Submission to the Royal Commission.

With this submission I announce my refusal to submit.

A brief moment from before.

I will submit in two sections. The first section accounts, in part, for how systems that Jewish Australia had assumed would play an earnest role in combating outbreaks of anti-Jewish hostility have not only exacerbated it, but produced it. The second part will describe, with limited sentimentality, some of the uncountable ways in which the institutionalisation of antizionist bigotry has changed my life.

Part 1: You

The IHRA definition compels antijudaists, antisemites, and antizionists to choose between two options:

1. Coming to terms with their own bigotry, or

2. Blaming guidelines designed to protect Jews as a Jewish conspiracy to remove their rights and make them feel bad.

The IHRA definition of antisemitism is materially uncontroversial in its identification of both the drivers and the results of anti-Jewish bigotry. That many Australians and Australian institutions are unable to ratify it is not a reflection on the definition’s clarity or reasonableness, but a reflection of the extent to which antizionism has moved from a fringe malevolence to a populist, mainstream, middle-class, and almost entirely well-intentioned phenomenon. Why would institutions want to define themselves into a definition of antisemitism?

In essence, it is the suspicion of Jews that prevents the ratification of definitions designed to identify the suspicion of Jews as wrong. The definition itself is guilty until proven innocent. A measure designed to ascertain bigotry has been hobbled by scrutiny levelled by the very bigotry it is designed to curtail. It is remarkable that we treat bigotry as something that may be self-aware. It is not. Those attacking IHRA do so with absolute moral conviction. A ruler cannot measure itself.

In the antizionist era, much like in prior iterations of anti-Jewish suspicion, vilification, and violence, to be suspicious of Jews is to be morally vigilant. The antizionist’s hyperfixation on Jewish power compels him to fight any instrument that may imperil his capacity to denigrate whichever element of Jewish life his context has deemed it permissible to mark for elimination.

Century after century, informed and emboldened by appeals to theological, scientific, and diplomatic authorities, normal people mark some facet of Jewish existence for removal on moral grounds. The amputation of the Jewish religion, ethnicity, or state is to suck the venom from a snakebite and spit it into red dirt. A toxic element must be removed—not out of spite or cruelty—but to protect the body politic from some profound indecency.

All bigotry believes itself to be a social justice movement, removing something bad for the improvement of the rest. The bigot’s hate-object is defined not by reality, definitions, or discourse, but by the bigot’s own emotional reaction to disinformation pertaining to the threat posed by some alien, minority, or marginalised cohort.

IHRA seeks to help prevent the repetition of a cycle of violence against Jews that, across the ages, moralises the purification of society from whichever Jewish toxin speaks most dearly to that context’s anxieties. These purification dynamics are mostly produced not by blind hate, but by the absorption of disinformation. Disinformation pertaining to some malevolence or threat to common decency produces, even within our best and brightest, a righteous, humanitarian zeal bent on the removal of a splinter imagined into reality and retroactively fitted to explain all subsequent infections coursing through the body politic.

The idea that antisemitism, antijudaism, or antizionism are all manifestations of ‘hate’ is common, antiquated, ahistorical, dishonest, and lazy. We must come to terms with the truth. In the West, the better angels of our nature conspire to invert the Holocaust, invert October 7, murder Jews in Bondi, Manchester, Colorado, and Washington, and platform rape deniers with public funds.

Egyptians. Greeks. Romans. Christians. Muslims. Racists. Revisionists. Each iteration justifies murder through its own internal logic. No two contexts’ permission structures are alike because no era’s moral priorities and dominant anxieties are identical. Bigotry moves in symbiosis with changes to a population’s moral values, forever casting some other as the inverse of whatever its context holds most dear.

The permission to vilify religiously is revoked and replaced with the permission to vilify racially, which in turn is revoked and replaced with the permission to vilify nationally. Antijudaism. Antisemitism. Antizionism.

