In today’s papers the Education Minister Jason Clare announced the decision to appoint a new National Student Ombudsman who will combat anti-Semitism at Australia Universities. He explained that Jewish students “don’t feel safe at university” and that it was obvious that antisemitism was a serious problem at tertiary institutions.
Clearly these are difficult times for Australia’s Jewish communities with tensions rising within families, communities and congregations. But do we need another government official to work alongside the recently appointed antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal and who will have the power – and we must assume the funding and the staff to launch separate investigations. The minister seems to be unaware of what he is proposing — the appointment of a government official to act as a political censor inside the universities to control what can be said or promoted. Will teachers have to present texts of their lectures on demand? Will the Ombudsman look for suspect books in libraries? Does the minister have any concern about institutional autonomy?
And all the minister has come up with is that some students “don’t feel safe” on our campuses. Safe from what? And how many students? And, more to the point, how many of our 37 public universities is the minister referring to? Has he any idea himself?
The only direct evidence he adduces is that students at the major universities had set up pro-Palestine encampments and that that was “where some of the worst reports of antisemitism had come from”. I don’t imagine the minister actually visited any of the camps and talked to the students involved. In all likelihood, he would have depended on second- and third-hand reports passed on by the Jewish organisations.
I made several visits to the camp at the University of Tasmania, talking at length with the participants. I don’t know how representative they were of students on other campuses. But there was little evidence of, what might be called classical antisemitism, that is hostility to the Jewish religion, customs or language. Their concern was not with Jewishness at all, but with the actions of the state of Israel about which they knew a great deal and they followed the news from the Middle East with profound concern.
And this is where so many of our current problems arise. In much of the public debate criticism of Israel is conflated, and quite deliberately so, with antisemitism even though many Jews are highly critical of the Netanyahu Government and of the whole Zionist Project. They are traditionally dismissed as “self-hating Jews”. And the conflation is often compounded. Opponents of Israel are accused, almost as a matter of course, of support for Hamas and, by further implication, being fellow travellers with terrorism. But the problem with this logical elasticity is that it can be turned in the opposite direction and, as a result, led to the assertion that defenders of the Israeli onslaught in both Gaza and the West Bank are complicit with genocide, apartheid and war crimes. Like it or not, this is an assessment of the situation, global in its reach. What is more it has behind it the precise legal definitions employed by the world’s peak judicial bodies, the ICJ and the International Criminal Court, in recent opinions about Gaza and the West Bank.
It is in these circumstances that antisemitism, however defined, provides a refuge from the condemnation of the world and an effective barrier against self- reflection. And this is the way it is being used by Clare and the Albanese Government, the Coalition Opposition and the mainstream media. The recent release of a selection of DFAT papers under Freedom of Information relating to advice provided to the government about the situation in Gaza and the West Bank told us a lot about the tactics used to mollify criticism of Israel. As a result, the public has no idea how critical our professional diplomats are of Israel and the “catastrophic” situation in Gaza. The documents present what journalist Michael West called “a litany of war crimes”. What we can conclude from this sample of DFAT advice is that expert opinion is very similar to the views expressed by student activists on the university campuses. What can we make of this? Is DFAT a hive of antisemitism and covert supporters of terrorism?
Well, perhaps not, but it raises the question about the advice provided by other departments and, in particular, by attorney-generals. Several P&I correspondents have remarked recently on the failure of the Attorney General Mark Dreyfus to provide adequate guidance to the Australian public about the significance of the recent decisions of the ICJ and the International Criminal Court. It is clearly a case where silence amounts to negligence. The need of the community to be given expert intelligence on these subjects is a pressing matter, given that since 2002 international crimes such as genocide, crimes against humanity and apartheid have been incorporated in Australian criminal law. They can no longer be ignored as crimes that only have purchase “over there”. Which brings us to the highly contentious matter of Australian citizens who are fighting with the Israel Defence Forces. The government and, we assume, the leading Jewish organisations, know how many people are involved, but it is a matter wrapped in the tightest security.
It is symptomatic of the way in which the profound tragedy of Gaza has opened up the latent contradictions in Australia’s foreign policy and the manner in which we present ourselves to the world. We have tried for a long time to hold together two different things: our deep and close relationship with Israel — one of our “forever friends” — and our commitment to human rights and what we call the rules-based international order. Since October 2023, we have dithered as the cracks in the façade have grown wider by the week. Do we know how we can, certainly in this generation, return to our habit of preaching far and wide about human rights and scold other countries who we like to think have fallen by the wayside? Members of the present government can’t even utter the word genocide and believe that antisemitism is the most serious problem we have to deal with. Meanwhile, the world looks on amazed by the high-end hypocrisy about which our leaders seem to be scarcely aware.
Henry Reynolds is an eminent Australian historian.
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