Crossing the line
Day one of the Royal Commission
Standing midway along a rain-slicked trail on Mount Gibraltar, ninety minutes southwest of Sydney, I pulled the hem of my raincoat over my phone to shield it from the downpour. Ducking my head into the dry, dark pocket it made, like a tortoise folding into its shell, I pressed play on the live broadcast of the Royal Commission into antisemitism and social cohesion.
AirPods threaded under my hood, I turned and continued the slow climb back up the track toward the car.
This is where I am now. Birdsong drowned out by a lawyer, Richard Lancaster SC:
“One of the tasks of this hearing block is to identify and assess the current character of antisemitism in Australia... and identify when anti-Zionism becomes antisemitism”.
The sentence sounds careful and procedural. The problem is easy to miss. Lancaster may have inadvertently built the inquiry on a damaging premise.
Why would it be important to “identify when antizionism becomes antisemitism”? One would have to believe that:
i. antisemitism is the umbrella term used to describe all forms of anti-Jewish prejudice, (not at all unreasonable, of course) and
ii. antisemitism is bad in and of itself, but antizionism is not—and therefore antizionism must conform to the badness of antisemitism to be considered also bad (troubling, given what we understand about antizionism).
This is what is today known as ‘crossing the line discourse’. It frames antizionism as reasonable by default, with problems arising only in certain cases where it goes too far. That framing treats the starting point as legitimate and looks for a boundary where legitimacy ends.
This approach distorts what is actually being described. It concedes, from the commencement of the Royal Commission, that the main pathway for anti-Jewish vilification and violence today—antizionism—is reasonable.
Antizionism is not reasonable, and shouldn’t have to be considered something that becomes something else in order to be understood as antisocial. It is, in and of itself, inexcusable.
Contemporary antizionism functions as an ideology that denies the legitimacy of Jewish self-determination and assigns collective blame to Jews in relation to the existence of a Jewish state. Anyone considered potentially proximal to the stigmatised Jewish state is marked for vilification and violence. Antizionism purged 13,000 Jews from Poland. Antizionism saw 600 creatives doxxed. Antizionism murdered Jews on Bondi Beach.
Antizionism doesn’t just deny Jewish national legitimacy. It imputes collective criminality to Jews worldwide unless they are able to prove to antizionists that they are not party to the heinous crime of the continued existence of a Jewish state.
Does this sound reasonable? To Lancaster and those advising him, it must.
There seems to be a continuation of the very logic that allowed for the flourishing of past iterations of Jew-hate: that this movement, be it antijudaism, antisemitism, or antizionism, is merely an instrument of political action—that the bigotry is actually a mechanism of some warped pathway towards social cohesion.
Here is an excerpt from “Taking Control”.
Antizionism ≠ Political Criticism
There is no version of Israel that satisfies the antizionist.
Without this distinction, an eliminationist position that stigmatises Jews is rendered reasonable.
Crossing the Line
The crossing the line model directs attention toward a moment where speech tips into racism. But antizionism operates through a different mechanism. It replaces Jews with “Zionists” as the relevant category for persecution, and directs hostility toward that category. The substitution allows familiar themes—collective guilt, conspiracy, moral corruption—to circulate in full view while remaining framed as political language.
That is why the current frameworks struggle to respond:
Antisemitism is recognised when Jews are explicitly named as a race or religion
Antizionist rhetoric reproduces the same tropes while remaining within accepted bounds
The content remains recognisable. The label changes. Legal and institutional responses follow the label.
This was an opportunity to establish that the issue is not that antizionism can cross over into something impermissible, but that antizionism is in and of itself impermissible.
Anti-Jewish hostility has repeatedly organised itself around a constructed figure presented as a source of moral danger. Today, the constructed evil Jewish element is the “Zionist’. Historically, the constructed evil element shifts in line with whatever a prevailing society deems permissible to persecute:
Antijudaism cast Judaism as a religious corruption and threat to social cohesion. This manifested in libels and conspiracies that stigmatised Jews, marking them for violence. Antijudaism was was considered morally important for a long time.
Classical antisemitism cast “semitism” as Jewish racial corruption and a threat to social cohesion. This manifested in libels and conspiracies that stigmatised Jews, marking them for violence. Classical antisemitism was considered morally important for a long time.
Antizionism casts “Zionism” as morally corrupt and a threat to social cohesion. This manifests in libels and conspiracies that stigmatise Jews, marking them for violence. This is considered reasonable to Lancaster SC?
Each form builds a target through accusation and then authorises hostility toward that target. Contemporary antizionism assigns to “Zionism” a fixed character—genocidal, colonial, apartheid—and treats opposition as a standing moral position. The definitions of these words are retroactively fitted to “Zionism”, not to help describe it, but to help stigmatise it. Actions directed at “Zionists” draw their legitimacy from a framing whose end point is to establish the elimination of the Jewish state, and the hounding of anyone considered a threat to this eliminationist obsession.
The effects are visible across Australia.
Jewish individuals and institutions are targeted as “Zionist”
Collective responsibility is assigned to Jews
Abuse, exclusion, intimidation and violence are justified as “political expression” — just as they were among antijudaists and classical antisemites.