There is nothing particularly complicated about any of this—but for the fact that we have misdiagnosed today’s anti-Jewish permission structure as yesterday’s. The Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, even by name, is as much a product of our misunderstanding and misdiagnosis of anti-Jewish vilification as the events that inspired it.

We live in an antizionist era now. Antisemitism in its most sincere expression—as a social justice and social cohesion mechanism built on racial purification—is irrelevant when placed alongside the power and prevalence of antizionism. Antizionism operates distinctly from classical antisemitism. Similar tropes and conspiracies are laundered through a permission structure that positions society’s purification through the removal of a new Jewish element as a collective, moral duty. Classical antisemitic tropes in cartoons from The Age to the AFR are rendered permissible by antizionism.

Without an inquiry that centres antizionism, there is no addressing the dynamics that today see young Jews telling me that they know better than to bother going on a dating app, use their real name in an Uber, or submit to the student newspaper. It is my hope that this Royal Commission produces a pivot in strategy across Jewish and non-Jewish institutions.

This pivot begins not with the defining of ‘antisemitism’, but with the defining of ‘political criticism’.

There is no formulation of antizionism that may be construed as a form of political criticism. One cannot constructively contribute to a conversation about the reform of an entity or dynamic without a belief in its continued existence. Antizionism is not anti-Zionism. Anti-Zionism was a conversation between Jews about Zionism. Antizionism is a permission structure for the laundering of libels and conspiracies about Jewish self-determination that mark Jews worldwide for violence. It is a conversation about Jews.

Anti-Zionism was a critical discourse. Antizionism is an eliminationist obsession. That the latter is now allowed to masquerade as an extension of the former is worse than cultural appropriation—it is cultural hijacking with genocidal intent. You cannot incite violence against Jews, call for intifadas, and advocate the elimination of a Jewish state and call it political criticism.

Without establishing antizionism as mutually exclusive with political criticism, any attempts to ratify definitions of anti-Jewish sentiments or protect Jews from vilification are useless.

It is deeply concerning that the word antisemitism continues to hold such a confusion-producing monopoly on society’s conceptions of anti-Jewish sentiments. But here we are, defining oranges as a variety of apples. Ducks as flying fish.

This category error means that we are stuck trying to force antizionist libels to conform to classical antisemitic libels in order for the harm that they’re causing to be considered real. The pen is not mightier than the sword. The pen is a sword.

The public have ingested libels and conspiracies pertaining to organised Jewry spread through pseudo-academia, publicly funded media, publicly funded arts and cultural institutions, and the secondary and tertiary education sectors.

We could not have engineered a better system designed to target Jews for violence if we’d tried.

There is nothing unique about cowardice’s capacity to burn holes in moments demanding self-reflection. I have little faith in institutions. I write to you for myself. I invest my energy in my people. I have much faith in my people.

Australian Jews are stigmatised for our perceived proximity to a belief in the continued existence of a Jewish state. I use the word perceived because the word Zionist is not used to describe a Jewish position, but to stigmatise the Jewish soul.

Modern invocation—antizionist invocation—of the word Zionist is as accurate a description of the Jew as the word bitch is of the woman, faggot is of the homosexual, and nigger is of the African American.

I assume this section needs no further explanation.

The task before this Royal Commission is not merely to condemn “antisemitism” after Jews are harmed, or to explore the ways in which the types of racial and religious anti-Jewish vilification may sometimes map onto antizionism. It is to identify the ideology operating today that makes such harm appear justified before it occurs. It is to name antizionism, and to establish that it is well covered within the IHRA definition as a manifestation not of criticism, but of exceptionalisation.

Antizionism recasts Jewish collective existence as a moral offence time and time again. Those perceived as potentially proximal to whichever facet of Jewish identity is designated constitutionally malicious in any given century are deemed legitimate targets of exclusion, intimidation, and violence. Today, the phantom hate-object goes by the name Zionism, despite the hate-object itself bearing no resemblance to its namesake.

Unless the distinction between “political criticism” and antizionism is enforced, institutions will continue to stigmatise the 0.4% of the Australian population who are Jewish.

