The Royal Commission into Zionist Absolution and Palestinian Erasure

Commencing days after its interim report release, the hearings of the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion began on 4 May 2026 on Gadigal land in Sydney, and ever since, tales have emerged regarding the expert witness conflating of prejudice towards Jewish people with criticism of Israel, while the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network has been barred from taking part.

The major government public inquiry was established on 9 January 2026, only weeks after the targeted antisemitic attack on a Jewish festival at Bondi Beach, which involved ISIS-inspired killers callously murdering fifteen people and injuring dozens more.

The inquiry was initially resisted by prime minister Anthony Albanese, however immense pressure from the local Israel lobby, the Murdoch press and the Coalition saw him buckle.

The Bondi Beach massacre was born of clear prejudice against Jewish people. Since the outbreak of the ongoing Gaza genocide, there is no doubt that antisemitism and Islamophobia have been on the rise. Yet, since that time, anti-First Nations prejudice has also been increasing but has been given less attention. And a huge spike in white nationalism has too been mainstreamed over this period.

Jewish Council of Australia executive director Sarah Schwartz told Sydney Criminal Lawyers in February 2024, about a conflation that’s applied by Israel to silence detractors of its settler colonial rights abuses targeting Palestinians, which applies the simple rule of claiming that an individual condemning Israel for its actions is being antisemitic because the state defines itself as Jewish.

But in early 2024, when people were reeling from the understanding that Israel was conducting a mass slaughter and starvation program in Gaza, the idea that a Royal Commission into Antisemitism would be underway two years later, with the unofficial aim of establishing this conflation, in order to stymie the large pro-Palestinian solidarity movement in this country was inconceivable.

Combatting antisemitism on the fly

Australia’s unelected special envoy to combat antisemitism Jillian Segal provided expert testimony on 7 May 2026. The lawyer explained that antisemitism is “a virus”, which has “mutated” over time. She pointed out three historical stages. The initial stage involved religious prejudice around “Jews killing Christ”, which then morphed into the racism of Nazi Germany. And the present stage involves Israel.

There are four types of antisemitism today, Segal told Royal Commission senior counsel Richard Lancaster. One is that held by Islamic extremists, while another is the prejudice of “far-right, neo-Nazi, white supremacists”. Then there’s that harboured by “far-left or issue nominated, issue motivated activist groups” and lastly, there’s those who blame dissatisfaction about Israel on all Jews.

But Segal’s identification of the third and fourth types of modern antisemitism appears to involve the splitting of the antigenocide/pro-Palestinian movement into two distinct groups to conceal what is occurring, which is legitimate criticism of Israeli atrocities, and in particular, those of genocide and apartheid, along with the rejection of political Zionism and the Zionists that adhere to this doctrine.

According to Segal’s reading, the far-left activist groups are those who oppose Zionism, the late 1880s political doctrine developed by Hungarian Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl, which proposed that just like European colonies, Jewish people should create their own colonial state somewhere else around the globe, which would also avoid their ongoing persecution by European Christians.

Early Zionists didn’t simply choose Palestine to establish Israel, despite the Bible stating that God promised it to the Israelites, whom the Jews are descended. Argentina was another potential site for a Jewish state. But Palestine was settled on, not merely because of the biblical justification, but also, because the British agreed to give it to Jewish people after they acquired it post-World War I.

Segal suggests there are Islamic extremists and Nazis who hold prejudice against Jews. She then raises the far-left anti-Zionist/pro-Palestinians as harbouring Jewish prejudice, even though this group is actually opposed to the Israeli settler colonial project, which involves ongoing genocide, and many of the more prominent members of this movement are Jewish people.

The envoy then pulls a fourth group out of her hat and claims they’re people dissatisfied with Israel and its actions in Gaza, and they go on to blame all Jewish people for what the Israeli state is doing. And this group, whose members aren’t far-right, far-left or Islamic extremists are causing the majority of the antisemitism, and most of her work on combatting antisemitism is focused on them.

“It’s almost as if in that last category that those people who have – are doing the conflation don’t understand always what they are doing. Some do and some don’t. It’s almost fashionable,” explained the envoy. “So, if someone that they follow online, an influencer is of that view, they adopt that view. And so, in one sense, it’s the most pernicious because it just happens very easily.”

