The Barghoutifly Effect

Antizionism in Victorian State Labor

Joshua Dabelstein and Movement Against Antizionism

May 24, 2026

Delegates at Victorian Labor’s state conference have voted to further institutionalise the apartheid libel against the Jewish state, while calling for the release of convicted terrorist Marwan Barghouti and refusing to condemn the Iranian regime’s human rights abuses.

The apartheid, genocide and colonialism libels have embedded themselves in universities, activist organisations, and sections of mainstream politics.

These libels mark Jews worldwide for vilification and violence. Jews doxed, shot outside museums, stabbed outside shules, or shot on beaches are not vetted for their “political opinion”. Violence does not erupt after conversations about “Zionism”. It erupts because, in the antizionist era that we now inhabit, that word is invoked not to describe, but to dehumanise.

Yet antizionism continues spreading through our institutions because it is protected as “political criticism”. But for the Royal Commission testimonies of an anonymous father in the Northern Territory and Melbourne high school teacher Sharonne Blum, there has been scant attention paid to the naming and describing of antizionism necessary for the Commission to truly protect Australian Jews.

Antizionism is mutually exclusive with “criticism”. Antizionists reject discourse with “Zionists”, and cannot be satisfied by Israeli reform or policy changes. It positions the Jewish state as illegitimate and marked for elimination. This is an extremist, bigoted, and dangerous obsession, masquerading as “political criticism”.

Australian leaders cannot respond to antizionism without naming it. Unnamed, it remains unseen. Unseen, it remains misdiagnosed, or worse, referred to as something that can only be addressed when it merely “crosses the line into antisemitism”.

Racism does not have to cross a line into sexism to be dealt with. Both are different justifications internalised by bigots to attack people. Bigotry always considers itself moral. Bigots define their enemy for themselves. The antizionist’s logic is no different.

Antizionism gives permission for modern anti-Jewish vilification to flourish. That permission is granted by the institutionalising of the libels it spreads about its hate object. Those libels attach themselves to anyone considered proximal to that object. All Jews are considered proximal to the antizionist’s hate object.

Jewish organisations, Labor figures and communal leaders condemned the conference decisions. Zionist Federation President Jeremy Leibler described support for Barghouti as a “shocking moral collapse”. Zionism Victoria President Elyse Schachna warned that the motions “blur the moral lines that civilised societies are meant to defend.”

These criticisms from highly capable and experienced advocates are important. But they stop short of identifying the ideology organising the conduct itself.

Almost all Australian institutions continue responding to the effects produced by antizionism without naming antizionism itself. Public discussion revolves around “social cohesion”, “community tensions”, and “rising antisemitism”.

Marwan Barghouti is serving five life sentences plus forty years for orchestrating terrorist attacks during the Second Intifada. Civilians were murdered in restaurants and roadside shootings. Antizionism encourages the celebration of Barghouti as a hero-victim.

We are living within an ideological system capable of recoding the murder of Israeli civilians as morally intelligible, first experienced by most of us on October 8. It is antizionism, not “Zionism”, that Australians need to understand. Too much time and too many resources are being squandered on efforts to explain “Zionism”.

Can you imagine a Jew in 1939 trying to explain “Semitism” to an antisemite? “Zionism” occupies the same role within antizionist ideology. It is the hated Jewish element around which the worldview organises itself. It does not “sometimes cross over” into a vile hate movement. It is one.

Adam Slonim, co-convener of Jewish Labor, criticised motions presenting Israel as uniquely criminal while erasing Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestinian extremism from the discussion.

Slonim’s intervention identified the moral asymmetry at play. Antizionism treats Jewish sovereignty as uniquely illegitimate and corrupt. Every accusation flows downward from that premise. This is how bigotry works.

Once Israel is established as “apartheid” or “genocidal”, hostility toward anyone considered proximal to “Zionism” is justified. Terrorists become resistance figures. Jewish safety becomes a distraction from a greater evil.

The refusal to condemn the Iranian regime exposed the same antizionist structure. Iranian-Australian delegate Nos Hosseini attempted to pass an amendment condemning the regime’s repression, executions and political imprisonment. Victorian Labor’s Socialist Left majority voted it down. Iran has executed more of its own citizens in the past 12 months than Gazan civilians killed since its proxies invaded Israel on October 7.

Antijudaism constructed the Jew as theological evil. Antisemitism constructed the Jewish ethnicity as racial evil. Antizionism constructs the Jewish state as structural evil. Each framework invents a uniquely corrupt Jewish entity standing outside legitimate humanity and requiring elimination.

We may use the umbrella term “antisemitism” for all three iterations of anti-Jewish obsessions, but the fact remains that each mobilising hate movement has emerged in distinct circumstances and is a representation of the anxieties and moral loopholes of the population at the time.

We remain trapped inside an outdated model that recognises anti-Jewish hatred only when Jews are targeted explicitly for their religion or ethnicity. By targeting Jewish sovereignty rather than Jewish biology or faith, antizionism assumes social legitimacy. It doesn’t conform to popular conceptions of “antisemitism” despite being very well covered under the IHRA working definition of antisemitism.

Wilhelm Marr popularised the term antisemitism in the late 19th century. In his 1879 pamphlet The Victory of Jewry over Germandom, Marr “unconditionally defend[s] Jewry against all religious persecution.”

He continues: “I emphasize the following indisputable truth: With the Jews, the Romans have forced a tribe upon the West, which as its history shows, was thoroughly hated by all the peoples of the Orient.”

Today’s antizionists are similarly the first to condemn “antisemitism, islamophobia, and all forms of racism”.

Institutions cannot defend Jews from a movement they refuse to name. Every condemnation of intimidation, extremism or antisemitism that omits antizionism leaves intact the ideology legitimising each of them.

Labor delegates passing motions celebrating terrorists falls well within the logic of antizionism.

But this is only half the problem.

We have more agency than we are exercising. As it has done with all successful social justice movements, dismantling hate starts only when we begin naming the problem.

What Jews are experiencing is not our fault. The failure of our communications and strategies up until this point is something we must confront.

It is the responsibility of political parties, courts, the Royal Commission, student unions, arts and cultural bodies, and everything in between, to listen to Jews when we tell them what’s wrong; to listen when we explain that antizionism is a pathological, inexcusable, bigoted obsession with the Jewish state.

Many of these groups aren’t listening—but many still are. How can they hear what we do not say?

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?