Inviting Israel’s president to Australia in the wake of the Bondi attack has blurred the line between antisemitism and legitimate criticism of Israel, weakening rather than strengthening social cohesion.

If the Australian Government is indeed serious about promoting social cohesion in the wake of the Bondi terror attack, then the decision to invite Israel’s President Isaac Herzog to visit Australia at such a traumatic moment in our history must be judged irresponsible.

Herzog represents a nation whose international reputation is now deservedly in tatters, and a government whose prime minister and former defence minister are subject to arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The International Court of Justice (ICJ) is currently seeking to determine whether Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, while a UN Human Rights Council Independent Commission of Inquiry has found that Israel both failed to prevent genocide there and to punish the military and civilian perpetrators of the crime. Herzog himself is widely considered to be at least partly responsible for triggering the indiscriminate violence against Gaza’s Palestinian population that followed the terrible events of 7 October 2023.

As if these were not reasons enough to refrain from inviting Herzog to come here, we have also to marvel, as many have, at the impropriety of inviting a foreign head of state personally to console grieving Australian families.

The government’s decision to do so has enjoyed far from unanimous support among Australian Jews, hundreds of whom signed an open letter opposing it. As Nomi Kaltmann put it in an article published in The Jewish Independent on 3 February: “President Herzog is not responsible for Australian Jews. We are not Israelis.” The visit, she believed, could only further divide Australians and reinforce the already “dangerous conflation of Australian Jews with Israeli politics.”

Lillian Kline’s response to this article is instructive. The argument, she says, “that this visit ‘blurs distinctions’ between Australian Jews and the State of Israel . . . gets cause and effect the wrong way around. For most Jews . . . our connection to Israel is not a political accessory. It is woven into our identity, history and peoplehood. That connection is not what fuels antisemitism. The refusal to accept it as legitimate is.”

Kline here gives expression to a view of antisemitism which builds on an idea of Israel as the physical embodiment of the collective identity of all Jews and which makes effectively no distinction between antisemitism and criticism of Israel. A misunderstood and persecuted people is now a misunderstood and persecuted nation state. The Australian Government may not necessarily buy this argument, but it is certainly under pressure to accept some version of it, and the timing and purpose of the Herzog visit – further fuelled now by Herzog’s own public remarks here – shows just how easy it is to stumble into its embrace.

Australia’s refusal to sign on to a recent joint statement condemning Israel’s demolition of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) headquarters in East Jerusalem provides further evidence of this dangerous trend. The statement, issued by such likeminded countries as Canada, France, Japan and the UK, urged the Israeli Government to abide by its international obligations both “to ensure the protection and inviolability” of UN premises and “to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip in accordance with international law.”

Australia has apparently made its concerns known privately to Israel and inside the UN but has given no reason for declining on this occasion to join countries it has previously partnered in publicly criticising Israel’s excesses. The decision was almost certainly driven by reluctance to put the Herzog visit at risk and thus perhaps to add, so soon after Bondi, to the burden of antisemitism that Australian Jews already carry.

The problem with this largely invisible ‘quiet diplomacy’ is that it leans too obviously into a Zionist construction of reality and pays too little heed to equally legitimate Australian community concerns regarding Israel’s abysmal treatment of Palestinians. It thus tends further to undermine social cohesion by implicitly accepting a link between antisemitism and broad-based international criticism of Israel which, when it comes to Israel’s egregious and systematic violations of international humanitarian law, simply is not there.

We may reasonably equate ‘anti-Israelism’ with antisemitism when it is driven by hostility to the existence of a Jewish state per se but, by and large, Israel’s critics are motivated not by blind prejudice but rather by what they perceive to be quite specific human rights-related failures on the part of the state of Israel.

The Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion will need to make its position on this issue clear sooner rather than later if it is to generate more light than heat. Defining what, for the purposes of the inquiry, constitutes antisemitism, will be a crucial first step. The influential working definition of antisemitism adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA) defines antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” The IHRA goes on to illustrate this extremely loose definition with a non-exhaustive list of examples, almost two thirds of which make substantive reference to Israel.

If the Royal Commission is to make any real progress on its mandate, it must be clear from the outset that Israel is not above criticism and that Jews are not always simply victims of other peoples’ misguided animosity. They, too, do sometimes orchestrate and/or facilitate actions which may themselves be hate-inspired, ethno-culturally specific and exclusionary, and which have as such much the same kind of impact on other ethnically defined populations that antisemitism has on Jews.

If things are to be made better rather than worse by generally worthy efforts to make Jews safer and more secure, both here and in other parts of the world, we would all do well to offer no further encouragement to ineluctably provocative notions of Israeli ‘exceptionalism.’