The Commission should therefore recognise antizionism as a distinct form of anti-Jewish bigotry and address it in its own right. Only with clarity on antizionism may we have clarity on antisemitism; only with clarity on antizionism may there be hope for Jewish Australians.

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Part 2: Me

My name is Joshua Dabelstein. I am a writer, Head of Communications at the Online Hate Prevention Institute, and Executive Director of the Movement Against Antizionism Australia. This submission concerns the effect that antizionism has had on my relationships, my work, my movement through public space, my engagement with public life, and my safety.

Antizionism has shaped my life through social exclusion, collective punishment, intimidation, estrangement, and the expectation that I answer for a conspiratorial obsession with a libellously constructed version of a country I have never visited. It has forced me to account for my Jewishness in rooms where no other person is required to explain their ancestry, their people, or their supposed proximity to events overseas.

I have spent much of the period since October 7, 2023, trying to explain these experiences. Splinters of these explanations have appeared on the ABC, SBS, The Australian, the Australian Financial Review, The Big Smoke, J-Wire, The Australian Jewish News, and The Sydney Morning Herald. Today I write for myself, and for my fellows of all backgrounds.

October 7

On October 8, 2023, I called the only Palestinian Australian I knew. I feared reprisal and expressed hope that these attacks would not incur more horror. He invited me to an APAN fundraiser that evening, where I met Nasser Mashni and watched Adam Bandt work the room.

The massacre went unmentioned. Hundreds of people ate and drank merrily, and speeches were delivered about resisting the Zionist entity. I was introduced as “one of the good ones”. I left early, overcome with anxiety and confusion. The person who had invited me has since been fired from the University of Sydney for posting on X: “I want Zionists executed”. He has since re-enrolled at the university as a student.

I was single and dating, but found myself being inundated with purity tests on dates. One woman I went on a few dates with enlisted a friend to pepper me with conspiratorial accusations about the Jewish state. Why was I being asked to speak about Israel? My concerns were with the victims, their families, and the hundreds of hostages dragged into tunnels.

I found myself separating myself, repeatedly, from anything associated with Israel or Zionism, a kneejerk reaction to the interrogations of my peers. Hostility was directed towards one element of me—an element that I was being given the option to amputate, as though I was being asked to renounce the continued existence of a Jewish state as gangrenous.

I believed that if I could polish that element—that very, very low bar that qualifies the continued existence of all states—or demonstrate that it was being misunderstood, everything would be fine.

What alarmed me was the confidence with which people who knew almost nothing about Jews, Judaism, Jewishness, Israel, or the Levant developed strong opinions about the victims of a massacre. These opinions appeared to justify what had been done to them and to stigmatise people around the world who were considered proximal to them.

I was expected to share in the collective punishment of the victims. I was also expected to participate in the condemnation of anyone unwilling to join the witch hunt that followed.

The strangest moments came when strangers—friends of friends, or now ex-friends—were appointed to explain terms like ‘colonialism’ and ‘intifada’ to me through the sharing of infographics and 1960s antizionist Soviet propaganda. Radicalised youth considered their hounding of me—a secular, Australian, diaspora Jew—to be a good-faith attempt to deradicalise me from my belief that tearing down hostage posters and calling for intifada were wrong, and that the continued existence of a Jewish state was not unreasonable.

I had attended anti-Netanyahu demonstrations prior to October 7. I had spent years criticising aspects of Israeli policy, just as I criticised Australia, the United States, Pakistan, Russia, Afghanistan, Iran, and other countries. It took many years for me to learn that there is no form of criticism sufficient to pass an antizionist’s purity test.

Criticism did not satisfy the demands of the bigotry I was experiencing, and it still doesn’t. Antizionists are not interested in criticising Israel or “Zionism”.

Friends began posting their opinions online, engaging me in conversation, and seeking my counsel. Many appeared to expect that I would be one of “the good Jews”. As a historically left-wing Jew, I was expected to join a movement directed against the continued existence of a Jewish state.

