemitism, and that political speech criticising Zionism and Israel is protected democratic expression.

3. Adopt as a working principle the holding of Justice Stewart in Wertheim v Haddad that “the conclusion that it is not antisemitic to criticise Israel is the corollary of the conclusion that to blame Jews for the actions of Israel is antisemitic”.

4. Commission an independent demographic and attitudinal study of Australian Jewish opinion before purporting to have already heard evidence reflecting “the majority of Australian Jews”.

5. Diversify the witness base substantially, including granting leave for APAN and LJC to deliver testimonies.

6. Expand the scope of the Commission to address Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian racism, anti-Indigenous racism, and antisemitism on equal terms, consistent with the universal anti-racist approach of the AHRC National Anti-Racism Framework.

7. Publish the selection criteria and probity assessments for the Gilbert + Tobin and JCLJ appointments.

8. Urge the Australian Government to repeal or suspend further legislative implementation of the IHRA definition pending independent review against Articles 19 and 21 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).

9. Recommend an independent review of the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Act 2026 against the Commission’s findings and against the ICCPR.

10. Identify in its final report every representation of fact made in evidence that has been or can be contradicted by documentary evidence, and detail how reliance on such misrepresentations affected the Commission’s deliberations.