“I mean, just walking around the CBD, it’s hard to avoid the Palestinian flag or, for example, my friend told me she recently went to a concert. She had a great time and at the end, the performer just said, ‘Thank you and free Palestine’ and I think that happens almost every single day, and, yes, it’s very tiring, yes.”
—Léa Levy testifying before the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion
For seven days this month, supporters of Israel were given a national platform to denounce the mass movement against genocide in Gaza. The first block of hearings for Australia’s Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion finished on 12 May. Three days later was the anniversary of the 1948 Nakba, Israel’s foundational ethnic cleansing of much of Palestine.
The above quote is typical of the testimonies, all of which are formally labelled “lived experience”. Analysis by Deepcut News found that, of the 36 witnesses called in the first three days, “23 explicitly characterised criticism of Israel and Zionism or Palestinian advocacy as antisemitic”.
On the second day, Jeremy Stowe-Lindner slandered a parent attending a school sporting event as an antisemitic provocateur because he was wearing “full Palestinian regalia”. When university Professor Tali Pinsky told the commission that she believed campus pro-Palestine activism was largely motivated by antisemitism, the assisting counsel simply invited her to elaborate rather than interrogating the claim.
The commission’s set-up means that assisting counsel are there primarily to encourage those testifying to expound their views, rather than to cross-examine them. So defamatory statements are almost never challenged. As well, groups such as the Australian Palestine Advocacy Network were refused leave to give evidence. Unlike in a court, the Palestine movement had no right of reply, no right to defend itself in the hearings. The pro-Palestine Jewish Council of Australia was given only limited leave to participate.
The commission is in effect an extension of the long-term campaign by pro-Israel groups for a crackdown on freedom of expression of those who stand for Palestinian justice.
The vast majority of testimonies were coordinated by a right-wing bloc of pro-Israel Jewish groups, led by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ). The group advertised two full-time positions to coordinate this earlier in the year. ECAJ is not simply a Jewish community group that happens to support Israel; it is a politically motivated campaigning body with a stated aim of pushing the Australian government to vote against Palestinian statehood in the United Nations.
In February last year, the group called for a nationwide ban on “encampments; the disruption of lectures by student protesters; and external organisations or individuals orchestrating campus protest activities”. It is notable that these demands don’t specify protests or activities related to Palestine solidarity or Israel. This is an authoritarian call to curtail left-wing activism and civil liberties in general.
The federal budget, announced just as the first hearings closed, awarded ECAJ $102 million in government funding.
The co-CEOs of ECAJ, Alex Ryvchin and Peter Wertheim, spoke on the first and second days. Predictably, Ryvchin launched into a vitriolic attack on Sydney’s Palestine Action Group, claiming that the group’s protests are motivated not by opposition to genocide but by “the humiliation of Israel” on 7 October 2023.
“When you deal with extremists motivated by hatred, there’s no sense that that extremism and those activities will naturally reach the end of their course, they will blow off a little steam”, he said. “That’s not how they operate. They go exactly as far as they are permitted to go.” Ryvchin’s testimony was a slanderous accusation: peaceful protests against Israel’s genocide inevitably lead to antisemitic violence.
Independent news outlet Michael West Media pointed out that ECAJ and other pro-Israel representative groups are all being assisted by the same legal firm, Arnold Bloch Leibler, during the commission’s hearings. These include the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, Jewish Community Council of Victoria, Zionist Federation of Australia, National Council of Jewish Women of Australia, Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council and the Dor Foundation. Jeremy Leibler, a partner of the firm, is also head of the Zionist Federation of Australia.
Leibler is a culture warrior of the right. In a January opinion piece in the Australian, for example, he railed against New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s “collectivism” and linked it to a logic that he claims drives activist circles to rationalise rape and murder. He has retweeted posts stating that Palestine has no right to exist.
