Labor’s ‘special envoy’ to promote racism and genocide
Fresh from driving Fatima Payman out of the Labor Party, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has now appointed Jillian Segal, former president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), a rabid pro-Israel lobby group, as “special envoy to combat antisemitism”. The role has nothing to do with combatting antisemitism and everything to do with silencing opponents of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
“We have been blessed to live in a country with no history of antisemitic laws or institutional persecution of Jewish Australians, but the world is changing”, Segal said soon after getting the job. In fact, Australia was rife with antisemitic persecution for decades, including under the racist “White Australia” immigration laws, which excluded Jews. And antisemitic far-right groups are active today and are growing globally.
But this stuff doesn’t much concern Segal because her appointment isn’t about challenging racism; it’s about stoking it.
Segal and ECAJ have campaigned against a ceasefire in Gaza, justified bombing hospitals, repeated false claims about babies being beheaded on 7 October, and lobbied for student protesters to be persecuted. In her own words, speaking at a pro-Israel rally in May, Segal said she wants to “drive anti-Zionism and antisemitism back into the darkest and most disreputable corners of our society”.
Of course, the way for organisations such as ECAJ to oppose anti-Zionism is to equate it with antisemitism, so that any criticism of Israel can be dismissed, and the critics can be accused of racist hate speech.
It is such a familiar tactic that it barely needs to be explained for the sham that it is. It has been deployed so often and so ludicrously that it is having less and less impact in cowing people who want to stop the genocide and support Palestinian liberation.
But a real threat lurks behind this appointment, which is the increasingly repressive environment for anti-genocide activists around the world. Segal will use her position to campaign for Australia to adopt the extreme anti-democratic measures we have seen in places like Germany and the UK, where pro-Palestine protesters, including many Jewish anti-Zionists, are being routinely arrested under the preposterous pretext of inciting racial hatred.
Similar moves have already begun in Australia. A Melbourne activist now faces arrest, and many student protesters are facing university discipline for criticising Zionism. And there are threats to ban chants such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”.
This leads us to the crux of the issue. When it comes to racial hatred, there is no form more extreme than genocide. It is, in the words of the Genocide Convention, an attempt to destroy “in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.
The practice of genocide goes well beyond words and hate speech, although is inevitably accompanied by odious racist ideology. It is killing on a vast scale, mass terror, ethnic cleansing and the destruction of the physical and social preconditions of life. It’s what Israel has been doing for nine months.
Every week, another atrocity is revealed. Surgeons working in Gaza have described the huge numbers of shrapnel injuries they are treating, leading to horrific numbers of civilian deaths, amputations and other internal injuries. They result from the kinds of shells and bombs Israel is dropping on residential areas and refugee camps, where the main munition is encased with a fragmentation sleeve consisting of hundreds of tiny tungsten cubes that explode in every direction, shredding organs and bones. The only reason to use such weapons is to kill and injure as many people as possible. They are being killed because they are Palestinian.
Beyond the 38,345 people counted as killed by the Gaza Health Ministry, a letter published in the journal of the British Medical Association estimates that the real death toll could be more than 186,000, or 7.9 percent of the pre-October Gaza population. Add to this the tens of thousands who have been forced to flee Gaza altogether (and who have been able to make it out), and this amounts to a significant depopulation of the Strip, one which Israel seems intent on continuing via ongoing massacres, blockade and starvation. Meanwhile, Israel carries out its biggest land theft in 30 years in the West Bank.
This is what Israel is perpetrating in Gaza—an immense slaughter, an ethnic cleansing, the worst possible form of racist crime: genocide. Then there are those outside of Israel helping to enable and justify this racist atrocity, like the Australian government, the various Israel lobby groups, the corporate media.
They systematically dehumanise the Palestinian people, erase and delegitimise their suffering, oppression and aspirations for liberation. This, in turn, fosters racist abuse and discrimination against Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims in Australia. Moreover, the government signs a $917 million military deal with Elbit Systems, an Israeli manufacturer of fragmentation shells, to help kill more Palestinians.
This is the main form of racism we confront in Australia today: support for genocide.
