Anyone with an ounce of humanity and a pinch of political sense can see that the current Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is a farce. It is an open secret that it is a show trial of the Palestine movement. It is an echo chamber for some of Australia’s most ardent defenders of war crimes and genocide to talk about their hurt feelings. It is a fig leaf for the escalating assault on civil liberties and democratic rights.
Given all this, it was surprising that Yasmine Johnson, co-convenor of Students for Palestine and a member of Socialist Alternative, was accepted as a witness after almost all applications from Palestine solidarity groups to appear were denied. As one sympathetic supporter said on social media, “it was like matter meeting antimatter”.
The centrepiece of Yasmine’s testimony was that the Gaza genocide matters and that Palestinian lives matter more than the feelings of those who support their extermination (a word used by the United Nations Human Rights Commission to describe just one of Israel’s crimes against humanity). She spoke of the murder of six-year-old Hind Rajab and of listening to her last words before the Israeli military killed her and the medics dispatched to save her.
Hind Rajab (murdered): “I am scared. Please come take me”.
Red Crescent medic (murdered): “My darling, if it were in my power, I would come to you”.
As Yasmine said:
“It was that instance, but also many others like it, which compelled us to set up the [campus] encampments. Because we felt something had to be done to draw more attention to what was going on in Gaza.”
The genocide that Yasmine forced the royal commission to discuss had not been mentioned throughout the previous months of testimony. Yet, it has been right there, beneath the surface. Hours of heartfelt speeches and reflections, tears and tissues and sympathy from the commissioner and counsel have been dedicated to the hurt feelings of those who defend Israel and want to silence any resistance to it.
In the royal commission, genocide doesn’t matter—but opposing genocide is like a crime against humanity; a crime against the sensibilities of Zionism. Starving kids and burning cities are not relevant, but flags and slogans that call for freedom are traumatic symbols for those politically committed to the unfreedom and persecution of Palestinians and Arabs. As The Shot described it in May, an alternative name for it could be: “The royal commission into the hurt feelings of genocidal psychopaths”.
Yasmine constantly returned to the genocide, and the decades-long occupation and apartheid throughout Palestine. Yet the commissioner’s counsel never once asked her to elaborate. She seemed totally disinterested in discussing Yasmine’s “lived experience” of empathising with and fighting alongside people oppressed by a Jewish-supremacist state and harassed by far-right Jewish nationalists. Counsel could not have cared less about her compelling personal history and its connection with her activism:
Yasmine: “My grandmother lost every living relative in the Holocaust. This gives me a sense that being Jewish should mean fighting for that to be the end of genocide forever”.
Yasmine Johnson, co-convenor of Students for Palestine and a member of Socialist Alternative, testifies at the royal commission, 13 July 2026
Instead, counsellor Zelie Heger returned to the hurt feelings of Israel supporters, interrogating Yasmine on the use of slogans such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “There’s only one solution: intifada, revolution”. On behalf of our movement, Yasmine defended our right to speak these words of liberation and struggle, and condemned those trying to silence us:
Heger: “When you chant ‘Only one solution: intifada, revolution’, are you aware that for some members of the Jewish community, that language of one solution echoes the final solution adopted by the Nazis in the Holocaust?”
Yasmine: “I’m aware that that may be maybe interpreted in that way, but I think it’s a deliberate misinterpretation of what we’re saying. As I’ve said, we are the ones standing up against a genocide that is currently going on, and we’re saying that the solution, the way to end that genocide, is by standing up to it. And I think, in a way, it raises that no matter what slogans our movement raises, whether they be one solution or intifada or resistance, those things are turned into controversial words and phrases by people who oppose our movement for justice”.
It is clear that the royal commission is providing “anti-racist” cover for crackdowns on free speech and civil liberties. Just last week, federal antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal used the commission’s platform to further her campaign for a more authoritarian society. Her plan includes potentially denying visas to or deporting migrants who criticise Israel, promoting in schools a definition of antisemitism that equates criticisms of Israel with racism, and cutting funding to universities and arts organisations when Segal herself deems that they “fail to act against antisemitism”. Her latest proposal is to prevent the ABC and SBS from accurately reporting Israel’s crimes.
As Yasmine pointed out, universities are aggressively attacking free speech, often in the name of “safety”. The commission’s counsel regurgitated university management talking points in response:
Heger: “What do you say to the suggestion that these sorts of restrictions on protest activity are simply designed so that the universities have advance notice of such protest activity and can take whatever steps may be necessary in terms of planning and security?”
Yasmine: “This is not the way that these measures have been introduced or used. In my view, these measures have been introduced in the wake of legitimate protests for Palestine, and they’ve been introduced in an attempt to codify what is acceptable on university campuses. The restrictions on which words you can say on campus. On some campuses, you can’t say ‘from the river to the sea’. Even campuses outside of Queensland, where that’s banned on a state level now, and you can be arrested for saying ‘from the river to the sea’. But on other campuses, these words have been banned, or the word ‘genocide’ has been banned, or the word ‘intifada’ has been banned. I mean, these are not things that are primarily about protecting people. They are restricting our right to express opposition to Israel’s assaults on Gaza.”