Many testimonials at the commission referred to the Palestine solidarity movement and the Bondi massacre in the same breath, not explicitly stating that anti-racist protesters carried out the massacre, but trying to establish guilt by testimonial link. A speaker on day two recounted going into lockdown at a community event during the attack—and then launched a tirade about the Palestine solidarity movement, lamenting “the chants and the protests and the words and the online rhetoric”.
In fact, the father and son who carried out the massacre were found by police to have been influenced by Islamic State (IS) ideology, and two IS flags were found in their car. IS opposes the Palestinian national struggle, has carried out massacres of Palestinians, and its own militants are suppressed by Hamas in Gaza.
Some of those testifying linked supporters of Palestine to crimes that are now well known to have been carried out by organised criminal gangs. Others described Nazi propaganda and pro-Palestine materials interchangeably, as if both are similarly motivated. In her testimony, Australian antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal identified “far-left ... issue motivated activist groups” as one of four categories of antisemitic actors, alongside “Islamist extremism” linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups, and naive people who conflate the state of Israel with the Jewish people.
Yet the biggest proponents of conflating the state of Israel and the Jewish people in general are the Israeli government and its supporters. Since 1948, Zionist institutions and Israeli political figures have claimed that the state represents all Jewish people and is their homeland. It is highly hypocritical to complain that some others now might conflate Judaism and Zionism. At any rate, Jewish supporters of Palestine and Palestine solidarity activists have been the loudest in arguing that the state of Israel does not represent Jews in general.
In Australia and elsewhere, far-left activists have been the most committed fighters against the rise of neo-Nazi and fascist movements. In Melbourne, for example, many of the individuals and groups that protest for Palestine also participate in anti-Nazi demonstrations led by the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism. This is connected to a proud history of leftist resistance to fascism.
I have organised several marches against the neo-Nazi National Socialist Network. In 2022, I was contacted by a young Jewish woman seeking help convincing the Zionist community groups she was involved with to support the demonstrations. She lamented that the groups refused to support the campaign against actual Nazis because it was led by the pro-Palestine left.
For the left, opposition to racism and fascism, and opposition to Israel’s occupation of Palestine go hand in hand.
It’s a different story on the right. On one hand, sections of the global far right often promote antisemitic conspiracy theories. In the US, for example, MAGA movement figures such as Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and Marjorie Taylor Greene have popularised antisemitism online as part of pushing a broader reactionary agenda.
On the other hand, many far-right groups also support Israel. They recognise it as an exclusionary ethnostate that practices apartheid and oppresses Arabs and Muslims. So they view Israel as a model to emulate. Richard Spencer, one of the world’s most prominent fascists, once said that Israel is “the most important and perhaps most revolutionary ethno-state ... the one that I turn to for guidance”.
Israel’s government is run by a far-right coalition headed by the ethno-nationalist Likud party. It is part of a global movement of fascist and far-right political projects including Trump’s Republican Party, the National Rally in France, Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, Reform UK and Narendra Modi’s Indian People’s Party. All of these parties have political ties and sympathies with Netanyahu’s government, and the European parties mostly trace their origins to inter-war fascism.
During the seven days of hearings, Israel killed thirteen Palestinians in Gaza. Armed settlers occupied the Ein Sala spring in the West Bank to prevent local Palestinians from accessing water. In Jalud, settlers bulldozed hundreds of olive trees. South of Jenin, in the town of al-Asa’asa, settlers forced a family to exhume their 80-year-old father and rebury him elsewhere. Every day, the Israeli state humiliates, imprisons and kills Palestinians.
The royal commission will likely result in recommendations for a further crackdown on Palestine solidarity and left-wing activism. But every day, our world becomes darker. Fascism is implanting itself into mainstream politics across the world. Israel is getting away with a new Nakba in southern Lebanon. Now, more than ever, we need a fighting left and a strident movement for Palestinian justice. The commission is an attempt to intimidate the left and to make resistance to war, fascism and racism more difficult.
