Genuine anti-Semitism must be confronted, but it must never be used to shield Israel from accountability

The campaign to silence criticism of Israel has become one of the most serious threats to free expression in Western democracies.

Around the world, and increasingly in Australia, critics of Israel’s occupation, apartheid policies and treatment of Palestinians are being accused of anti-Semitism, subjected to complaints, threatened professionally or warned that their organisations could lose public funding.

Let us be absolutely clear: anti-Semitism is hatred of, discrimination against or violence towards Jewish people because they are Jewish. It is morally repugnant and must be opposed without qualification.

Jewish Australians must be able to worship, study, work and live without fear. Attacks on synagogues, Jewish schools, homes or individuals are crimes against both their victims and our multicultural society.

But criticism of Israel, Zionism or the actions of an Israeli government is not automatically hostility towards Jews. Israel is a state, Zionism is a political ideology and Judaism is a faith. Conflating these three distinct things is intellectually dishonest and dangerous.

The IHRA trap

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition says criticism of Israel comparable with criticism directed at other countries is not anti-Semitic.

However, several of its accompanying examples extend into contested political territory, including arguments about Israel’s foundations, applying “double standards” to it or comparing its conduct with that of the Nazis.

These examples have enabled institutions and lobby groups to portray strong criticism of Israel as suspected anti-Semitism, even when no hostility towards Jewish people is expressed.

Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal, has strongly promoted the IHRA definition. Her plan also proposed linking government funding to institutional responses to anti-Semitism, monitoring media coverage and establishing report cards for universities.

Universities Australia adopted its own definition in 2025, drawing partly upon IHRA, while the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency adopted IHRA in June 2026 as a “reference tool” for regulatory work.

AHPRA acknowledged that it had previously resisted adoption because of concerns that it could stifle legitimate free speech.

For healthcare professionals, the consequences can be profound. A complaint to AHPRA can cause months of anxiety and reputational damage, even when it is ultimately dismissed.

Between October 2023 and January 2024 alone, AHPRA received and resolved 59 complaints relating to practitioners’ social-media posts about Gaza.

Doctors, nurses and allied health workers consequently learn to remain silent about destroyed hospitals, killed colleagues and Palestinian suffering.

Community organisations fear that outspoken advocacy could cost them grants. Academics, artists and students moderate their language to avoid investigations.

This is how censorship often works: not through an official ban, but by making the personal and professional cost of speaking so high that people censor themselves.

A global lobbying strategy

The newly released book Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power, by investigative journalist Eli Clifton and political scientist Ian Lustick, examines campaign finance, pressure on politicians and attempts to police domestic dissent in the United States.

Published in August 2026, it updates the debate generated by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s 2007 study, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.

These works argue that a network of organisations and influential donors has pushed American policy in a consistently pro-Israel direction, often at the expense of American interests, Palestinian rights and regional peace.

We should avoid the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Jewish people act collectively or secretly control governments. The Israel lobby is neither all-powerful nor synonymous with Jewish communities.

It is a visible political network that includes Christian Zionists, political donors, lobby organisations and ideological supporters of Israel, alongside some Jewish organisations and individuals.

Indeed, many of the most courageous critics of Israel are Jewish.

They include Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, Australian-Jewish journalist Antony Loewenstein and Holocaust and genocide scholar Omer Bartov.

The Jewish Council of Australia also rejects the conflation of Jewish identity with Israel and has warned that IHRA-style policies suppress lawful Palestinian advocacy.

These distinguished voices are sometimes dismissed as “self-hating Jews” — an insulting tactic intended to deny Jewish people the right to form independent moral and political judgements.

Their presence demonstrates that criticism of Israel cannot honestly be reduced to hostility towards Jews.

Accountability cannot be silenced

A UN independent commission concluded in September 2025 that Israeli authorities and security forces had committed and were continuing to commit genocide in Gaza. Israel rejected that finding.

International bodies and human rights organisations have also documented settlement expansion, forced displacement and grave violations in the occupied West Bank.

Israel’s military actions have extended into Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran, spreading death and instability across the region.

Australians must remain free to discuss these findings, oppose occupation, advocate sanctions and support Palestinian self-determination without being maliciously branded anti-Semitic.

The struggle against genuine anti-Semitism is weakened, not strengthened, when the term is stretched to protect a state from accountability.

We must defend Jewish Australians from hatred and defend Palestinians from dispossession, apartheid, occupation and genocide. These commitments are not contradictory. They arise from the same universal principles of justice, equality and human dignity.