I knew the role they wanted me to perform because I had once performed it myself.

My Former Antizionism

For several years in my 20s, I considered myself an anti-Zionist. This was before I had read a book about Israel, spoken meaningfully with Jews or Israelis about the Jewish state, or developed any substantial relationships within Jewish communal life. I lived outside the Jewish community between the ages of 18 and 28. I played in bands, studied, worked, did too many drugs, and found fraternity in radical left-wing communities.

My antizionism was convenient—not considered. It allowed the people around me to express hostility towards Zionists, Israel, and Jewish collective life while presenting me as evidence that their hostility could not be anti-Jewish.

My Jewishness became a laundromat for antizionist bigotry, and I participated willingly in that process. I did not understand the system I was helping to sustain.

My relationship with Jewish life changed gradually. In my late 20s, after years of separation from the Jewish community, I found myself living among Jews in Melbourne’s southern suburbs, working with Jews, dating Jews, and developing connections within my local community. Whether it was walking my dog, grocery shopping, or chatting to neighbours, I seemed to have fallen back into a tribe I’d walked away from.

I made no conscious decision to build a Jewish life. It happened through proximity, friendship, work, love, routine, and the generosity of Jews who knew better than to dismiss my rougher edges.

I found myself in synagogues and standing by chuppot. I dated a Jewish woman. On Friday nights, I walked my dog through Caulfield and Elsternwick, the warm glow of candles and challot drifting through open windows.

I began to recognise a Jewish identity within myself that had always been present, even when I lacked the language to describe it. In high school, I’d been called a stingy Jew if I’d refused to lend a peer a dollar—a rich Jew when I did. At university, on two separate occasions, my mother had been referred to not as a doctor, but as a “Jewish doctor”. A partner in my early 20s would make jokes about me “Jewing” her, but saw nothing problematic about her own family’s fleeing South Africa following the end of apartheid.

My Family’s Jewishness

My mother took us to synagogue when we were children because, in her words, she did not want the Nazis to win.

My maternal grandmother was born in Budapest in 1933 and escaped Hungary in January 1939 with her two parents. She was raised in Lane Cove, Sydney. During the war, her father was once detained on suspicion of being a German spy. Her mother cut a deal with the local priest—he’d supply a character reference to the police if they agreed to enrol my grandmother in a local Catholic school.

They hid their Jewishness in Sydney. My grandmother was baptised—a tradition among many Hungarian Jews that well preceded the Holocaust—and was raised as a Hungarian Australian. Her parents told her that they were ‘political refugees’. She married a white Australian and raised three girls, who attended Catholic schools. It was only upon the death of her parents that she opened boxes full of old, buried documents. Her nationality on her birth certificate listed her as an Israelite, ‘ISR’.

When I speak to her today about it, she continues to live in split cognition. She knew she was Jewish, deep down, but had done just as her family in Hungary had done for generations and buried it.

I repeatedly asked her about her hesitation to take an Ancestry.com test. In 2024, she confided in me: “What if I’m a changeling?” For centuries, Jews have been forced to invent themselves within the parameters considered reasonable by our oppressors. These parameters change in accordance with what flavour of persecution any given era deems permissible. The fluidity of Jewish identity is a response to our persecutors’ changing appetites.

The Nazis did not win World War Two. In my family, they came pretty close. And yet, to blame the Nazis for Jewish erasure—or to use the term ‘antisemitism’ as it is used in popular parlance—is to mistake that horrifying period at the beginning of the 20th century for an anomaly. It’s happening again.

My mother retained a stubborn attachment to the part of herself that others had tried to erase. She is not a stubborn person. But on this matter—the matter of her Jewishness—she has never faltered. I could not be more proud of my mother. “Life is not a dress rehearsal”, she says. She’s right.

She did not know how to conduct every ritual or explain every observance. She knew enough to ensure that we attended synagogue at Newtown or Emanuel often enough to remember what we were. My grandmother offered resistance at one point, asking my mother to make sure they weren’t writing any of our names down. This was in the late ‘90s.

