In June, Liberal MP Julian Leeser introduced a bill into federal parliament for a Commission of Inquiry into Antisemitism at Australian Universities (2024).
According to Leeser, the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), tasked by PM Anthony Albanese with carrying out a general inquiry into racism, including antisemitism, was unsuitable due its support for the “rights of protesters” and other evils.
Despite the AHRC’s scandalous silence on anti-Palestinian rhetoric, apparently “systemic racism against Jews is the order of the day”.
The commission’s terms of reference state that it will base its investigations, conclusions and recommendations on the highly contested International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. This fact alone renders its potential findings virtually irrelevant to the issue of antisemitism, whether on Australian university campuses or elsewhere.
Jewish Australian academic Peter Slezak wrote an essay in 2020 titled “How should antisemitism be defined? A reply to Peter Wertheim”, in which he so comprehensively documents the flaws in the IHRA definition that it emerges completely bereft of legitimacy.
The ABC version of Slezak's essay conveniently omits the salient point that “six of the accompanying eleven illustrative examples concern criticism of Israel”.
Any definition of antisemitism that includes criticism of Israel, conflates Judaism with Zionism, making the racist assumption that all Jews support a Jewish supremacist state. In fact, there has been consistent Jewish opposition to Zionism since its inception and Jewish opposition to Israel’s egregious violations of Palestinian rights and international law ever since the establishment of the State.
The AHRC’s adoption of the IHRA definition erases this principled resistance to racism, colonisation, occupation and apartheid. It also sets the stage for universities to take repressive action against Jews for antisemitism.
Furthermore, to exceptionalise antisemitism is divisive.
Jews are far from the only ethnic or religious group subjected to persecution and genocide over the centuries. Even the Nazi Holocaust swallowed not only the Jews of Europe but also the Sinti and Roma peoples.
It was, in fact, a crime against humanity. And humanity includes all of us.
A far more inclusive approach to prejudice and discrimination against Jews would be to include it under an umbrella definition of racism that allows for consideration of the specific experiences of each group subjected to it, for example Muslims, people of Asian, Arabic and African heritage and Jews.
(Prejudice against First Nations people involves racism but includes other factors beyond the scope of this essay.)
Zionist Jews insist on lone Jewish victimhood, despite our history ofinclusion and support by solidarity groups in diverse social justice struggles, to “justify” Israel’s crimes.
Judaism, as most people know, is a religious and cultural tradition a few thousand years old. Zionism is a political ideology dating from the emergence of ethnonationalism in mid 1800s Europe.
Originally an Evangelical Christian idea to rid European society of Jews and hasten the Apocalypse, it was weaponised by Britain to install a proxy in the Middle East as the Ottoman and British empires crumbled.
Given the fact that Israel appears to be engineering its own spectacular demise, there is room for hope that Zionism won’t survive its 200th birthday. We Jews would do well to reflect on which historical, theological and moral current we wish to follow.
As Jewish people who oppose Israel’s colonisation of historic Palestine and refute the political ideology of Zionism, we do experience antisemitism, but not from within the Palestinian solidarity community.
Our most egregious experiences of antisemitic hatred have come from Zionist Jews who deny our Jewishness, insult us as “capos”, Nazis and “kaffirs”, call for us to be raped by Hamas and have even expressed regret that our families survived the Nazi genocide.
One of our senior members was physically assaulted and verbally abused, and others have been variously harassed and threatened.
Jewish academics have been subjected to subtle, and not-so-subtle, pressure to censor their political views or risk their careers.
Are we being targeted for our Judaism or for our politics? The answer is clear.
Similarly, Jews who feel “unsafe” on Australia’s campuses are overwhelmingly perfectly safe in their Jewish identity. They are merely feeling “uncomfortable” because their political position in relation to Zionism and the State of Israel is increasingly placing them outside the consensus — confirmed by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) — that not only is there sufficient evidence to plausibly consider Israel’s psychotic brutality in Gaza to be genocide, but that Israel’s entire occupation of Palestinian land is illegal.
This consensus is built on earlier findings by human rights groups, and confirmed by the ICJ, that Israel is practicing the crime of apartheid.
Israel and its supporters know that evoking the spectre of antisemitism is Israel’s only bulwark against total delegitimisation.
In May, Sky News reported that a Monash University poll found “68 percent of Jewish students at Australian universities personally encountered hostility towards Israel from other students and 46 percent had experienced hostility towards Israel from university lecturers and staff”.
Just as intended by the purveyors of the IHRA definition, there is no daylight between Jewish identity and support for Israel.
Of course, this leaves Jewish students and staff with scant protection from actual anti-Jewish hatred. But then, Jews have always been cannon fodder in Israel’s propaganda and hot wars.
Clearly, this ill-conceived Commission is a naked attempt to suppress the growing clamour, in Australian universities and broader society, for Palestinian human and national rights.
Its proponents are willing to sacrifice academic integrity and freedom of speech to shield their investments in Israeli weapons and surveillance technology. They are either blind to the fact that privileging (Zionist) Jewish sensibilities will inevitably feed antisemitic tropes, or willing to sacrifice Jewish safety and wellbeing on the altar of Israel’s insatiable need for antisemitism to justify its own existence.
Ultimately, by adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism, Australian universities have opened their gates to a Trojan Horse every bit as dangerous as the original.
[Michelle Berkon is a Jewish Australian, aspiring mosaic artist, and former teacher. She has always been committed to social justice, environmental sustainability, and animal rights. As a member of Jews Against the Occupation ‘48 for a decade, she has repudiated Zionism and become active in the struggle for Palestinian rights. This article was first published by Pearls and Irritations.]