By Jeremy Salt

Jeremy Salt argues that accusations of antisemitism are being weaponized in Australia to deflect from Israel’s genocide in Gaza, suppress Palestinian solidarity, and shield Zionist organizations and state policy from accountability.

One objective of Australia’s ‘Royal Commission on Anti-Semitism and Social Cohesion’ will be to explain “the circumstances surrounding the antisemitic Bondi terrorist attack on 14 December 2025.”

As Naveed Akram, the surviving gunman, refused to speak to police when in hospital and as nothing he might have said since has been made public, his precise motives remain unknown.

By describing the Bondi attack as “antisemitic,” the government is prejudging the outcome of legal proceedings.

‘Antisemitic’ implies hatred of Jews for no other reason than that they are Jews, but retaliation for the massacres in Gaza against Jewish supporters of Israel, if this was Naveed Akram’s motive, would surely put the Bondi attack in a separate category.

Even so, the murder of civilians in Bondi cannot be morally justified any more than the murder of civilians in Gaza can be, no matter the immense difference in the scale of the killing. In particular, there is no justification for the murder of children, for one child in Bondi, as it happened, and thousands in Gaza.

Australian Palestinian and Muslim community associations have uniformly condemned the attack, if the Gaza genocide was the reason. At the same time, the question is raised of innocence and how far responsibility for genocide extends, beyond the government ordering it and the soldiers carrying out its orders.

Do ‘ordinary’ people who ‘support’ a genocidal state and know what the state is doing as the genocide is being committed have some responsibility?

On the basis of Daniel Goldhagen’s arguments, they do. In his 1996 book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Goldhagen ascribed collective guilt to the German people.

The question of what or how much they knew has, since 1945, engaged German and other historians. As Hitler had frequently advertised his determination to wipe out European Jewry, the German people certainly knew what he wanted.

Against postwar arguments that Germans did not know where the government’s exterminationist policies were leading, Goldhagen argued that they did know and ascribed the participation of ‘ordinary’ Germans in mass murder to an “eliminationist antisemitism” deeply rooted in German culture.

With all means of communication controlled by the German state, it is clear that the capacity of ‘ordinary’ Germans to know what was going on around them was severely circumscribed. This was particularly true of the early years of the war. By 1943, however, it is generally agreed amongst historians that they had a much clearer idea of how the deportations of Jews to the east were ending.

The comparison with the information flow from Gaza could not be greater. Protection of Israel by the ‘legacy’ media in the past two years was quickly overwhelmed by the mass of information pouring out of Gaza through social media.

Much of it came from Israeli soldiers themselves. Despite the censorship of their government, ‘ordinary’ Israelis could not not know what was going on, even if they chose to blame Hamas.

Polls taken in the past year show that the great majority (about 80 percent) fully supported the onslaught on Gaza. They regarded the military as doing a good, if not an excellent, job, despite the evidence of the mass destruction of civilian infrastructure and life. There was very little criticism.

Evidence shows that many ‘ordinary’ Israelis justified the mass killing of Palestinian civilians or believed they deserved it. In social media posts and mainstream media, some even celebrated or mocked it. This surely indicates the presence of an “eliminationist antisemitism” deeply rooted in Israeli history and Zionist ideology.

What about Jews outside Israel? While some have taken a strong stand against the genocide, the majority appear to remain aligned with the Israeli state. Peak Zionist organizations continue seeking to implicate all Jews in Israel’s crimes.

The Zionist Federation of Australia (ZFA) says on its website that it advocates for Israel “on behalf of the Australian Jewish community.” In fact, the ZFA is not a representative body of the “Australian Jewish community”: it speaks only for itself and acts, as it admits, as an agent for the interests of a foreign government.

ZFA president Jeremy Leibler claimed recently that “the overwhelming majority of Australian Jews are Zionists. ” Based on polling, according to Leibler, 72 percent have supported Israel and the IDF since October 7, 2023, 25 percent of them “uncritically,” which can mean nothing else but support for the annihilationist policies declared openly by the government of Israel and put into effect by the Israeli military.

‘Support’ for Israel also comes from global Chabad organizations. The Australian Chabad ‘house’ arranged the ‘festival of light’ at Bondi, which was targeted by Naveed Akram and his father.

Eli Schlanger, one of the two murdered Chabad rabbis, visited Israel during the obliteration of Gaza and the massacres of its people. He was filmed bonding with Israeli soldiers, cooking for them, dancing with them, kissing them, sitting inside an armoured car, holding an assault rifle and even cradling a missile such as might be fired into the Gazan civilian population.

All of this was totally consistent with Chabad support for the Israeli military. Alone among Hasidic movements, currently protesting in huge numbers against conscription in Israel, Chabad supports enlistment in the military.

Most religious activities within the military are sanctified by Chabad rabbis. On the grounds of the old pretext of ‘national security,’ Chabad is totally opposed to any withdrawal from occupied Palestinian territory. It campaigns for the ‘return’ of Jews to all parts of ‘eretz Israel’, naturally including the West Bank and Gaza, where Israeli soldiers were quick to fly a ‘Chabad house’ banner from a partly destroyed building soon after Israel began waging its war of obliteration.

In occupied Hebron, on the West Bank, the Chabad House hosts soldiers at Friday evening meals and delivers food and drink when they are on duty. According to its website, Chabad Hebron brings “warmth, love and wisdom to local on-duty soldiers and residents as well as countless visitors and pilgrims” as part of the “global Chabad army” that is preparing the world for the “coming of Moshiach” (the messiah).

