Throughout 2025, I served on Australia’s first parliamentary inquiry into society-wide antisemitism. When the Bondi terrorist atrocity occurred, we had yet to finalise a report, and I supported the decision to simply send our evidence to the Royal Commission.

A notable feature of our inquiry was the care taken to test evidence and contentions through robust questioning.

This included testing key witnesses vigorously as to the line between antisemitism and legitimate criticism of Israel, and on other key contentions and demands of Jewish representative groups of a Zionist perspective.

This didn’t please all the witnesses, for example, it led Lynda Ben-Menashe, president of the National Council of Jewish Women, to later publicly label me as “NSW’s Gaslighter-in-Chief”. This was for daring to even suggest that a wrongful conflation of Israel and the Australian Jewish community could be driving antisemitism.

In my limited observations so far of the Royal Commission, this degree of scrutiny seems not to be present, particularly when

witnesses have sought to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

The evidence in our inquiry made clear the absolute centrality in Zionist advocacy in Australia of this conflation, which is no new phenomenon, as former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban famously said of his work, “the chief task of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all”.

This conflation, however, seems to be worsening antisemitism.

Critising Israel not antisemitic
The Jewish Council of Australia spoke in their evidence of “a politicised and divisive discourse which seeks to label any criticism of Israel as antisemitic, thereby increasing antisemitism by linking Jewish identities to the state of Israel and its human rights abuses”.

A central insight I took from the inquiry is that political leaders need to exercise restraint and responsibility in not treating the Jewish community as a monolith (itself an antisemitic trope), but also in how we respond to political demands from pro-Israel Jewish representative groups.

We should undoubtedly treat these groups as important voices and witnesses on antisemitism and recognise their right to lobby, but if we subcontract the development of policy to them,

counterproductive policies focused on criticism of Israel will inevitably be the result.

This has certainly been the case with the appointment of Jillian Segal, someone, as I put to her in our inquiry, with no obvious expertise on the core question of how to reduce racism across a community.

Long before Bondi, Segal played a central role in demanding the banning of pro-Palestine protests from the CBDs of major cities, and she undoubtedly contributed to the divisive and unconstitutional post-Bondi ban on protests.

I challenged Segal in the inquiry on whether this demand was actually pernicious, because such bans would be unconstitutional and calling for them created fear and suggested the Jewish community was deliberately not being protected. She unsurprisingly disagreed.

Shared understanding missing
Another topic at the inquiry was the importance of dialogue at a community level, building shared understanding between communities sitting on each side of the conflict.

I put to a number of witnesses that perhaps this should be a two-way street.

On the one hand, non-Jewish communities are gaining an understanding of Jewish history, why Israel is so important to so many Jewish people and why the tropes of antisemitism are false.

On the other, Jewish people gaining an understanding of Palestinian history, which perhaps might reduce perceptions of antisemitism arising from Palestinian activism.

Segal was asked in this regard whether, “there might be a role for education within the Jewish community about the history of the Palestinian people” and tartly responded, “education is always valuable, but the focus of the plan is protecting Australians from hate, not asking vulnerable communities to adjust their sensitivity to it”.

Similar evidence emerged from Joshua Kirsch, a Jewish community advocate, of whom I asked:

“Do you think there are ways to deepen community understanding on both ‘sides’, if I can use that term, such that there can be a greater alignment of understandings, or greater understanding of the perspective of the other? We’ve heard evidence about perceptions of antisemitism having a pernicious influence themselves, and people interpreting things in a genuine way as antisemitism that is not intended as antisemitism is intended, for example, things that Palestinians might say about their situation.”

He answered, “I think my priority as a Jewish person, and I think as a person who is involved with Jewish organisations, is not to educate Jewish people about why their feelings are not valid.”

Indeed, what became clear in the evidence was that many of the political demands of pro-Israel groups actively

prevent the development of some semblance of a shared understanding of history.

This came up directly in the inquiry when I questioned Waverley Mayor Will Nemesh, whose council has adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which suggests that it is antisemitic to label Israel a “racist endeavour”.

“If you had a Palestinian resident who came to you and said, ‘I was expelled in 1967 from what is now Israel. I’ve been denied a right of return. I think Israel is a racist endeavour,’ is that resident an antisemite?”

Namesh replied, “There are strong views in terms of Israel and Palestine. What is crucial is understanding there are two peoples and both claim connection to the land. I think both are very valid”. 

It seemed to me that the IHRA definition could, in that public exchange, hardly be defended, because to do so would have been to directly and blatantly deny Palestinian history and identity to an absurd degree.

Yet inevitably, it will continue to be advocated for by many Jewish representative groups.

Zionist denials
In that vein, prominent Australian Zionist Alex Ryvchin attended the inquiry and directly denied that any ethnic cleansing had occurred during the formation of Israel.

A level of denialism, contradicted by the historical record, that is difficult to square with a dedicated commitment to inter-community dialogue. The evidence in our inquiry convinced me that ensuring our Jewish community is not conflated with Israel is central to dealing with growing antisemitism.

Callow future Australian political leaders might return from Israel impressed after free study tours, but the difficult, albeit obvious, truth is that Israel is an Apartheid state, founded on ethnic cleansing, a premeditated determination to create a Jewish super majority and then a denial of the right of return.

The world’s expert human rights organisations do not have this wrong.

These facts, the criminality of the destruction of Gaza and Israel’s increasingly expansionist tendencies, mean Israel will continue to attract a growing storm of criticism.

But Australia is a free society, and our Jewish community is allowed to be as supportive of Israel and Zionism as they wish. No other community in Australia is expected to distance itself from a country with which they identify, no matter how illiberal and criminal its government is, and it should never be demanded of any part of our Jewish community.