These patterns already produce a broader climate of intimidation and hostility. A focus on identifying a boundary where speech becomes unacceptable leaves the wider pattern intact and rendered acceptable.
Crossing the line rhetoric is therefore a symptom of the institutional acceptance of antizionism. It has no place in an inquiry into antisemitism. It’s like watching a ruler try to measure itself.
A clearer line of inquiry would follow what antizionism does in practice:
How it constructs its targets
How it legitimises hostility
The conditions under which it produces discrimination, exclusion, and violence
Lancaster SC’s troubling characterisation of antizionism normalises it by contrasting it against the bad version of bigotry: antisemitism.
Even the phrasing in the closed captions exacerbates the confusion. “Anti-Zionism,” with the hyphen, gestures toward a tradition of political debate among Jews. Anti-Zionism was a real thing. A real discourse. It was a conversation between Jews, about Jews. It was a genuine line of inquiry that fell apart during the Holocaust. It is an important part of modern Jewish history. But it bears no resemblance to the antizionist hate movement that erroneously hijacks its name.
The phenomenon we see today began as a Soviet propaganda exercise, very deliberately appropriating the name of a Jewish conversation and weaponising it it against the survivors of the Holocaust. Antizionism was born to re-hash the very Jew-hate that saw so many Jewish refugees from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East emigrate to Israel. Antizionism, as it operates now, is not anti-Zionism. At a time like this, precision of language is not semantic waffle or academic posturing. Language sets the guardrails for what is and isn’t considered permissible.
Clarity on these issues is paramount. It is troubling how such carelessness—how such a recycling of the very linguistic bastardry that got us here today—could be used to set the parameters of the Royal Commission’s inquiry.
I have done all I can do shift the dial. Small droplets in an ocean. Not enough.1
Maccabees
Needless to say, it was an emotional and unpleasant bush walk up until the moment I reached the lookout at Mount Gibraltar.
The rain thinned to a mist.
A bouquet of white roses sits drapes out over the edge of the slippery platform. A chain with a crucifix dangles above the bouquet, looped to the handrail, swaying.
I consider the sea of flowers left at Bondi Pavillion. The little yellow stars swaying back and forth from guardrails used and abused over decades. Centuries.
At what point did those bullets cross over into antisemitism?
Was it when they tore through the body of a little girl at a petting zoo on the first night of Hanukah?
Was it when they were loaded, idle and cold in the chamber of legally obtained firearms?
Was it when the murderers announced, before the killing, that they intended to hunt “Zionists”?
Was it something that happened slowly—in a country that so dutifully repeats that it is “no place for antisemitism”—as it failed to distinguish between ‘political criticism’ and bigotry? For two and half years?
Did the antizionism become antisemitism while the institutions we believed would protect us waited, patiently, for the hate surging through our community to more neatly map onto the hate we learn about in Holocaust museums?
I sit for a moment with the engine off. The dog shakes the wet from her coat, and it sprays up the back of my neck and across the inside of the windshield.
The distance between the clarity of what is happening in everyday life and the way it is being framed in a national inquiry feels difficult to ignore.
I start the engine and pull down the winding black ribbon to Mittagong.
There is timid Jew inside me that tells me not to make a fuss. Not to make a scene. Not to second guess a process we should be grateful for.
And there is a Maccabee inside me, too. A Maccabee that survived two thousand years. A Maccabee that tells me to light the fucking candle—it will burn if it’s meant to.
So here is my little candle. Lit cautiously, and lit purposefully.
Antizionism does not need to ‘become’ something other than what it is in order to stab Jews in London, shoot Jews in Washington, hurl Molotovs at Jews in Colorado, or shoot Jews in Sydney.
Antizionism is a hate movement.
Sugar and sabre-rattling
There are fewer and fewer spaces that foster the cross-pollination of truly diverse political and philosophical backgrounds.
I’m speaking in Sydney tomorrow night. Event to be disclosed to those who register here
Some examples
2026 Adelaide Writers Festival and artistic freedom
Radio interview on SBS with Mariel Olenski
Published in print and online here2026 How are young Jews responding post-Bondi?
Radio interview on JJJ
Published online here2025 Antisemitism in Australian Cultural Institutions
Op-ed published by The Australian
Published in print and online here2025 Grave Uncertainty For Jewish Australians at Federal Election
Op-ed published election day in The Australian Financial Review
Published in print and available online here2025 Antisemitic Bias at The ABC
Op-ed published by The Australian Jewish News
Published in print and online here2025 Glastonbury 2025: Fast Fashion
Op-ed published by The Australian Financial Review
Published in print and available online here2025 Antisemitism in the Australian arts
Op-ed published by The Australian
Published in print and available online here2025 Holocaust Inversion
Op-ed published by The Big Smoke
Published online here
I hope you’ve submitted these ideas for consideration. Also that you’ve kept it simple!
This needed to be said. We cannot accept any distortion of truth and reality because it always starts with dismissing or ignoring what seems like little things and before we know it our lives are turned upside down.