Empathetic and Impartial? The Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion in Australia.

What has struck me most so far is the very limited amount of clarificatory or probing questioning in the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion by Justice Bell herself. Is much of this testimony simply being taken at face value? At this point, it is entirely unclear to me what her intentions are.

The only witness who was really subjected to sustained questioning, even mildly, was Jeremy Leibler, and even then he was still largely permitted to go full throttle. Were his statements being treated as fact or opinion? There was little real interrogation. Nor was there any serious exploration of whether the political stance taken by Leibler — and the close alignment of some organisations with the Israeli government — might itself help explain part of the hostility being discussed.

Frankly, a number of witnesses sounded as though they had been coached to deliver almost identical formulations about Zionism, Israel as the eternal homeland, Jewish identity and security. Palestinians were barely mentioned, if at all. Criticising the existence of Israel as a state was frequently treated as effectively equivalent to antisemitism itself.

The repeated attempt by some community leaders and individuals to claim there is no meaningful connection between the organised Jewish community and the actions of the Israeli government strikes me as hollow. The very purpose of many Zionist organisations is to support the State of Israel, and we know there has been fundraising connected to the current war effort. Pretending there is no influential political or institutional relationship at all — or that Australian Jewish organisations have no influence or access — has simply not been truthful. The Lobby was, in fact, on display throughout the hearings, and Leibler himself was quite forthcoming about his relationship with the Israeli government and, unconsciously perhaps, his own privileged status.

Michael Gawenda, the retired and at times somewhat embittered former journalist, was also questioned, though at times his testimony was so meandering that the questioning seemed more about keeping him on track than testing his claims. Given the broad basket of grievances he raised, it is surprising that someone like Louise Adler was not invited to offer a perspective on the cultural industries and the silencing of dissenting voices — even if I do not agree with Adler on everything either.

Similarly, Jill Segal, despite claiming to understand the distinction between antisemitism and opposition to Israel, appeared far too willing to collapse matters such as student protests and encampments into antisemitism simply because they caused distress or disruption. She referred repeatedly to commissioned research reports that, frankly, would struggle badly under peer review. Yet many of her core assumptions passed without serious challenge. She also claimed to have consulted widely across the Jewish community. That was news to me. She also made claims about ״foreign actors״ or “foreigners” on campuses including Iranian funding. It’s the first time I have heard that one. I will need to check the transcript, but the RC is slow.

At the same time, some of the testimony was genuinely disturbing, and I found parts of it deeply distressing — particularly accounts involving isolated Jewish children in schools after October 7, and especially after the Bondi Junction stabbings. The level of fear and trauma described by some Sydney witnesses was palpable. Some people clearly feel danger everywhere now; they are traumatised. I suspect many were children of Holocaust survivors.

Left-wing sceptics who dismiss concerns about antisemitism altogether should actually listen to some of this testimony, particularly witnesses such as Steph Cuneo speaking about antisemitism within progressive circles (conflict of interest: she’s a mate). She was right to raise the lack of solidarity shown towards Jewish progressives , gaslighting, and lack of interest or recognition of the joint Jewish–Palestinian left in Israel/Palestine. Others also spoke about hostility or exclusion experienced in workplaces after October 7. At the same time, with some witnesses it remained unclear whether they were able to distinguish consistently between antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and anti-Israel sentiment.

Furthermore, complain as we might about the need to engage in a Royal Commission into other forms of racism, it is the Jewish community at which murder was directed. That should not be forgotten. Royal Commission or not, we need to understand what is going on to cause this.

None of this justifies stereotyping the Jewish community as a whole or delegitimising Jewish safety concerns. Yet clearly that narrative exists and circulates widely. Overland, for example, has recently published articles that, in my view, ultimately assign Jews a diminished or suspect status as a white settler colonial community with undeserved attention..

I reject claims that Jews or Zionists collectively bear responsibility for the actions of the Israeli government. Nor am I endorsing campaigns against institutions and individuals, some of which have been completely out of bounds. At the same time, I do think there is truth in one point repeatedly raised by witnesses: some anti-Zionist circles have produced an astonishingly simplistic, know-it-all analysis of Jewish history and identity, often displaying little historical understanding or empathy for the awful dilemmas faced by Jews in the twentieth century around the world — notwithstanding the terrible injustices inflicted upon Palestinians in the name of Jewish security. At times this has drifted into antisemitic tropes or broader forms of group stigmatisation.

