Federal Antisemitism Plan Marks the Death Knell of the Public Sphere

Prime minister Anthony Albanese’s decision to impose antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal’s Plan to Combat Antisemitism on the Australian public on 18 December 2025, has nothing to do with preventing another Bondi Beach massacre, and it has everything to do with placating the local Israel lobby, so that the ability to criticise Israel is suppressed as it continues its settler colonial project.

On Sunday, 14 December 2025, a western Sydney father and son duo, with links to a local ISIS cell, attacked a Jewish event marking the first day of Hannukah. The men callously murdered 15 people and injured 40-odd more. This was a horrendous antisemitic attack that occurred amidst a two-year-long moral panic around antisemitism, which happens to coincide with the genocide in Gaza.

“The ISIS-inspired terrorist atrocity that killed 15 innocent people – including a 10-year-old girl – was an attack on our Jewish community and it was an attack on the Australian way of life,” said the PM on Thursday.

“The Australian government adopts the Plan to Combat Antisemitism. We have already legislated for hate speech, hate crimes, hate symbols and doxxing.”

The Special Envoy’s Plan to Combat Antisemitism was released by the unelected official on 10 July 2025. At its heart, the plan seeks to insert a definition of antisemitism into government and public institutions that conflates the prejudice with criticism of Israel.

So, if this initiative is progressed, suggestions that Israel is illegally occupying and annihilating Palestinians, may be construed as showing prejudice towards Jewish people.

As the Jewish Council of Australia put in the wake of the PM’s disheartening decision to have the nation adopt and propagate a false understanding of antisemitism that serves to erase Palestinian identity, instead of moving to promote unity and safety, whilst preventing more such crimes, the decision has gifted Israel fulfilment of its divisive agenda to supress local dissent.

The Zionist reform package

The Australian government’s response to the envoy’s combatting antisemitism plan was only released on Thursday. The response appears five months after Segal’s overbearing agenda was first flagged publicly, but only four days after the Bondi Beach mass shooting. The report declares the plan’s 13 recommendations will be actioned, which the PM too suggested at the presser.

The key recommendation is that states and territories adopt the IHRA working definition of antisemitism at “all levels of government and public institutions”. The IHRA definition is a fraudulent understanding of antisemitism, as seven of the eleven accompanying examples of what comprises prejudice towards Jewish people involve criticisms of the Israeli state.

Further recommendations include legislation guarding against and criminal justice guidance on antisemitism, Holocaust education, university accountability, ensuring safety of Jewish communities, monitoring the internet and cultural institutions, educating various sectors, reforming migration policies, interfaith engagement, global cooperation and local monitoring and data collection.

Key reforms to be expedited in the present include establishing an antisemitism education taskforce, from preschool to tertiary, “a legislative package to crack down on the spread hate, division and radicalisation, including strengthening penalties for hate speech that urges violence”, and to set the eSafety commissioner and the envoy loose on the internet to censor antisemitism online.

Australian home affairs minister Tony Burke outlined on Thursday that federal Labor will be resurrecting the idea that former federal Liberal opposition leader Peter Dutton took to the last election, which comprised of being able to cancel or refuse visas if subjects are found to harbour antisemitic views. But the government appears to be proposing it cover all forms of racial prejudice.

Further reforms aimed at curbing antisemitism post-Bondi include an aggravated hate speech offence for antisemitic preachers, increased penalties for hate speech, making hate an aggravating factor for online threats and harassment, a regime for listing hate speech propagators and “a narrow federal offence for serious vilification based on race and/or advocating racial supremacy”.

Snake oil for sale

“Obviously, we gather to consider my report and the… adoption and implementation of it, in the shadow of the Bondi massacre, which has been an unbelievable tragedy for the community,” said Segal during Thursday’s press conference.

“I have been overwhelmed by support from members of the community, both here and from overseas and from all other envoys around the world.”

Albanese appointed Segal to the position of antisemitism envoy in July 2024. She is the immediate past president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, which is a Zionist or pro-Israel organisation. Zionism is the late 1880s European political doctrine that promotes the establishment of a Jewish state in historic Palestine, which is today the state of Israel.

The appointment responded to a growing moral panic over prejudice towards Jewish people, which coincided with Israel’s commission of the worst genocidal atrocity since the Nazi Holocaust against European Jews in World War II. The issue with this is that Segal is a Zionist who seeks to stamp out criticism of Israel as racial prejudice and therefore, suppress these legitimate political criticisms.

The creation of the envoy role appeared to be in response to concerns over rising prejudice, however, as it turned out, the first thing Segal did in her new role was fly to Argentina to join the Special Envoys and Coordinators Combating Antisemitism conference, which involved preexisting envoys from across the western world coming together. The first US envoy was appointed in 2004.

Esteemed US political dissident Noam Chomsky has underscored that since the late 1960s, advocates for Israel have been propagating the conflation of political criticism of the apartheid nation with the dehumanising antisemitism that fuelled the World War II Holocaust.

However, such conflation has led to non-Israeli Jews being held responsible for the crimes of the Israeli state across the world. The Bondi Beach massacre appears to involve the targeting of Australian Jews due to the 16-month-long genocide in Gaza, even though a sizable portion of Australian Jewish people do not support Israel and are vocal non-Zionists.

Erasing Palestinian identity

Oxford University PhD candidate Jamie Stern-Weiner’s 2021 report The Politics of a Definition details that the IHRA working definition was never officially adopted by the May 2016 IHRA Plenary meeting, but it has since been presented to governments as an officially adopted definition that they too should take up, precisely in order to curb criticism of the Israeli settler colonial project.

The definition examples of conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism include suggesting Israel exaggerates the Holocaust, accusing Jews of loyalty to Israel above their home countries, claims Israel is a racist endeavour, requiring Israel meet higher standards, comparing Israel to the Nazis, using Jewish stereotypes on Israelis and holding Jews collectively responsible for Israeli acts.

However, Federal Court of Australia Justice Angus Stewart found in July this year that “the ordinary, reasonable listener would understand that not all Jews are Zionists or support the actions of Israel in Gaza and that disparagement of Zionism constitutes disparagement of a philosophy or ideology and not a race or ethnic group”.

“Needless to say, political criticism of Israel, however inflammatory or adversarial, is not by its nature criticism of Jews in general or based on Jewish racial or ethnic identity,” his Honour threw in for good measure.

Indeed, Segal attended an antisemitism conference for Australian mayors in September, where discussion considered what sort of antisemitic symbols are a danger in the present. And it was found that no longer are Nazi swastikas the issue, but rather watermelons and inverted red triangles, along with phrases “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free” and “Free Palestine” are a problem.

So, what can be garnered from this is that the combating antisemitism plan primarily suppresses criticism of Israel, but also expressions of Palestinian identity and liberation.

The state of Israel relies on the usurping of Palestinian land to establish itself, and as criticism of this in Australia is to be officially conflated with antisemitism, therefore, citizens and residents criticising Israel’s right to exist could soon face potential criminal charging.

But the greatest victim of the imposition of the plan to suppress criticism of Israel is not the right to free speech and political communication in this country, as ultimately, the plan PM Albanese has agreed to serves to erase the identify of all Palestinians living in this country for fear that their existence raises an inconvenient truth about the founding of the Israeli state.