Antisemitism did not spring up here as suddenly and as localised as a field of mushrooms. It is, above all, a by-product of Israel’s endless onslaught on the people of Gaza which one and all can watch as a daily horror show.

On 20 May, Stuart Rees published an essay in Pearls and Irritations with the heading Inaccessible, indifferent, out of touch? which outlined his attempt to establish some communication with the vice-chancellor of the ANU, Professor Genevieve Bell, in relation to a meeting that had been held at the university three weeks earlier which had addressed the question Vote for humanity, Why Genocide is a Key Election Issue? He wished to discuss significant questions in relation to the meeting, including the campaign of Jewish organisations, amplified in The Australian, which asserted that the eminent speakers at the meeting were driven by rampant antisemitism. A reasonable request we might have thought, but the lack of response by Professor Bell suggested that rather than welcoming a meeting to discuss one of the great moral issues of the moment, she wished discussion about the fate of the Palestinians would just go away.

This re-awakened my interest in the Statement on Racism issued by Universities Australia on 27 February which included the highly contested definition of antisemitism developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Having spent my whole career teaching Australian politics and history and researching across the wide field of racial thought and politics, I found many reasons to wonder what had happened to the leadership of the nation’s universities. It was hard to know where to begin.

The Universities reacted almost instantly to a report of parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights released to the media on 12 February. Its most consequential finding was that there was an “urgent need” for reform to ensure the “safety of Jewish students” and that the universities should adopt a definition of antisemitism in line with the document of the IHRA. Ten days later, Universities Australia met and decided to do as instructed. All 39 universities were to adopt the definition and embody it within their workplace regulations. What an extraordinary precedent! What a signal to future governments! All the public universities can simply be told how to manage their affairs, not just be presented with recommendations. The implication was that the Senate Committee knew more about all 39 universities than they did themselves. The deep divisions arising directly from Israel’s savagery, already characterised by the ICJ as a probable genocide, encouraged Universities Australia to jump right in rather than facilitate a process of campus-wide deliberations. Did any of the universities consult their own staff? Were there campus-wide debates? Were the complex moral and intellectual questions involved ever construed as might be expected in our universities? Did the leadership even know or even care about what their staff thought? The decisions were made from above as might be expected in a corporation by the board and the chief executive and just imposed from on high.

Was the perceived problem of the discomfort of Jewish students present everywhere in Australia? In all 39 campuses? Were they even consulted? Was there even time for consultation? Did the desire to appease the parliament and the Murdoch media overwhelm every other instinct, even the need to think all the matters through? That was the least we might have expected from universities who all aspire to intellectual vitality. And autonomy? Can anyone take that seriously anymore now that all 39 universities march to the same tune conducted by a handful of senators? Conservative Australians with Trump-like ambitions must be watching it all with keen interest and assume that the universities are a push over.

Clearly one of the problems which the promoters of the IHRA definition of antisemitism wanted dealt with was the almost insurmountable problem of grappling with the great conflation – the difficulty of separating criticism of the state of Israel, on the one hand and anti-Jewish animus on the other. If anything, the chosen definition lacks clarity and has too much ambiguity. Both sides of the argument can find encouraging words and phrases. But there is a much more challenging problem for administrators seeking to find a means to shield Jewish students from perceived and undeserved hostility.

The problem has never been a local Australian one. Antisemitism did not spring up here as suddenly and as localised as a field of mushrooms. It is, above all, a by-product of Israel’s endless onslaught on the people of Gaza which one and all can watch as a daily horror show. How could it be otherwise? Widespread student revulsion, twinned with moral outrage, may trouble university administrators but whatever on earth did they expect? It would have been easier to ignore or repress if the ICJ and the International Criminal Court had not issued a series of devastating decisions about Israel. They came out one after another – probable genocide, indictable war crimes, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and illegal occupation of Palestinian territory.

Israel has two defensive shields. The iron dome provides protection against missiles and drones – antisemitism does the same for criticism and judgment. It is an intellectual and moral iron dome. Israel’s leaders dismiss every political and moral attack as an embodiment of antisemitism, regardless of where it came from. Most of the states in the UN General Assembly have been infected with the virus which had also taken hold of all the jurists on the ICJ bench. The country believes that it suffers from the consequences of an intellectual pandemic of unprecedented global reach. Gideon Levy, the great Israeli journalist, recently discussed the way in which the whole community protected itself against the horror unfolding a few kilometres away. Nothing, he wrote, “will crack the protective wall Israelis have built around themselves…nothing in Gaza evokes any guilt”.

What happens in Israel reverberates in Australia. Many members of the Jewish community have joint citizenship. They are people with two homelands. This should not surprise us. Within living memory, older Australians still felt the same way about mother England referring to a journey back to Britain as “going home”. It is a fair-minded assumption that many Jewish Australians are Israeli patriots and are deeply concerned as the country is increasingly regarded as a pariah state isolated on the lonely trail once walked by South Africa.

Universities Australia and the 39 vice-chancellors took up the banner of antisemitism to make life easier for Jewish students. In doing so they helped strengthen Israel’s protective walls. Conflation was unavoidable. Collusion perhaps, but more likely political naivety for most, if not all, of those involved. But it leaves our whole university sector complicit in the greatest human rights catastrophe since World War II. It matters more now, much more, than it did just six months ago. There is now across many Western countries what Guardian correspondent Owen Jones termed “a reckoning” when Israel’s enablers will face the judgment of history.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.