A cloud hung over the Fair Work Commission in Melbourne today as the fourth hearing block of the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion convened in its offices. Not that anyone noticed the shadow it cast. Indeed, very little attention has been paid to the latest United Nations Human Rights Commission inquiry documenting Israel’s crimes against Palestinian children. The report, released last month and titled “The essence of childhood has been destroyed”, describes Israel’s security forces’:
- “deliberate targeting and killing of Palestinian children”;
- “use of torture, inhumane and degrading treatment, including sexual and gender-based violence, against Palestinian children”;
- “severe, multi-layered harm to Palestinian children’s survival, health, and development”; and
- “plan to destroy the biological continuity of the Palestinians in Gaza”
Following previous findings of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity—also mostly ignored, dismissed or denounced as antisemitic—the latest report finds that Israel is guilty of the following war crimes and crimes against humanity. This list is not exhaustive, but it is all specifically about children:
Extermination; murder; wilful killing; torture; sexual violence; persecution; enforced disappearance; inhuman and degrading treatment causing severe physical and psychological harm; outrages upon personal dignity; wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health through deliberate deprivation and violence.
The public record of charges by human rights organisations grows year by year and month by month, as the facts of the genocide overwhelm all reasonable opposition. Yet the motif running through the first witness testimonies in the commission today was that an attack on Israel is an attack on Jews in Australia—and because the Zionist movement feels this to be the case, it simply is the case. Dr Andy Smidt, an academic, said this outright during her appearance on the stand. Having lost the intellectual and factual argument about genocide, the establishment has found this brush with which to paint opponents of Australian foreign policy as racists, and defenders of barbarism as victims.
Australian supporters of Israel—none of them innocent children like those described in the UN report; all of them adults presumably with the capacity to reason and digest facts—complained not once about the destruction of Gaza or the slaughter, starvation and dislocation of Palestinians being carried out in their name by the Israeli government. Instead, the throughline was the inconvenience and trauma of witnessing opponents of genocide protesting on university campuses. We saw this play out previously during the 2024 Senate committee investigation into the campuses. The testimonies were transparently tendentious then, and remain so.
Today, the adults who testified to their purported lack of safety in the face of the student movement were allowed anonymity and granted immunity from cross-examination. That is, they received infinitely more protection than the children of Gaza. Commissioner Bell, presiding over the hearing, justified this on the basis that the testimonies recounted “lived experience” and thus were inherently personal and subjective. Therefore, any challenge to their veracity would strictly be out of bounds. To state the converse of a phrase made famous by US activist Ben Shapiro: in the royal commission, feelings don’t care about facts.
Having been provided this cover and protection, some testimony went much further than outlining subjective unease. They included claims that purported to be factual, and serious charges against Palestine solidarity activists, such as that “people were calling Jews baby killers”. This charge has been leveled more than once over the last few years but is yet to been substantiated on a campus. It feels like the scurrilous playbook used retrospectively to discredit the anti-Vietnam War movement. In that instance, a reactionary lie repeated often enough—that veterans were spat on by anti-war activists when they returned from combat—became a widely believed cultural myth.
Another witness, an adult using the pseudonym “ACJ”, claimed that the University of New South Wales was a “hostile environment” characterised by “vicious protests”. ACJ also claimed that anti-Zionism has nothing to do with Israel and is all about bullying Australian Jews. Because that’s how he feels, the royal commission could give no leave for anyone to challenge this wild and defamatory garbage.
At any rate, the focus on “lived experience” (is there such a thing as “unlived experience”?) itself gives the game away. A Royal Commission into the Facts of the Matter would have to contend with reality and allow for arguments to be put and claims to be tested. Under the terms of the existing royal commission a “hostile and unsafe environment” for Jewish people purportedly generated by student activists can be established simply by asking Jewish supporters of Israel how they feel, while disallowing any challenge to their statements.
The first witness of the day, Liat, again an adult granted parital anonymity, declared that she was “so scared” and shaking with fear from an Australian National University student meeting that pushed for the university to divest from weapons companies and break ties with Israeli institutions. Yet the meeting, she admitted, was actually on Zoom. Liat described herself as a “proud Zionist” who had become an executive member of the ACT Australasian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS). For those unfamiliar with campus politics, AUJS is the key, and highly aggressive, pro-Israel student group on university campuses, and a key organisation of the political right in the student movement. It held perhaps half a dozen counter-protests against the ANU Gaza solidarity encampment, according to one of the camp’s organisers. One of Liat’s complaints was that people held up Palestinian flags to their cameras when she spoke in the Zoom meeting. This purportedly was a form of antisemitic bullying.
