Grace Tame's peaceful calls to peacefully globalise peaceful intifada result in peaceful protest
A strangely instructive evening for the country as a whole
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When Grace Tame led a crowd in chanting “globalise the intifada” at Town Hall today, she sent a message we can’t afford to miss.
Tame’s defenders were quick to insist that the chant was not antisemitic. She did not invoke Jewish ethnicity or spirituality.
Antizionists do not need to subscribe to classical antisemitism. Antisemites once enjoyed the same distinction from their forebears, considering antijudaism distasteful and immoral.
While antizionism continues to be conflated with “political criticism,” it maintains social and institutional assent. The NSW government plans to criminalise the chant, but criminalisation and social permissibility are far from the same thing.
The most important difference between antisemitism and antizionism—as with all forms of bigotry—is permission.
Permission is granted when a society considers an idea to be important. The stigmatisation of any form of bigotry occurs when the harms it produces begin to outweigh the once-axiomatic moral drive behind it.
The science of “race” under the Nazis was as warped as the politics of Jewish self-determination today. At some point, vilifying Jews through libels about Israel will be considered no less vulgar than antisemitism. We will regard October 7 and Bondi as examples of antizionism—which will be seen as no more valid a “political critique” of the Jewish state than antisemitism was a “scientific critique” of the Jewish “race.”
Today, antisemites mostly conceal themselves. Permission for antisemitism was revoked not through debate, but through recognition of harm.
Antizionism produces many of the same harms—vilification, intimidation, and violence—but does so through an institutionally and culturally permitted antizionist pathway. Its permission to incite violence against Jews rests on the belief that if hostility does not explicitly name Jews as Jews, it cannot constitute anti-Jewish harm.
The word intifada refers to campaigns in which violence against Jewish civilians was normalised and celebrated. Sieg Heil translates to “hail victory.”
In the post-Holocaust era, antisemitism has been the umbrella term for anti-Jewish conspiracies, libels, and violence. When incitement deviates from classical antisemitism, we are left with two options: force antizionist hate speech to conform to classical antisemitism, or confront antizionism as its own distinct apparatus.
Terms like “globalise the intifada” do not sit squarely within the public’s understanding of antisemitism. We are told, “I’m not antisemitic, I’m an antizionist.”
Considering how libellous and harmful antizionism is—and considering its overwhelming social licence to undermine Jewish safety—should it matter whether Jews as a “race” are named explicitly in its rhetoric? Must a sexist also be a racist?
These words are simply different ways of describing pathways used to moralise bigotry.
It is time we establish what antizionism is, and clarify to Ms Tame that it is mutually exclusive with “political critique” or being “pro-Palestinian.” There would be no war in Gaza if there were no obsession with destroying the only state forced to wall itself in.
Criticism engages actions and policies and presumes legitimacy. Antizionism constructs the Jewish state as uniquely illegitimate—colonial by nature, apartheid by design, and genocidal in essence. Antizionism, unlike anti-Zionism—a pre-Holocaust conversation among Jews about their future—is an eliminationist movement trading in the same core antipathy toward Jews that has driven centuries of anti-Jewish hatred.
Much like its predecessors, antizionism borrows the moral language of its context to whip up urgency, presenting itself as virtuous opposition to an imagined religious or racial coloniser.
The global “Zionist” is everywhere. The intifada must follow.
Arguments about whether antizionism is “really” antisemitism often miss the point. The issue is not equivalence; it is function. Between all forms of anti-Jewish bigotry, there is significant overlap. Antizionism is often antisemitic, but it does not need to conform to twentieth-century antisemitism to result in Jews being attacked or killed.
Grace Tame’s rhetoric illustrates Australia’s confusion perfectly.
By accusing Israel’s president of “inciting genocide”—a lie reliant on deliberate misrepresentation—she reinforces libels that encourage a Jew hunt. Within this framework, hostility toward “Zionists” appears not as prejudice, but as principle. Jews who object are accused of “weaponising” antisemitism, rather than recognised as citizens responding to a real threat.
This permissive framework is now reflected in Australian law.
In Wertheim v Haddad (2025), a Federal Court found that statements accusing “Zionists” of controlling media and politicians constituted political commentary rather than racial vilification.
That legal reality matters as Australia approaches a Federal Royal Commission into antisemitism.
A Royal Commission confined to insisting that antizionism must “cross the line” into antisemitism is in jeopardy of leaving untouched the primary mechanism driving contemporary vilification. Worse, it may entrench the very category error that has allowed antizionism to metastasise: the idea that whatever is not antisemitic is therefore “political critique.”
Antisemitism is one pathway to harming Jews. Antizionism is another. They are distinct, adaptive, and mutually reinforcing. One pathway has been closed. The other remains open. While antizionism retains moral licence, Grace Tame and her fellows will continue to exploit its permissibility.
When public figures incite antizionist violence, we have a responsibility to name it for what it is. By naming antizionism not as critique, but as eliminationism, we allow it to stigmatise itself.
The Royal Commission must confront this directly. If it does not, I fear for the thousands of Jews whose submissions may be dismissed as “not antisemitic enough.”
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Grace Tame has morphed from a warrier against misogny into a warrier for bigotry and hatred. Once admired she should now be reviled for spreading libels and inciting hate, but instead, given the moral vacuity of today she will probably be regaled.
Thanks for writing this. I am really stunned by the events of last night, including in relation to how proactive and normalised hostility to Jews has become in Australia. I was speaking recently to a friend who is a psychiatrist in Melbourne. He noted that when you define a person or people as 'genocidal', you are implicitly licensing their execution. He also had a bit to say about mass psychosis. I don't know how to process this really but I am grateful to anyone who tries to write and find our way through it.