These “soldiers and residents” have committed some of the worst crimes on the West Bank. The city has been slowly strangled by occupation ever since 1967. The Israeli journalist Gideon Levy once described the daily bullying, intimidation, and violence of Palestinians by soldiers and settlers as a pogrom. In the Russian ‘pale of settlement’, pogroms lasted for a few days; in Hebron, the pogrom has continued for 59 years. This is what Chabad is involved in.

The Israeli headquarters of the Chabad movement, Kfar Chabad, was built in 1949 on the land of the ‘depopulated’ (ethnically-cleansed) land of the village of Al Safriya, close to Lydd, occupied in 1948 and now known as ‘Lod.’

Chabad has about 5000 ‘houses’ globally. The world headquarters, Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York, welcomed the open genocidalist Itamar Ben-Gvir when he visited the US in April 2025.

The Chabad rabbi Shmully Hecht sponsored the talk he gave to the Shabtai society at New Haven, not right on the Yale campus but founded nearby by former Yale staff or graduates. Jewish pro-Palestinians were among the hundreds of people who protested outside as Ben-Gvir gave his talk.

Jared Kushner and his brother Joshua, the oligarch Roman Abramovich, the late Sheldon Adelson, and his wife Miriam are among those in the billionaire class who have donated millions to Chabad activities, including the Chabad presence in the occupied Palestinian territories and on the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, where it has established another ‘house.’

The trial of Naveed Akram may reveal whether the involvement of Chabad was a specific reason for the Bondi attack. If so, it would not be the first time Chabad has been targeted. In 2008, six people, including two rabbis, were killed at Mumbai’s Chabad House during a wave of attacks by Pakistani militants associated with the Lashkar-i Taiba jihadist group.

In November 2024, three Uzbeks abducted and murdered a Chabad rabbi in the UAE in what a court described as “terrorist activity.” In recent years, two Chabad rabbis have been wounded in street attacks in the US and France.

While condemning the Bondi murders, the Australian Labor government and the Liberal opposition have remained basically supportive of Israel during the genocide. Neither has taken any punitive action or even condemned Israel for what are widely regarded as some of the worst war crimes and crimes against humanity in modern history.

Instead, the government and the media concentrated on a reported upsurge in the number of antisemitic attacks in Australia. This led to the government’s appointment of a special envoy to combat antisemitism, Jillian Segal, a past president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), which, along with the ZFA and the AIJAC (Australia Israel Jewish Affairs Council), functions primarily as a propaganda outlet for Israel.

After Israel began its attack on Gaza, Segal opposed a UN resolution calling for a ceasefire, criticized Foreign Minister Penny Wong for calling on Israel to end its attacks on hospitals, and sought an end to anti-genocide protests in Australian cities.

Segal’s 20-point plan to combat antisemitism recommends the government’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which conflates it with anti-Zionism.

If written into Australian law, there can be little doubt that it would be quickly used to criminalize public demonstrations of support for the Palestinians.

Prime minister Anthony Albanese recently followed Segal’s appointment by inviting the president of Israel, Isaac Herzog, to visit Australia, despite the ICJ’s interim ruling against Israel and the ICC’s indictment of its prime minister for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Against widespread public opposition to Israel, government decisions favouring a genocidal state or its propagandists can hardly be said to be doing anything for the royal commission’s ‘social cohesion’ except damage it.

At the same time as setting up a royal commission into antisemitism, the government has tabled the “Combatting Anti-Semitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026” in Parliament.

Against growing political and public opposition, it might not be passed into law, but if it is,

section 114A.5 (b) covers any organization that has “advocated or engaged in politically motivated violence.” Honestly applied, this would have to include Zionist organizations that support Israel and justify its violations of international law and its extreme violence against the Palestinian people.

It took a genocide to reveal the truth about Israel, but Australians do see it now. Hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets to protest. The Adelaide Writers Festival recently collapsed following the withdrawal of 180 novelists or speakers in protest against the ‘disinvitation’ of the Palestinian-Egyptian novelist Randa Abd al Fattah.

This is only the latest instance of Palestine being the cause of attempted censorship of Australian writers and artists. In 2024 the Lebanese-Australian broadcaster Antoinette Lattouf was sacked by the national broadcasting network for posting on her social media account an HRW report accusing Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war. A federal court later ruled that she had been unlawfully dismissed.

The resignation under pressure of the managing director of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Sophie Galaise, is another sign of the times. Galaise led a management decision to cancel a concert by the pianist Jayson Gilham after he dedicated a piece to Palestinian journalists killed in Israel. She had to step down after the orchestra passed a vote of no confidence in her.

The journalist Mary Kostakidis is still fighting a legal action launched against her by the ZFA in 2024 on the grounds of alleged antisemitism after she reposted a tweet by Hasan Nasrallah. The attempt to silence this greatly respected person has had the effect of drawing attention to the bullying tactics regularly used by well-funded Zionist organizations to silence critics of Israel.

In investigating the circumstances surrounding the Bondi attack, the commissioner, Virginia Bell, will soon discover she is opening up a can of worms. Palestine is no longer something happening in a far-off land that does not directly concern Australia. It is a domestic policy issue with electoral implications.

It is not the demonstrators against genocide who are damaging ‘social cohesion’ and putting Australia at risk, but Zionist lobbyists pushing the interests of a genocidal state and a government supporting Israel when, morally and legally, under its international law obligations, it should be holding it to account.

It remains to be seen how capable the royal commissioner is of separating genuine hate speech and antisemitism from the decoys thrown into the air by the propagandists for a genocidal state.

Gaza has opened the window to the truths concealed from the general public by decades of propaganda. Australians are now rejecting Israel and a hateful, murderous ideology that has no place in the modern world. The time is long past for the Australian government to join them.

The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Palestine Chronicle.