She took us to the homes of Jewish family friends for the High Holidays. I watched families who had remained more firmly connected to Jewish culture. I watched how they ate, how they washed their hands, what they said before and after meals, and how they interacted with one another. I learnt pieces of prayers by rote that I never understood and knew to buy two challot instead of one—but not why.

I joked with our rebbetzin as I passed the shule on a Saturday morning a couple of months ago, AirPods in my ears, phone in hand. “I am Level 1 Shabbat”, I said. Our local shule, Newtown Synagogue, has become a beacon of resilience and humanity in an otherwise hostile locale.

Among Jews today, I feel a kinship unlike any other. An acknowledgement of something shared. A candle, held by so many hands, weathering storm after storm to light the way for our children.

My mother gave us what she could. She preserved a connection that violence, displacement, assimilation, and shame had nearly severed.

Learning the Jewish Double Bind

In high school, I began to understand my Jewishness through ordinary encounters. Jews who were friends were referred to as “The Jew Crew”. It was more loaded than I felt permitted to let on. “The Coin Game”, also called “The Running of the Jew”, involved throwing coins into a circle and assaulting the boy silly enough to try to brave picking them up.

Boys sitting at the back of the class would jeer “Jewshua” and “Jewshua Jewbelstein”, but feign familiarity should I express any misgivings. To draw attention to any of these microaggressions was to be considered too sensitive or to be weaponising Jewish victimhood. So I didn’t. I didn’t want to look soft. All transgressions against Jews pale in significance to the Holocaust. G-d forbid a Jew express discomfort short of being shot into the Danube.

This double bind appears throughout Jewish life. Jewish persecution is dismissed because Jews are imagined as wealthy, powerful, coordinated, or protected. Anti-Jewish bigotry undermines any attempts to make anti-Jewish bigotry visible and ensure that it is dealt with. When violence is committed against us, we are accused of having caused it. Jewish victims are recast as Jewish oppressors receiving their comeuppance. Holocaust inversion, October 7 inversion, Bondi inversion. It’s all the same.

At university, I found myself being described by my ethnicity long before having disclosed that my mother was a Jew. Jewishness was treated as an explanatory category, carrying insinuations about profession, status, wealth, and social position. Having gone to Sydney Grammar was evidence not of my parents’ many sacrifices, but of their involvement in an international, ethnocentric wealth- and status-hoarding enterprise.

As I progressed through my 20s, my Jewishness gave others permission to express ideas about Jews without overt racial or religious overtones. The category of the “Zionist” could deliver the full brunt of anti-Jewish bigotry, sanitised through the language of politics and social justice. My assent to this bastardisation of language and dignity gave those ideas legitimacy. I didn’t understand.

Caulfield After October 7

Within months of October 7, my life in Melbourne began to feel alien.

Relationships I had maintained across Victoria, the ACT, and New South Wales seemed to fall through my fingers. I watched friends post “glory to the martyrs” and “long live the intifada” before the blood had dried on the bodies of people murdered, raped, and mutilated in southern Israel. It felt like the life I’d worked so hard to build was being overwritten by some new historical arc—one that cared not for the record, but for the emotional needs of today’s most frustrated and frail.

I spent too much time wondering whether I was being overly sensitive. I spent too much time attempting to quell the anxieties of Jews around me. I spent too much time believing that this was nothing more than a hiccup—that my friends would wake up to themselves if they could only see the October 7 footage, could only understand the events of 1948, 1967, 1972, and 1994, Hezbollah bombings in Argentina, the Oslo Accords, the intifadas, the Abraham Accords, Iranian proxies, antizionist eliminationism, eschatological bloodthirst, and recycled libels. Facts would prevail. Reality would prevail. Humanity would prevail.

In early 2024, a burger shop called Burgertory, located a few hundred metres from my then-home in Caulfield, was burnt down. Its owner had been using social media to spread antizionist conspiracies.

