The promotion of antisemitism as a diversion from what is happening in Palestine is a deliberate activity which must be understood by all Australians, particularly voting age Australians.

What must be understood is this. Antisemitism is a derogatory concept. To call someone an anti-Semite is to convey a defamatory imputation about that person. It is to say something about that person which would tend to cause ordinary reasonable people to think less of the person, it is to stigmatise. That is the essence of what is defamatory. I shall come back to this concept.

Apparent antisemitic attacks or hate crimes on Jewish schools, homes, and. synagogues appear to have taken off in the last month or two. The attacks can be principally described as arsonist attacks and spray painting of antisemitic graffiti on such buildings. Our politicians, and the mass media, have had a field day of indignation, and pushback, which needs to be properly considered. The outrage, however, appears to be largely directed at the presumed perpetrators, namely pro- Palestinian activists, and the sympathy that is aroused is for the Jewish community in Australia, and through them, to the Jewish inhabitants in Israel.

It is important to recognise that clear-cut antisemitic acts such as the graffitiing of a synagogue with swastikas must be condemned: and Australians would so condemn. The question is, who should be condemned? A misconception of what is happening here could just be the vehicle for engendering anti-Palestinian racism.

I wish to start with a view that I have expressed before, namely, that antisemitism is a rare concept in the Australian scene. It may have existed to a degree in a pre-boomer generation. But in my lifetime - I am a boomer - it has barely existed. When I speak of antisemitism, I speak of antisemitism as traditionally understood - the dislike/hatred of Jews as Jews. I mean by that hostility directed to Jewish peoples characteristics and appearance, such tropes as greed and mendacity, the crooked money lender, the trope of the power broker. By way of example. I refer to the literary characters of Shylock the money lender in The Merchant of Venice, and Fagin, from Dickens Oliver Twist. That traditionally understood meaning of antisemitism has no doubt further developed to include white nationalism and its inherent racism.

I must then add that this traditional meaning is not that advanced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Associations (IHRA) definition, which seeks to promote criticism of Israel and Zionism as evidence of antisemitism and as anti-Semitic. The IHRA definition is highly contentious and has not been accepted by the English High Court as assisting as to the meaning of antisemitism for defamation purposes. Neither has it been so accepted in Australian law. In other words, to say of someone that they are critical of Israel and Zionism is not to say of that person something which would tend to cause ordinary reasonable people to think the less of that person, i.e. is not defamatory. It is not antisemitic.

Supporters of Israel notoriously seek to weaponise the allegation of antisemitism against pro-Palestinian activists by confusing that which is defamatory with that which is not. They seek to conflate antisemitic violence with peaceful Palestinian solidarity demonstrations. To call someone who is a pro-Palestinian activist who is critical of Israel/Zionism an antisemite is to wrongly defame that person.

And so, I come back to the recent spate of activity directed at the Jewish community. Who is doing it? There are a number of possibilities.

First: first of all, there is the traditional anti-Semite, the right-wing racist, the white nationalist or supremacist, who, it would be widely agreed, should be condemned if it was actually they who are responsible. It might be added that this group has possibly been emboldened recently by the election of Donald Trump and his promotion of the far right billionaire Elon Musk.

Second: then there is the pro-Palestinian activist, acting out of anger at the conduct of Israel, as an illegal occupier and committer of genocide. To not differentiate between these first two groups is to weaponise antisemitism, or stigmatise.

Third: finally, there is the one group that does not immediately come to mind, but which, on considering, has the potential to benefit from encouraging a negative attitude towards Palestinians and their supporters, namely Zionists themselves. Oh, you might say, how could Jewish people conduct themselves in this way? Let me give you an example taken from Illan Pappes recent work A Very Short History of the Israel Palestine Conflict (pp. 78- 79]. Pappe addresses the late 1940s and 50s, a time when the Zionist movement needed to get Jews to Palestine to populate a Jewish state. It was necessary to encourage the Iraqi Jewish community to leave Iraq and emigrate to Palestine. To quote from Pappe: (t)he Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, conducted false flag terror operations to sow fear among the Jewish community, including planting bombs in synagogues and other community centres (in Iraq). Such rationalising by Zionist extremists could well embrace the recent acts of apparent antisemitism in Australian cities.

As against those possibilities, we have the announcement by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) that they are investigating whether overseas actors or individuals may have paid local criminals in cryptocurrency to carry out antisemitic attacks inside the country. Readers will make up their own minds as to which of the three groups previously identified is more likely to be situate overseas.

I wish to add that I’m not asserting that Zionist interests are responsible. I am only asserting that no one should presume that any particular interest group is responsible, and by presuming this current recent activity is antisemitism, our politicians are so presuming presuming that it is one of the first two categories, or both. If the recent actions are in fact initiated by Zionist entities it is inaccurate to label the actions as antisemitic. And if the public might think that one of the perpetrators was a pro-Palestinian activist, it was incumbent on the politicians or mass media to point out that being pro-Palestinian is not per se antisemitic.

Let us hope that the police, unhindered, will get to the bottom of the matter, i.e., just who is responsible, and to deal with it decisively.

Related articles:

A fizzled campaign to muzzle free speech, Peter Slezak, Larry Stillman, Martin Munz, April 11 2023

The perfect recipe for a real antisemitism crisis, Caitlin Johnstone, Feb.17, 2024

Israel and the weaponisation of antisemitism, Paul Heywood-Smith, Feb.19, 2024

Anti-Semitism, a pandemic of concocted claims, Stuart Rees, Dec. 21, 2024

Who feels unsafe and why? Alison Broinowski, Jan.25, 2025

Anti-semitism rise obscures more slaughter in Gaza, Stuart Rees, Jan. 26, 2025