Shape-shifting lobbying

The hearings don’t simply involve experts like Segal seeking to propagate the conflation that’s employed to silence criticism of Israel, it’s Gaza genocide and its current attempting to invade and colonise southern Lebanon.

The Bondi Beach massacre saw innocent people killed. Local Jewish people have been subjected to rising prejudice, and these people will have a chance to share their experiences at the hearings.

But if the envoy was seriously concerned with locals conflating Israeli atrocities with the Australian Jewish community, then a clear condemnation of those international crimes would prevent this.

This is not how Israel’s conflating device operates, however, as in order to prevent criticism of its genocidal and apartheid practices, this mechanism purposefully conflates that criticism with all Jewish people globally and that then serves to block the raising of the international crimes for fear of being deemed as antisemitic.

The Sky News Antisemitism Summit was broadcast in February 2025, and it involved the Israel lobby calling for an action plan that would see a national emergency established, along with a specific police taskforce. The plan further called for law enforcement and intelligence training on the prejudice, and enactment of new laws to prevent it.

Fast forward a year on and this plan that appeared absurdist on delivery is basically underway.

Segal’s whole-of-society combatting antisemitism plan is being implemented, Operation Shelter, established to deal with antisemitism in October 2023, is now permanent, and many consider the Royal Commission is ultimately focused on ending criticism of Israel via officially conflating it with antisemitism.

But there were those who considered when former High Court Justice Virginia Bell was appointed as commissioner for the Royal Commission that this attempt to conflate legitimate political criticism of Israel with antisemitism would no longer be a threat. That was until the former judge announced at the opening hearing that the IHRA working definition on antisemitism would inform the inquiry.

The IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) working definition is a simple two-line explanation of what prejudice towards Jewish people is. But then it’s accompanied by eleven examples of antisemitism and seven of them involve Israel. So, applying this definition serves to shut down all forms of criticism of Israel by conflating it with hatred towards Jewish people.

“Almost fashionable”

The reason there has been a rise in antisemitism since October 2023 is that Israel has been committing a large-scale AI-assisted genocide in Gaza that’s been livestreamed, and Segal hinted at as much during her testimony.

However, not all of them, but a fair few of the incidents and crimes that have been labelled antisemitic in Australia have targeted Israel: a nation currently committing genocide.

The fact that APAN (the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network), which is the nation’s peak Palestinian representative body has twice been denied permission to testify at the Royal Commission certainly hints at there being aspects to the official inquiry that are a bit off. Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinians, and conflating the raising of this as hatred towards Jews is key to the inquiry.

British antisemitism expert Dr Dave Rich spoke at the 14 May Royal Commission hearing and he explained the history of antisemitism and its old tropes and stereotypes. Rich brought up the medieval European trope of blood libel, which involves the idea that Jewish people used to kill non-Jewish children as part of their religious rituals. Then he did a bit of conflating of his own.

“You can see its traces in some of the depictions of Israel today, in the idea that Israel goes out of its way to deliberately kill Palestinian children, that those children are not just victims of war but are targets of this Jewish desire to murder children,” Dr Rich posited.

The official death toll of the Gaza genocide right now is over 72,700 people, with at least 21,000 of these murdered Palestinian civilians being children. The real death toll is expected to be much higher. And foreign doctors have been warning about Palestinian children being systematically shot in the head or chest by Israeli snipers for years now. Israel has been committing genocide for 31 months.

No one cares about old blood libel tropes from medieval times. People just want the Israelis to stop slaughtering the Palestinians to take over their land, and that includes to stop murdering their children.

Rich also raised the old trope of Jewish “dual loyalty”, which is the idea that Jewish people were more loyal to other Jewish people than were the rest of the community, or today, that Jewish people around the world are more loyal to Israel than their own countries. Then Dr Rich warned that this stereotype is leading to ideas about Israel lobbies putting pressure on governments to get their way.

So, with experts like Dr Rich spouting ideas like this at the Royal Commission into Antisemitism, whilst Segal’s Plan to Combat Antisemitism is being implemented at all levels of government and its institutions, including education, just after several jurisdictions have passed combatting antisemitism legislation, the outcomes of the official inquiry seem pretty much guaranteed.