When I heard about the fire, I felt sick at the possibility that someone from my community might have attacked the shop. I wanted to make a public statement. I wanted to stand in solidarity against this kind of hate, wherever it came from. Whatever I thought of this business owner’s hatemongering, we do not set fire to the property of those we do not like.

I heard that a rally was being organised nearby and walked towards the site. As much as I wanted nothing to do with an antizionist rally, I wanted to exercise whatever control I possibly could over the disaster.

As I approached, I heard tyres screeching and engines revving. Trucks full of young men of Middle Eastern appearance tore aggressively and menacingly through the quiet residential streets. They accelerated at speeds that could have killed someone. These are streets where children play, where teens wander down after school, Slurpees in hand, using slang that makes the rest of us feel old.

Then I heard a truck approaching from behind me.

The driver crossed the street, mounted the pavement, and drove directly towards several Jewish people walking along the road. At the last moment, the truck swerved back onto the street and continued driving.

It came within feet of killing people.

Shortly afterwards, another truck pulled over and a group of young men got out. They moved towards the burnt-out shop, chests out, ready to provoke an altercation. One of them walked directly into a pedestrian, attempting to knock him over with his shoulder. The man stumbled and hurried away.

This was an assault on a random Jewish person. Jewish families were walking on Shabbat, while people had driven to Caulfield to intimidate us.

They appeared to hold local Jewish residents responsible for the suspected burning of the restaurant in the same way that antizionism holds Jews everywhere responsible for allegations concerning Israel.

Every Jew in Caulfield became a possible target.

The fire was later reported to have arisen from a criminal dispute unrelated to Jews or Israel. The Jewish community had nothing to do with it. The stigma remained. The justification for violence against Jews lingered. This is a story as old as time.

The episode distilled a recurring pattern. Jews were collectively accused before the facts were known. Random Jews were treated as legitimate targets.

Antizionism provides the contemporary framework for this collective punishment.

Leaving Melbourne

Antizionism has driven many of the people I knew and loved from my life.

People who stood by me through alcoholism and drug addiction exited my life shortly after October 7.

It was not my having been an often volatile menace to society that people objected to. No. The straw that broke the camel’s back came when, at five years sober, working full-time and volunteering in drug and alcohol services, I had the audacity to use social media to draw attention to the stigmatisation of Australian Jews.

Many of those same people withdrew from my life after I began making simple public statements about anti-Jewish conduct.

I said that ripping down hostage posters was disgusting.

I asked why posters calling to “globalise the intifada” were being marked with swastikas near my home.

I asked why non-Jews were leaving those posters in place.

These statements generated months of interrogation, accusation, and hostility.

The people who had forgiven serious conduct in my past could not tolerate my objections to the public humiliation and intimidation of Jews.

I packed up my business in Caulfield. I sold the equipment and possessions associated with the life I had built. I placed what remained in my ute and drove back to Sydney.

Starting Again

When I arrived in Sydney, I started again.

I put down my tools and returned to writing. I began submitting work to newspapers and was published across major Australian outlets. I appeared on television and radio.

I now devote much of my life to educating Jews and non-Jews about antizionist abuse.

The abuse is routinely presented as political criticism, even when it bears no reasonable relationship to policy, government, war, or political analysis.

I have experienced editors ceasing communication after previously engaging with my work. I have been uninvited from social events. I have stopped hearing from friends I once imagined would remain in my life permanently.

I have been abused for requesting decorum.

All the while, “Zionism” and Israel have rarely occupied much of my attention. I have never been to Israel. I do not spend my days discussing Israeli politics or constructing arguments about Zionism.

I have been called a “Zio-Nazi.” I have been told to “get back in the oven.” I have been followed, doxxed, and deleted from the lives of people I’ve known for decades.

The Effect on Daily Life

For months, I told people that Jews were overreacting to antizionism. I told them that I came from the left, that I knew these political spaces, and that the hostility would pass.

