In a recent podcast, award-winning US journalist, author, and film maker Max Blumenthal underlined the importance of following up stories “that are on the public record, but not getting adequate attention”. A concerning example was explored in his podcast, titled “Australian Authorities: ‘Paid Actors’ Spreading Anti-Semitism from Abroad”.

This under-explored topic is particularly important to consider in the wake of controversial new laws in Australia which will require jail time for some specific terrorism offences: “Mandating minimum prison sentences were folded into the bill at the eleventh hour after Labor caved to the Opposition’s demands for stronger action against antisemitism, against the backdrop of a rise in antisemitic behaviour and attacks” ( Israel praises new Australian laws as critics warn of 'serious injustice' | SBS News)

Significantly, the Israeli Government has welcomed this legislation which has been just as quickly opposed by a variety of Australian actors (from social justice advocates and the Greens to a UNSW Law Professor, the president of the Law Council Executive, and the shadow minister for defence along with members of the crossbench) and which is at odds with Labor’s own party platform which has opposed mandatory sentencing.

The opposition of Liberal MP and Shadow Minister for Defence Andrew Hastie encapsulates a major ground for the concern: “I think it’s a foundation principle of our justice system that it is for the courts to decide punishment, not politicians… it can be downright dangerous for politicians to be deciding what punishments should be awarded in any case”. Hastie’s opposition is especially telling in that he is a prominent member of the Australian Liberal Party, which has vociferously campaigned for such legislation and which consistently weaponises what it regards as the ALP’s tardiness and lack of resolve in responding to antisemitism.

While the new laws apply to threats of violence against various groups, there is no doubt that the current sustained focus on antisemitism has fast-tracked this legislation. Which makes it all the more important — particularly in light of the frequent conflation of criticism of the state of Israel with antisemitism — that the nature and sources of antisemitism should receive as much focus as reflexive condemnation of it. Hence the spectre of “paid actors” who may be spreading antisemitism — a topic which has received little attention despite explicit reference to it both by Australian police and the Israeli government — should be an urgent corresponding priority for investigation.

In this context, it is also important to note the 2018 conviction in Israel of a young Israeli for multiple hoax bomb threats against Jewish institutions in the US and elsewhere — including Australia — and that despite also holding US citizenship, Israel refused the request of the FBI to extradite him and attempted to suppress his identity: “Michael Kadar [20 years old and a teenager at the time of the offences] was found guilty in June [2018] of about 2000 hoaxes between 2015 and 2017 that were so extensive they contributed to rising fears of antisemitism in the United States”.

In fact, Kadar also made robot calls issuing bomb threats to schools in Australia, and not only were Victorian police actively involved in securing the evidence for his conviction, they played a key role in so doing: “A spokeswoman for Victoria Police said Israeli police who made the arrest acknowledged that ’they could not have done it without us…. The Victoria police e-crime squad provided vital cyber evidence in the arrest of the Israeli suspect’.”

In light of the above, it is interesting that in January this year (in deploring the “scourge” of antisemitic attacks that “authorities struggle to contain”) The Times of Israel reported the view of Australian police that “these may be co-ordinated by foreign actors”. It also reported the statement of AFP Commissioner Reece Kershaw that “Australian Federal Police were investigating that overseas actors were paying local criminals to carry out attacks against the Jewish community”. This Times of Israel article simultaneously reported that according to the security agency Shin Bet, “dozens of Israelis have been arrested in recent months for accepting money from figures in Iran to graffiti cars and walls with anti-Israel or pro-Iran messages, and to torch cars”.

This, in combination with the prior 2018 Israeli conviction of one of its own citizens for serial bomb threats in Australia and the US, means that the question of “paid actors” – whether home grown (in the latter case within Israel itself) and/or overseas assumes additional dimensions. It also renders less startling the otherwise confounding question posed by Blumenthal: “Would it be antisemitic to investigate a certain settler colonial country whose existence is justified by the global proliferation of anti-semitism?”

Here it is also pertinent to note the shocking but plausible possibility (plausible because Israeli historian Ilan Pappe as well as former Palestinian ambassador Ali Kazak have confirmed Zionist attacks against Jews in the past) that the December 2024 attack on the Adass synagogue in Melbourne may have been carried out by the Israeli spy and intelligence agency Mossad: “We must determine who benefits from this criminal act. The only beneficiary is Israel…. Mossad agents who have a history of killing Jews and attacking synagogues when it serves Israel’s interests should not be ruled out.”

The politicisation, as well as literal weaponisation, of antisemitism also means that there is potential gain to be had by those who seek to exploit antisemitism for their own interests and purposes. Here it is relevant that prior to the revelation that convicted serial bomb hoaxer Michael Kadar is Israeli, his actions “stoked allegations by some American critics at the time that the Republican contender was encouraging anti-Semitism and other forms of racism (for which Trump [during his first term as US President] denied any such wrongdoing”). The potential applicability of this point to the Australian political landscape does not need to be spelt out.

What does need to be emphasised, however, are the extremely high stakes in the current period of the second Trump presidency (where, as Blumenthal notes, calls of antisemitism are and will be used “to actually criminalise pro-Palestinian solidarity activism in a way we have never seen before”.

The default and unremitting attempts to silence — on the grounds of an undifferentiated “antisemitism” — Australian journalists, commentators, students and anyone who speaks or even retweets statements of support for the Palestinian people in the face of the horror to which they are subjected by the state of Israel with Western government support is a blight on any pretence to procedural fairness, “freedom of expression” and indeed decency (as the current cancellation of cricket commentator Peter Lalor makes abundantly clear. As the latter’s subsequent dignified statement articulated, “[since] the IDF’s campaign in Gaza the majority of my retweeted posts have been about the suffering of Palestinians. The asymmetry of my retweeting reflects what can now surely be seen as the asymmetry of the suffering”; “I am moved by the deaths of innocents. That shouldn’t be too difficult a position to understand. I will continue to have sympathy for the suffering of the Palestinian people just as I will continue to be appalled by acts of antisemitism and terrorism”.)

That the state of Israel perpetrates and even in some respects benefits from the very antisemitism it purports to deplore (as claimed by Blumenthal and Kazak alike may be a hard proposition to countenance. So too is the related proposition (ironically confirmed by the conviction in Israel of one of its own citizens for multiple bomb hoaxes against Jewish institutions overseas including Australia) that antisemitic terror can be at the same time both home-grown — in this case incubated within the state of Israel itself — and “overseas assisted”.

But as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe declares in the preface of his most recent 2024 book, “Israel will not allow any show of solidarity with the Palestinians in Britain and the US, even by one person, to escape its radar, and will do all it can to push for the dismissal of every person who condemns its ethical violations… It will brand these activities as anti-Semitic and tantamount to Holocaust denial. In essence, this is the work of an aggressive lobby that began its political advocacy for Israel in the nineteenth century and still continues today. There are not many states, if there are any others at all, frenetically trying to convince the world and their own citizens that their existence is legitimate”.

As we know from the Australian context, the Israel lobby is no less “aggressive” and “frenetic” in its attempts to silence its critics. “Being an Israeli Jew”, Pappe goes on to say, “I know first-hand the toxic effect of such a propaganda effort – and the inertia that accompanies it’”.

Part of combating this inertia — as courageous Jews like Pappe, Blumenthal, and Melbourne-born Antony Loewenstein among others do indefatigably — is to insist that conflation of criticism of the actions and propaganda of the state of Israel with antisemitism per se is illegitimate. Whether home-grown and/or overseas aided — the product of “paid actors” and/or unpaid opportunists — the sources and roots of antisemitism also need to be exposed as consistently as they are routinely and reflexively condemned.