I am also concerned that, as far as I know, only the Jewish Council of Australia has been invited to present a substantially different or dissenting perspective, apart from perhaps one or two individual witnesses. There are many distinguished people with more complex or heterodox views who do not appear to have been called. Perhaps that will change. I hope so. But at present the range of perspectives feels remarkably narrow. It would seem entirely reasonable, for example, to hear from people such as Dennis Altman or Robert Manne.

There is also little clarity about how the Commission intends to assess the evidentiary merit of the enormous volume of submissions it has received. I suspect many will contain sweeping allegations about schools, universities, media organisations, cultural institutions, and political movements.

At this point, I honestly do not know whether the Royal Commission is capable of distinguishing between verified incidents, subjective or mistaken perceptions, political commentary, and antisemitism — or between statistical inflation and empirical reality, including the flawed datasets repeatedly invoked to blame “the left” as the primary source of the problem.

But large numbers of similar submissions do not automatically establish truth.

What is undeniable, however, is that many people are frightened and distressed by the level of public anger surrounding the Gaza war. Jews who visibly identify themselves — for example by wearing kippot — often feel highly vulnerable. There have been appalling and unacceptable incidents, particularly involving children, alongside traumatic events such as Bondi.

Yet collapsing political anger, ugly rhetoric, stickers, social media abuse, protests, and isolated incidents into claims of a generalised outbreak of antisemitism runs against what social science research — at least internationally — generally tells us about the overwhelming majority of protesters, who are neither antisemitic nor violent.

There has also been aggregation of vastly different kinds of events, ranging from stickers and verbal abuse to serious violence. The number of violent incidents appears relatively small, though still deeply disturbing — with Bondi in a category of its own. But when large numbers of low-level incidents are aggregated together with a relatively small number of violent attacks, the result can begin to look like a massive societal eruption of antisemitism. That may be misleading. Incidents do not necessarily demonstrate broad social pervasiveness or widespread endorsement of antisemitic attitudes.

And then there is the sewer of social media, which should not be treated as representative of society at large. Yet many people increasingly seem to treat it that way, rather than recognising it as an amplifying machine capable of magnifying the worst material imaginable. I suspect the Commission will focus heavily on the responsibilities of social media companies, at least in relation to antisemitism, even though the underlying problem is obviously much broader than antisemitism alone.

The whole dataset needs reassessment, and I genuinely do not know whether the Royal Commission is capable of undertaking that kind of methodological scrutiny. At times there has been remarkably little examination of claims of the sort one might expect in a more rigorous legal or evidentiary setting.

I remain baffled. I hope I am wrong. I hope the next round of hearings involve greater diversity of opinion and a greater willingness to interrogate political assumptions — including recurring claims that the State of Israel is simply the contemporary fulfilment of an ancient yearning. There is an enormous amount to say about that proposition and, above all, about its consequences for Palestinians, which have often been appalling.

So what should people on the left make of all this?

They need to be capable of hearing some of what is emerging from the Commission without simply collapsing into defensive anti-Zionist reflexes or dismissing everything as propaganda. There is a real problem in this country. There are influential elements of the left that have shown little empathy for many Jews who are grieving, frightened, or isolated, and who are not themselves associated with genocide or war.

Grievances about imperialism and settler colonialism have too often collapsed into a generalised hostility towards a labelled Zionism that easily slides into simplistic, patronising, and insulting analyses of the “Jewish Question”. If sections of the left were genuinely serious about opposing antisemitism, it should have been obvious from the outset that they needed to avoid rhetoric and tropes that risked invoking precisely that spectre. Too often they have failed to do so.

Back to the Royal Commission itself: if Justice Bell ultimately hears and absorbs evidence primarily from one side, and if the Commission staff follow that trajectory, then the outcome could become a politically divisive and methodologically flawed mess that may actually worsen the problem it claims to address.