I told parents of Jewish children experiencing bullying that their children might be taking events too seriously.

I told my partner that older Jews comparing the present period to the 1930s were expressing inherited trauma.

I made excuses for antizionist abuse while it stripped away parts of my life. It took me far too long to understand what was happening. I understand with too much experience the allure of justifying the bigotry of others.

Antizionism affected my capacity to play in bands. It changed how I feel when entering an art gallery. It damaged my relationships with people I had grown up with in Sydney. It affected my willingness to tell people who I am.

I had never felt self-conscious about my surname. I now think about it when sending emails, ordering cars, entering unfamiliar spaces, and introducing myself.

Even when I sign an email “JD,” my full name remains visible in the address.

I have considered whether my name makes me easier to identify. I have considered whether I should walk a longer route home. I have considered whether public expression will expose my partner or family to harassment.

These calculations have become ordinary.

I refuse to change my Uber name to Max.

I refuse to walk the long way home as a permanent accommodation to other people’s hatred.

I refuse to begin every statement with a dissertation about the errors of the Israeli government.

I refuse to make apologies for a state I have never visited. I would never demand that an Australian of Pakistani background apologise for Pakistan, that a Chinese Australian answer for the Chinese government, or that an Iranian Australian account for the Islamic Republic.

Jews are routinely subjected to that demand.

A rabbi’s seven-year-old daughter was spat on in King Street in Sydney. She was targeted because another person had absorbed years of propaganda concerning the allegedly evil Jewish state.

This is the lived form of antizionism.

Antizionism as Collective Punishment

Antizionism is an obsession with the collective punishment of Jews under a political banner.

Earlier systems of anti-Jewish hostility focused on Jewish religion, Jewish race, Jewish blood, Jewish wealth, or Jewish conspiracy. Antizionism focuses on Jewish proximity to the establishment, existence, or defence of a Jewish state.

It renders that state inherently evil and illegitimate from birth. It then treats Jews around the world as extensions of that supposed evil.

The individual Jew is expected to declare their distance from Israel, condemn Zionism, answer allegations, disavow other Jews, and establish their moral innocence before entering public conversation.

The Jew who complies becomes useful. Their Jewishness can be presented as proof that the movement targeting other Jews is free from anti-Jewish hostility.

The Jew who refuses becomes a Zionist, and the word “Zionist” becomes permission to subject that person to conduct that would be recognised as bigotry if directed towards any other minority.

That permission structure has entered universities, cultural institutions, workplaces, friendship groups, activist organisations, media spaces, and ordinary social life.

It has allowed people to intimidate Jews while understanding themselves as participants in a social justice movement.

What I Am Asking the Royal Commission to Recognise

I am done apologising for my existence and for my refusal to participate in the collective punishment of my own people.

I am done pretending that the treatment I have experienced arises from a serious engagement with Israeli policy.

My life has been irrevocably shaped by antizionism. It has altered where I live, who remains in my life, how I work, how I move through public space, and how safely I can identify myself.

The Royal Commission should recognise antizionism as a distinct system of anti-Jewish hostility.

It should examine the way antizionist language authorises collective punishment, social exclusion, intimidation, and violence against Jews in Australia.

It should examine the institutions that have allowed antizionist rhetoric to be presented as ordinary political criticism while Jewish students, workers, artists, writers, families, and children absorb the consequences.

It should examine the expectation that Jews prove their moral worth by distancing themselves from Israel and Zionism.

It should examine the role of cultural, educational, political, and media institutions in normalising that expectation.

Antizionism is frequently described by its adherents as resistance. In contemporary Australia, antizionism is deeply institutionalised, socially rewarded, and culturally fashionable.

It takes effort, strength, and courage to step outside it.

I resist antizionism.

I resist the demand that Jews accept collective punishment as the price of participation in Australian public life.

I resist the expectation that Jewish dignity must always be qualified, explained, and apologised for.

I ask the Royal Commission to name the system that has produced these conditions and to treat its consequences with the seriousness they require.

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