A problematic definition

July 21, 2026

I write to congratulate Gareth Evans for urging the Royal Commission into the Bondi massacre to revisit the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism. As a co-author of a 2003 report on social cohesion in Australia after the 9/11 attacks in the USA (Cahill, D., G. Bouma, H. Dellal and M. Leahy (2004). Religion, Cultural Diversity and Safeguarding Australia. Canberra, ACT, Department of Immigration, Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs), I too regard this definition as highly problematic and have made a Submission to the Commission detailing my concerns.

One concern is that the definition does not specify that the behaviours to be proscribed must be directed to Jews as such. Evans’ addition of this specification to his proposed alternative definition is thus to be applauded.

A second concern relates to the understanding of Zionism. A common understanding of it is that it expresses a Jewish aspiration to a homeland, whose boundaries lie within those of ancient Israel, entitlement to which is by ancestral right, the rightful heirs of which are the Jewish people, legitimately represented by the modern State of Israel. This aspiration has even been argued to form a constitutive part of the Jewish identity.

The aspiration is understandable, the existence of ancestral ties of a certain kind clear, but the fulfilment of the aspiration in a land claim similar to Australian Aboriginal Land Rights claims seems very difficult to defend, and its guarantee in the Westphalian nation-state of Israel appears all but indefensible. An identity grounded in such a dubious claim as the last is in fact an ideological belief, and as such, its truth is not measured by the passion with which it is held. The legitimate aspiration to a homeland could be satisfied by Jewish participation in a pluralist state recognising the equal rights of other inhabitants of the relevant lands.

I am also concerned that outside the courts applicants of the definition as it stands are unlikely to have the regard to intent and context that Commissioner Bell assumes. To the community at large the problematic examples in the definition such as ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’ are likely to be taken at face value, in this case the implying that Israeli governments are so endowed with moral virtue as to be incapable of committing atrocities such as those committed by the Nazis, and therefore that the suggestion that any Israeli government may be doing so is eo ipso an antisemitic utterance.

A final observation. ‘Social cohesion’ is a mechanistic way of conceptualising the kind of unity that should bind a political community. ‘Freedom of speech’ is one of the goods that members of such a community can enjoy. Respect for one’s fellow members is an indispensable condition for enjoying that freedom. Undisciplined exercise of freedom of speech can only encourage disrespect of the targeted fellow members. Is the Bondi massacre not a reminder that we cannot have the mechanistic social cohesion on which our freedoms depend without the moral respect for each other which underpins our unity as a political community?