The commission’s counsel basically cross-examined Yasmine from the outset. The line of questioning was in stark contrast to the way pro-Israel witnesses earlier in the day were treated. None of their assertions was challenged. And Students for Palestine’s lawyer was denied leave to cross-examine a witness who had included testimony about the supposed racism of a campus meeting featuring anti-Zionist Jewish speaker Rick Kuh. According to commissioner Bell, “lived experience” is subjective and therefore cannot be challenged.
Bell did, however, make it clear that she did not consider Yasmine’s “lived experience” worthy of the same respect. At one point she interrupted her counsel’s questioning to interrogate Yasmine on her Jewishness. It is worth reproducing the exchange in full:
Bell: “Miss Johnson, can I ask you a couple of questions just about your background? Did you grow up in a family that identified strongly as Jewish?”
Yasmine: “We talked about our background and our kind of history and so on. I went to a secular school. I went to a public school”.
Bell: “Do you have relatives who live in Israel?”
Yasmine: “I don’t, no”.
Bell: “When you were growing up, did you have an attachment to Israel in the sense of feeling some strong identification with Israel as the nation-state of the Jews?”
Yasmine: “I never felt that. In fact, my mother went to Israel as a younger person, and at the time felt that what Israel was doing was not right. She witnessed its oppression of Palestinians, and so no, I didn’t feel that this was connected to my background”.
None of the other witnesses had their identity interrogated like this. It was a disgrace—the commissioner herself implying, or at least leaning into the idea, that Jewishness might be associated with familial and/or political attachment to Israel. The Zionists might as well sit the rest out: the commission apparently has accepted their central claim that to be Jewish is to be Zionist and to support Israel, and therefore to be anti-Zionist or opposed to Israel is to be antisemitic and/or bring one’s Jewishness into question.
Yasmine was then cross-examined by the hardline Zionist organisation Australasian Union of Jewish Students. AUJS is a large Zionist student group that seeks to “promote a positive image of Israel on campus” and has a longstanding strategy of making complaints to university managers and federal ministers about Palestine solidarity activism on campuses.
The AUJS lawyer, Gabi Crafti, perhaps thought she was about to have some sort of John Grisham movie moment that would expose Yasmine as something other than a principled campaigner for justice. She led her down a long path, asking about the reach of Students for Palestine, the number of campus chapters, its social media presence and so on.
Crafti then asked Yasmine to repeat her earlier statements condemning the violence of the Israeli state. The killer blow was supposed to come when she introduced a speech Yasmine delivered at last year’s Sydney Socialism conference, titled “A socialist strategy to liberate Palestine”. Would Yasmine defend her claims that Israel must be destroyed, that the oppressed have the right to fight back, and that Hamas has given up on Palestinian liberation (the implication being that Hamas is not radical enough)? Yasmine held her ground and basically said yes, yes and yes.
Crafti: “You still say to this commission, pardon me, that Students for Palestine are the ones who stand against violence?”
(This from a lawyer defending those whose central argument is that they should be able to defend and champion an ongoing genocide without the interference of pesky student activists and morally attuned teachers who oppose it.)
Yasmine: “Yes, the violence going on in the world today, in terms of Palestine, is being carried out by Israel on an extreme scale. I mean, there have been 70,000 people killed in the last two and a bit years. There is a new report by the United Nations that finds that there has been systematic use of violence, including sexual violence, against Palestinian children. That is the violence that is going on right now. I’m for a world where that violence of colonial regimes occupying the land of another people and carrying out genocide and ethnic cleansing. I’m for a world where that violence no longer exists. So yes”.
Crafti: “But violence is okay. If it’s perpetrated against Israel, is that right?”
Yasmine: “I think the resistance of people against colonisation has always involved elements of both mass non-violence and also violent resistance. I think it’s hard to believe that there would be a contention that slaves did not have the right to use violence when opposing slaveholders, that there would be a contention that the struggle of Black South Africans against apartheid was somehow wrong because it was not perfectly non-violent violent in every instance, that the Vietnam War resistance movement of the Vietnamese people was somehow problematic in opposition to the world’s largest imperialist regime carrying out campaigns of mass murder and targeting of Vietnamese citizens. That those people should have quietly and peacefully only held up signs in opposition to their own oppression.”
Again and again, Crafti lunged. And again and again, Yasmine parried with the strength of her conviction: yes, Israel is a racist state whose existence denies the rights of Palestinians. And yes, the oppressed have the right to resist. The task of socialists is to figure out and debate which forms of resistance can liberate Palestinians and all oppressed peoples.
Stumbling and scrambling, the hapless AUJS lawyer was handed a note by her co-counsel. We can only speculate that it read something like: “Shut the fuck up. You lost”. Promptly, she ended the cross-examination. And so ended the time that a socialist spoke truth to power at the royal commission.
Yasmine is one of only two anti-Zionist Jews who have spoken at the hearings. Sarah Schwartz from the Jewish Council of Australia also spoke to counter the right-wing lies that underpin the commission. It is unsurprising, but disgraceful, that the voices of genocide supporters have been so amplified and venerated. It is also a disgrace that only Jewish witnesses are deemed worthy and that, to this point, no Palestinians or other non-Jewish members of the Palestine movement have been called to testify.
But what would we expect from this echo chamber in which genocide does not exist, facts are labelled as antisemitic tropes, and in which those organising against a genocide are smeared as racists? We should not expect any more socialists or radicals to be called before this farce, because our existence explodes their victim fantasy and exposes the whole thing for what it is.
God save the King, because no one can save the royal commission.
