There isn’t much space set aside for the truth at the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion. You have to really look for it, buried in day after day of spurious testimony by prejudiced witnesses who have little interest in the facts.
Sometimes a little bit of the truth slips out, though, as in this week’s testimony from the acting University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Glyn Davis. Davis’s own account inadvertently undermined the widespread establishment narrative that Palestine solidarity activism unleashed a torrent of antisemitism on the campuses.
The University of Melbourne Gaza solidarity encampment in 2024 was one of the most high-profile of the national wave of encampments that provoked a backlash from the political right and widespread media hysteria.
At the time, May 2024, deputy vice-chancellor Michael Wesley, who was tasked with addressing the media and issuing threats of discipline to the protesters, told Radio National that “there is antisemitism on campus”. He condemned the student occupation of the Arts West building as “intimidating” and said he could “only imagine how our students, particularly our Jewish students, would feel having to make their way to class through that”. University Council member Mark Leibler went further in an Australian article the same month, demanding recognition of a “crisis” of antisemitism on the campus.
Yet on Wednesday, under questioning by Rachel Doyle, counsel for the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, Davis confirmed that not a single disciplinary process against any student Palestine solidarity activist related to the university’s anti-racism policy. When Davis was asked which university rules protesters had broken, the following exchange took place:
Davis: “They are student behaviour questions and they’re about heckling and harassment and treatment of individuals. They’re not necessarily antisemitic and they’re not claimed to be antisemitic”.
Doyle: “Indeed you point to no instance, wherein either the encampment on the South Lawn or the protest activity and encampment in the Arts West Building was found to have constituted a breach of the university’s racism policy. There’s no such instance is there?”
Davis: (After some waffling) “I’m not aware of any complaint of antisemitism in either event”.
So the biggest issues stemming from the encampment were related to behaviour like “heckling”. This is proof that the accusations of antisemitism levelled at the encampment had no factual basis. They were attempts to smear and marginalise critics of university and government policy, rather than protect students from racism.
Those who haven’t had the time to watch the royal commission’s proceedings have likely missed this entirely, because the media has failed in its basic duty to hold the process to account and subject its underlying framework and claims to scrutiny. No mainstream media outlet is pointing out the massive discrepancy between the claims levelled at the encampment and the facts.
Media coverage of Davis’s testimony instead uncritically echoed the line that university vice-chancellors endangered students by showing an indulgent attitude toward rabid protesters. So the Australian somewhat predictably reports: “VCs in the dock: unis caught napping when hate came to campus”.
But short of indulging protestors, Davis explained in his testimony the lengths the university has gone to suppress legitimate opposition to Israel’s assault on Gaza. This included using Wi-Fi services to geo-locate and identify student protesters so that they could be hauled in front of disciplinary committees. Davis admitted as much when the Victorian information commissioner found that the university broke privacy laws. But the university simply modified its terms of use in order to continue the practice.
Rachel Doyle’s questioning also unearthed new university guidelines that empower campus security to cover and remove student posters deemed “offensive”. Yet the definition of what constitutes “offensive” material is apparently confidential. So students aren’t allowed to know what they can and can’t say or advertise.
While Davis conceded these damning facts, he still did as much as possible to stick to the script. Davis maintained that activists have held the Jewish community collectively responsible for the actions of the state of Israel: “I’ve found ... distressing the conflation of the Jewish identity with the actions of a nation state”.
Some nerve. While the Palestine solidarity movement has worked relentlessly to explain the distinctions between Judaism, Zionism and the state of Israel, institutions and individuals committed to defending Israel have worked just as hard to conflate the three.
The University of Melbourne was the first in the country to adopt the discredited International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which has been criticised by more than 100 human rights groups for blurring the line between criticism of Israel and antisemitism. And the entire royal commission has been based on the outrageous premise that identification with the state of Israel is such an inextricable element of Jewish identity that an attack on Israel effectively constitutes an attack on Jews.
Like almost every witness called before the royal commission, Davis didn’t really have anything to say about the plight of the starved, bombarded and besieged Palestinian population. Nor did he have much time for introspection about the reasons hundreds upon hundreds of Melbourne University students might have felt compelled to face the threats of slander, academic discipline and arrests to register their opposition to university policy and the federal government.
But he does have some regrets. Davis bemoaned the fact that the university lacked its own police force and that he was unable to convince Victoria Police to take more aggressive action to clear out student protesters. Perhaps he would like to see the importation of the “American model” of university anti-racism, where police keep the community safe from controversial ideas, with extreme prejudice.