Ultimately, the only people responsible for the actions of the state of Israel are the officials of that state.

While most people will agree on this statement, the difficulty is found in how broader narratives and policies, including the conflation of criticism of Israel with antisemitism, impact across the community.

It is in this fiendishly difficult context that we look to Royal Commissioner Bell to chart a way out of the downward and divisive spiral we seem to be in.

She truly will need the wisdom of Solomon to unpick this knot of growing antisemitism in Australia.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Threats, intimidation and misogyny have long been a reality for women in public life around the world, and the pandemic appears to have amplified this toxic reality.

Aotearoa New Zealand is led by one of the world’s best-known female prime ministers, Jacinda Ardern, and was the first country in the world to grant all women the right to vote.

Yet even here today, attempts to silence, diminish and demean the prime minister, female MPs and other prominent women have plumbed new depths, leading to calls for more robust policing of violent online and offline behaviour.

Unfortunately, the phenomenon extends well beyond elected representatives and public health professionals into most workplaces, including academia.

Women working in universities, including those in positions of academic leadership, are also routinely subjected to online vitriol intended to shut them down — and thus to prevent them exercising their academic freedom to probe, question and test orthodox ways of making sense of the world.

One of the commonest defences of abusive or threatening language (online or not) is an appeal to everyone’s right to free speech.

And this has echoes within universities, too, when academic freedom becomes a testing ground of what is acceptable and what isn’t.

A duty to call it out
The international evidence indicates that almost all of this behaviour comes from men, some of them colleagues or students of the women concerned.

The abuse comes in various forms (such as trolling and rape or death threats) and takes place in a variety of settings, including conferences. It is enabled by, among other things, the hierarchical nature of universities, in which power is stratified and unequally distributed, including on the basis of gender.

Threatened scholars warn that online harassment risks academic freedom. Rebekah Tromble and Patricia Rossini feared for their safety when the conservative online world turned against them last summerhttps://t.co/FZYo1e8Qzf pic.twitter.com/WLPGRRzIe0

— Times Higher Education (@timeshighered) February 15, 2019

As male academics we have an obligation not just to call out these sorts of behaviour but also to identify some of the corrosive consequences of the misogyny directed against women academics, wherever they may work.

We need to use our own academic freedom to assess what can happen to that of academic women when digital misogyny passes unchecked.

Whose freedom to speak?
Misogyny in university settings takes place in a particular context: universities have a statutory obligation to serve as producers and repositories of knowledge and expertise, and to act as society’s “conscience and critic”.

Academic freedom is what enables staff and students to carry out the work through which these obligations are met. This specific type of freedom is a means to various ends, including testing and contesting perceived truths, advancing the boundaries of knowledge and talking truth to power.

It is intended to serve the public good, and must be exercised in the context of the “highest ethical standards” and be open to public scrutiny.

A great deal has been written about threats to academic freedom: intrusive or risk averse university managers, the pressures to commercialise universities’ operations, and governments bent on surveilling and stifling internal dissent are the usual suspects.

But when women academics are subjected to online misogyny, which is a common response when they exercise academic freedom, we are talking about a different kind of threat.

Opinion: Misgendering students is not “academic freedom.” It’s an abuse of power. https://t.co/AatNwzrnB1

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) April 1, 2021

Betrayal of academic freedom
The misogynists seek to silence, shut down, diminish and demean; to ridicule on the basis of gender, and to deride scholarship that doesn’t align with their own preconceptions of gender and body type.

Their behaviour is neither casual nor accidental. As journalist Michelle Duff put it, it is intended to intimidate “as part of a concentrated effort to suppress women’s participation in public and political life”.

Its aim is to achieve the obverse of the purpose of academic freedom: to maintain an unequal status quo rather than change it.

It is to the credit of women academics that the misogynists frequently fail. But sometimes the hostility does have a chilling effect. For a woman to exercise her academic freedom when she is the target of online threats to rape or kill requires considerable bravery.

Women who continue to test perceived truths, advance the boundaries of knowledge and speak truth to power under such conditions are academic exemplars. They are contributing to the public good at considerable personal cost.

‘Whaddarya?’
The online misogyny directed at women academics is taking place in a broader context in which violent language targeting individuals and minority groups is becoming increasingly graphic, normalised and visible.

We do not believe the misogynistic “righteous outrage” directed at academic women is justified under the statutory underpinnings of freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech — within or beyond a university — is not absolute, and to the extent that it is invoked to cloak violent rhetoric against women, existing constraints on that freedom (which are better thought of as protections for the targets of misogyny) need strengthening.

Men who engage in online misogyny almost always speak from an (unacknowledged) position of privilege. Moreover, by hiding their sense of entitlement behind core democratic notions, their self-indulgence does all of us a disfavour.

With academic freedom comes the moral responsibility to challenge misogyny and not stay silent. What so many women across New Zealand’s tertiary sector are subject to poses a challenge to men everywhere.

The kind of conduct our women colleagues are routinely subjected to is the sort of behaviour at the heart of Greg McGee’s seminal critique of masculinity and masculine insecurity in New Zealand, the play Foreskin’s Lament. In the final scene of the play, the main character stares out at the audience and asks: “Whaddarya, whaddarya, whaddarya?”

He might have been asking the question of every man, including those of us who work in universities.

Dr Richard Shaw is professor of politics, Massey University; Dr Andrew Dickson is senior lecturer, Massey University; Dr Bevan Erueti, senior lecturer — Health Promotion/Associate Dean — Māori, Massey University; Dr Glenn Banks is professor of geography and head of school, School of People, Environment and Planning, Massey University; Dr John O’Neill, head of the Institute of Education te Kura o Te Mātauranga, Massey University, and Dr Roger McEwan is senior lecturer, Massey University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz