Immediately following the horrific antisemitic arson attack on the Adass Israel synagogue, before perpetrators or their motives had even been revealed — and before our communities had a chance to catch our breath — politicians and interest groups started capitalising on the attack by advocating for increased policing and a law and order response.
As a Jewish historian, I’m deeply concerned that this approach fundamentally misunderstands antisemitism and how to combat it.
Antisemitic arson attacks on synagogues and cars are beyond the pale and an attack on our collective values of diversity. The perpetrators must be investigated and held to account for the terror they have instilled in Jewish communities. But a broad police crackdown — including targeting protests, as suggested by Jillian Segal, the special envoy to combat antisemitism — will not make even a small dent in antisemitism.
The Australian Federal Police has set up special operation Avalite, a mobile squad of counterterrorism investigators who will have expanded powers to focus on threats, violence and hatred toward the Australian Jewish community and parliamentarians.
There is a real problem of antisemitism in Australia, but it can not be solved by more policing. It’s a problem of racism. At the Jewish Council of Australia, where I am executive officer, we cop antisemitic abuse daily — from the far right, from conspiracy theorists, from Zionists attacking our Jewish identity, and from a lot of people who think we are somehow responsible for Israel’s genocide.
It’s well documented that antisemitic incidents increase whenever Israel is committing atrocities. Jewish identities trace back more than 3,000 years and span many cultures and traditions. Zionism is a political ideology with Jewish and non-Jewish adherents, just over 120 years old. When the media, politicians and pro-Israel lobby groups all consistently assert a fictitious, absolute alignment between Jewish identity in Australia and the actions of Israel, it’s not hard to see why a racist idea takes hold that Jews as a whole are to blame for Israel’s actions.
But this form of racism does not take place in a vacuum. Contrary to Zionist rhetoric, antisemitism is a historical and political phenomenon, not an “eternal hatred” that simply recurs in all societies for thousands of years. It is not a pathology or a problem of “antisemites”, or an issue simply of the far right or far left. Antisemitism is a form of racism that has come to the fore at various points throughout Australian society since the 1890s, shaped by broader racial ideologies.
Racism against different groups in Australia has always been tied to geopolitics and Western imperialism: from invasion and colonisation, to competition with China, to the War on Terror — from the exclusion of Chinese people through to panics around asylum seekers and Muslim migrants. White Jews in Australia were mostly considered “white” until the 1930s, when potential Jewish migrants — refugees from Germany and Austria — were racialised and considered unassimilable. Throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, Australia’s immigration policies discriminated against Jews.
In the late 1940s, antisemitism was exacerbated by fears of Jewish terrorism in Palestine and stereotypes portraying Jewish Holocaust survivors as clannish, communist agents, black marketeers and anti-British. These racist ideas mirrored those directed against Asians, illustrating how antisemitism in Australia has always intertwined with and reinforced other forms of racism.
Understanding antisemitism requires seeing beyond an exceptionalist narrative. It demands we recognise how racism works through an interconnected racial order that continually redraws boundaries of power and belonging. The Human Rights Commission’s recently released national anti-racism framework draws these links and gives us a solid plan to tackle all forms of racism across Australian society.
The spectacle of arrests in a law and order crackdown, likely including some of the favourite Muslim and Palestinian targets of pro-Israel Jewish groups and the right-wing press, will serve as national security/anti-terror theatre. The optics aim to reassure the public, and Jews in particular, but they do so by racialising and marginalising others.
The Scanlon Foundation’s recent “Mapping Social Cohesion” report found that negative attitudes towards Jewish people have increased from 9% in 2023 to 13% in 2024. While this is certainly worrying, it pales in comparison to the now one in three (34%) adults that have a somewhat or very negative attitude towards Muslims (up from 27%). These figures can’t be separated from the rhetoric of “anti-terrorism” and Israel’s genocidal war, which has seen anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim racism proliferate.
True safety for Jewish communities cannot be achieved through divisive crackdowns that associate Jews and the fight against antisemitism with the police and state power. The continued exceptionalisation of antisemitism, treating it as a standalone or special type of racism — put starkly by Senator Dave Sharma who recently condemned ALP ministers for talking about a “fictitious Islamophobia” in the same breath as antisemitism — is a recipe for the continued use of Jews as political footballs by both major parties and the entrenchment of anti-Jewish attitudes.
Jewish communities deserve real protection — not a false sense of security purchased at the expense of other marginalised groups. We need solutions that address the roots of antisemitism in the broader problem of racism in Australian society, not law enforcement theatre that only breeds more division.
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