How to change the world

By paying attention to our own communication failures, we may overcome the moral failures of others.

Joshua Dabelstein and Movement Against Antizionism

Jul 09, 2026

Some say the pen is mightier than the sword. They are wrong.
The pen is a sword.

Fighting for Jewish dignity starts at home.

This awfulness is not our fault. But it is our responsibility.

The hopelessness reverberating through the Jewish community after today’s performances at the Royal Commission does not need to be laboured. Suffice it to say, the expertise, tools, and strategic acumen being utilised by Jews at a grassroots level have not percolated upwards fast enough.

This evening, I am sullen and defeated. Tomorrow, I will return to my determined, defiant, and doggedly optimistic self. Even in feeling defeated, I have no doubt that we can change the world.

Perhaps whatever comes out of my fingers in the next twenty minutes may help me talk myself—and the many others who have expressed their dismay after today’s testimonies—back to where we need to be.

What I will say is this: if anyone had been reckless enough to make a drinking game of every time the Commissioner, Senior Counsel Assisting, those giving evidence both Jewish and non-Jewish, or the legal counsel representing the Jewish Community—either deliberately or inadvertently—conflated libels and conspiracies of “Zionism” or “Israel” that stigmatise Jews worldwide as “criticism of Israel”, well, you’re in for a decades-long hangover.

If anyone’s drinking game also included a shot for every time antizionist propaganda was laundered—like referring to antizionists as ‘pro-Palestine’—then I think we may have safely called your time of death at around Noon today. Antizionists want you to call them ‘pro-Palestinian’ or ‘pro-Palestine’. We help to sanitise their hate movement by making it sound like advocating for Palestinians has anything to do with feeding them into a forever war against pluralism in the Levant and heralding the dead as ‘martyrs’. Antizionism is mutually exclusive with being ‘pro-Palestine’.

We recycle the very linguistic treachery we blame for our own stigmatisation.

Such careless use of language from people whose jobs it is to guide the rest of us ...

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Today, it is fashionable to either partake in, or to allow for, the stigmatisation of Jews for their relationships to Israel. Sometimes those relationships are real, sometimes they are imagined. While this fashion has increased steadily for decades, it exploded on October 8, and has snowballed ever since.

Some say the pen is mightier than the sword. In another era, they may have been correct. But today, they are wrong. The pen is a sword.

This awful conversation, through televisions, newspapers, revoked grants, graffiti, harassment, and exclusion, is not a conversation that exists independent of Jewry. It exists over us, around us, and through us, and we exert whatever skerrick of motion we have onto it. Contrary to popular belief, getting a Jewish opinion published or publicly circulated in some form that doesn’t recycle dogma of some variety is incredibly rare. I’ve given up for the moment.

And as a community, with our letters and our lawsuits and Special Envoys’ Offices, we scrape at the sides of humiliation and despair, hoping that we may curtail a modern incarnation of an ancient bigotry by tying it to past episodes of anti-Jewish brutality now identified as abhorrent in retrospect.

We attempt to convince antizionists that they are the same as Nazis. We use words like antisemitism, a word which exists between the ears of most people as synonymous with the unimaginable and irreplicable evil of the Nazis, then stare at our palms, confused, when those who hurt us most make statements deploring ‘antisemitism and all forms of racism’.

Not even our national broadcaster will adhere to an agreed upon definition of antisemitism. Antizionism is the single greatest impediment to the strategic relevance of defining or explaining antisemitism. Another busload of students to a Holocaust museum, anyone?1

What we are experiencing—what we are presiding over—is a communications strategy failure.

As a writer, and someone who works in communications, I encounter this frequently. It is not the person you’re communicating to whose responsibility it is to understand you. It’s not their problem to solve when they don’t. It’s your responsibility, as the communicator, to know them well enough to arrange code intuitively.

For this failure, we are not responsible. How could we have known?

But for our failure to reckon with this failure—for our failure to take a solemn inventory of the path taken, the language we’re using, and the reality that slips further and further from grasp in its wake—we have only ourselves to work with.

Over the past 12 months, things have begun to shift. In the immediate aftermath of Bondi, that shift has accelerated dramatically. Historically—and among many of the rusted on stalwarts in our community—we do not identify antizionism as a ball in play at all. Instead, our old, failed strategy insists upon pointing to its depraved hounding of Jews on university campuses and expecting often well-intentioned bigots to see themselves in a mirror we call “antisemitic”. They do not see themselves in the mirror. They do not even see a mirror. They see a Jew yelling at them from behind soundproof glass, and all they hear is a propagandistic, algorithmically saturated song blurring the lines between “criticism” and abuse.

From Poland to Munich, Argentina to Washington, Israel to Manchester to Bondi, Jews have been met with violence every decade since the establishment of a Jewish state, just as they had been prior. Almost all of these exiled, murdered, raped, and burned Jews were not asked about their relationships to Israel. This facet of Jewishness is assumed. The Jew is a Zionist unless proven otherwise.

Only, in the decades since, the permission to hunt Jews moved from racial or religious fixation, to a national fixation.

All of these configurations, at their heyday, were (and are) sanitised by two core elements. The first is an appeal to the greatest moral authorities of the day—religious institutions, scientists, governments, NGOs, academics, etc. The second is a belief that the bigotry itself is a form of reasonable criticism in response to the moral threat those authorities have warned them about.

Today, our communications strategy must shift to meet reality. Antizionism, much like its predecessors, antijudaism and classical antisemitism, is not a “criticism” of its hate object. Antizionism is as much a “criticism” of “Zionism” as antisemitism is a “criticism” of “semitism”.

Our grassroots have made this shift. The curtains were opened faster among those of us who have to live and work among antizionists.

But at the top, I fear that antizionism may still be consigned to some academic, irrelevant appendage to antisemitism.

Without an understanding of antizionism, our leaders may continue to take the stand and conflate bigotry with criticism. The rest of the country scoffs, hearing only what we’re told: that we have a problem with the state of Israel being told.

Fighting antizionism has been a grassroots initiative long enough. Many incredible institutions have joined the fight—too many to name. But somehow, those who truly understand just how much agency we have, and just how easily we can exercise it, are not being heard at the Royal Commission. (With Sharonne Blum and Ben Adler as two rare exceptions.)

You can hold agency in your mouth. You can hold it in your hand. It is in the careful application of language, and in the memetic design of an idea, that power truly resides.

The pen is a sword. Pick one up. Name antizionism, and mail it to someone whose job it is to change the world.

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