Another purported instance of antisemitism was the student meeting refusing to endorse three AUJS motions to affirm that using the term “intifada” constitutes hate speech, to support a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, and to condemn Hamas. But Liat admitted that motions affirming the right of Jewish students to participate in and belong to the university community were accepted by the meeting. So AUJS’s political motions about Israel-Palestine failed to gain support, but their motions on inclusivity and antisemitism were supported. What, then, did Liat and AUJS do? They withdrew all the motions in protest—because their main concern was not antisemitism, but defending Israel and delegitimising resistance and/or opposition to it. Two years later, Liat came to the royal commission to denounce the episode as antisemitism.
Someone tell the children of Gaza to weep for the psycho-social safety of this Zionist desperately trying to undermine the anti-genocide movement. Someone tell the residents of Jabalia about this shaking with fear during an online meeting of anti-racist undergraduates in Canberra.
Another of Liat’s examples of purported antisemitism was the following:
Counsel assisting: “At paragraph 57 of your statement you also describe an incident that you experienced in the classroom, on one occasion. Can you tell us about that incident?”
Liat: “Yes. It was a political philosophy course, and I believe it was the last class of the semester, so I was very excited for the holidays. And we were looking at civil disobedience, and the tutor at the time posited that the encampment was a very exemplary illustration of the concept of civil disobedience. And I noted that the encampment had a very intimidatory and isolating effect on Jewish students, just truly not even a comment on the encampment itself, just saying I’m a Jew and I feel intimidated, and scared by the encampment at times. And the tutor again took a breath, leaned back in his chair, and said ‘Well, Israel’s dropping bombs on heads’. And then I said, ‘That’s not particularly relevant’. You know, as a Jewish Australian and as an Australian Israeli, I don’t think that’s necessarily the appropriate thing to say in that instance.”
Facts again. Irrelevant and inappropriate in a political science course. Worse, facts themselves are now evidence of antisemitism according to this idiotic testimony.
ACL, yet another adult hiding their identity, started her testimony by recounting her trips to visit family in Israel during the second intifada. It was very scary, she said, and relevant because of how she felt during the Gaza solidarity encampment at Melbourne University. There was a banner that said people had a “moral obligation to resist” the genocide. She complained to the university about this. That she couldn’t avoid the protests against Israel was the real antisemitic tragedy: when she went home after a hard day at uni, even TikTok was awash with clips of people opposing the genocide. Someone tell the orphans in Rafah. Tell them to walk a day in ACL’s shoes before shedding tears; tell them the horror of how she couldn’t escape anti-war sentiment, except by getting off TikTok.
The first complaint of Dr Smidt, who was mentioned above, recounted purportedly latent institutional antisemitism: a fellow staff member at Sydney University had taken a proactive approach to instituting a cross-cultural calendar that included Jewish and other holidays. But—and here was the sinister part—the calendar was never fully integrated into the university system and Smidt had to download it manually. Someone tell the fathers waiting days at checkpoints in the occupied territories as they desperately try to get their children medical care, only to be turned away—because to Israel they are worthless Palestinians. Someone tell them about this racist ordeal of a calendar that had to be manually downloaded.
But it got worse, according to Smidt. When Macquarie University Palestinian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah came to the Gaza solidarity encampment to host a teach-in for children, Smidt sent her 21-year-old son to video the event. Her son, another adult who can’t be named—perhaps he’s a dentist—was then bullied online as a paedophile. This of course is classic antisemitism, up there with the blood libel. An innocent Jewish mother sends her son to invasively video small children; what follows is a diabolical and tragic twist, and a hurtful and enduring canard: the mother’s son branded a pedo on Reddit. Someone tell the blinkered, biased UN Human Rights Commission that they missed this crime against humanity. Ask them how this family will ever recover their dignity and why this episode was ignored until now.
*****
While Gaza continues to be bulldozed, Tel Aviv continues to be backed by almost the entire Australian establishment, just as a previous generation of the Australian establishment backed Adolf Hitler all the way up to 1939, knowing full well the crimes that regime was committing. Unsurprisingly, the leading figures of that generation, such as Robert Menzies, continue to be lionised by today’s ruling class, which backs Israeli apartheid to the hilt.
There is more than an echo with that era—a rising far right being tailed or embraced by “traditional conservatism”, attacks on civil liberties, denunciations of communist conspiracies and enemies within. It is entirely legitimate to criticise a foreign government and oppose war crimes. So the establishment has attempted to use the guise of anti-racism to silence and intimidate opponents of Israel and critics of Australian foreign policy. The commission is part of a broader attack on civil liberties and free speech. It has very little to do with antisemitism, and much to do with attacking opponents of Australia’s bipartisan Middle East policy in general and the political left in particular.
