The Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion took a distinctly political turn during its second week of hearings. The focus shifted from personal stories of discrimination to how prejudice should be defined and quantified.
Expert witnesses were called to testify, with lawyers from the commission and external groups delving into the complex issues surrounding the distinction between antisemitism and criticism of Israel, among other debated topics.
On Monday, Julie Nathan, the research director at the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), was questioned about how her organization distinguishes between pro-Palestinian activism and antisemitism. ECAJ represents the interests of Australian Jewish communities.
For over ten years, Nathan has been responsible for ECAJ’s annual reports on antisemitism, which are frequently referenced in the media. These reports have highlighted a significant increase in antisemitism, especially since the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s subsequent military actions in Gaza.
Critics argue that ECAJ’s approach blurs the lines between legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitism. Nathan countered these claims during her testimony.
“Probably most criticism of Israel, even though it’s — a lot of it is incredibly offensive, we don’t treat as antisemitic,” Nathan stated. She emphasized that ECAJ follows “very strict guidelines” and only labels criticism as antisemitic in specific cases, such as when it involves offensive anti-Jewish stereotypes or targets Jewish individuals.
Examples of antisemitism from ECAJ reports brought up in the hearing included the placing of Free Palestine stickers on synagogues and Jewish schools, and one 2024 incident in which such stickers were stuck on two soccer balls and kicked over a fence into a Jewish community facility.
Nathan said her report counted these incidents as antisemitic because, although they were criticisms of Israel, Jews and Jewish institutions had been targeted.
Antisemitism, Israel, anti-Zionism and the IHRA
Another point explored by Nathan and her interlocutors was whether comparing Israel’s actions to those of Nazi Germany was antisemitic.
Nathan said that, given the scale of the Holocaust, such comparisons were incorrect and offensive. She also said they were intentionally deployed because people “know that that will also hurt Jews, that we are incredibly offended by that”.
Nathan explained that this type of discourse was categorised as antisemitism by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an intergovernmental organisation founded in the late 90s whose guidelines she described as providing “good guidance” for the work of groups like ECAJ.
However, the IHRA definition — which is endorsed by dozens of nations, including Australia, but not the United Nations — has faced significant pushback, with critics accusing it of impeding political expression and academic inquiry.
For instance, the authors of a 2022 academic paper criticising the definition said that, while “broad unqualified statements treating Nazism and Zionism as similar, or equally bad, are likely to spring from antisemitism and/or gross ignorance”, this restriction stymied genuine historical scholarship.
“Historians and others who study these and other ethno-nationalist movements of European origin, for example Serbian nationalism, may quite reasonably identify certain historical parallels along with major dissimilarities,” they wrote.
The definition was again discussed during a Tuesday appearance by Andre Oboler, CEO of the Online Hate Prevention Institute and a long-serving member of the Australian government’s delegation to the IHRA.
Oboler explained to the commission how his group had assessed the comments on 13 Australian government and media posts, which he said were rife with antisemitic tropes.
“[A] lot of it was about the government’s response to antisemitism, and people have reacted to that by saying: ‘Well, they’re only addressing antisemitism because the Jews control the government.’”
He said there were some contexts in which criticism of Zionism — the foundational ideology of the state of Israel — or its adherents should be considered antisemitic, but it depended on the context.
He said the repurposing of classic antisemitic tropes, such as Jewish people nefariously controlling institutions, was one such example: “So instead of saying ‘Jews control the banks’, it’s saying ‘Zionists control the banks’”.
“It’s pretty consistent that the vast majority of this antisemitism category is actually just old antisemitism, but instead of talking about Jews, it’s been coded to talk about Zionists, Israelis, or Israel,” he said.
Patterns of prejudice
The distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism also arose during the Tuesday appearance of emeritus professor Andrew Markus, a Monash University researcher involved in several significant surveys of both Australian Jewish community attitudes and Australians’ attitudes towards Jews and Israel.
At one point, Markus was pressed on how his surveys had used a framework that divided antisemitism into two distinct varieties: a Judeophobic antisemitism ( “traditional or classic prejudicial attitudes towards Jews as a group”) and an anti-Zionist form of antisemitism (“antisemitic attitudes directed at Israel and its supporters”).
The latter category involved respondents expressing levels of agreement or disagreement with statements such as “I am comfortable spending time with people who openly support Israel”, “Israel can get away with anything because its supporters control the media” and “Israel and its supporters are a bad influence on our democracy”.
Markus said it was “not at all” antisemitic for someone to indicate that they were uncomfortable with spending time with those who openly support Israel and stressed that what researchers were looking for was “the pattern of response”.
On whether it was antisemitic to compare Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to the persecution Jews suffered under the Nazis, Markus said it “totally depends on the context”, a qualification that he said was consonant with the IHRA definition.
A 2025 survey he carried out for The Jewish Independent media outlet found Greens voters had the “lowest level of agreement with negative statements on the Judeophobic scale, but the highest level on the anti-Zionist scale”, while One Nation voters “averaged the highest score on the Judeophobic scale, but second lowest on the anti-Zionist scale”.
Markus also discussed his work on the Scanlon Foundation’s annual Mapping Social Cohesion report, which found that negative attitudes towards certain religious groups had increased across the board in recent years.
From 2023 to 2025, the proportion of those holding negative views about Jewish people increased from 9 per cent to 15 per cent, while those holding negative attitudes about Hindus increased from 10 per cent to 14 per cent. Meanwhile, negative attitudes to Christians saw a shift of 16 per cent to 18 per cent and Muslims from 27 per cent to 35 per cent.
Palestinian group criticises exclusion
While some progressive Jewish groups, such as the Jewish Council of Australia, were granted leave to appear at the commission, a prominent Palestinian advocacy organisation has said it was “deeply disappointed” it hadn’t secured the same rights.
The Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN) said on Thursday that it was “deeply concerned that the inquiry will rely heavily on submissions equating criticism of Israel, Zionism and Israel’s actions in Gaza with hatred of Jewish people, without rigorous inquiry”.
“Excluding voices from the Palestinian community increases the very real probability of producing an incomplete and polarising account of the rise in antisemitism,” it said in a media release.
It said that “within hours” of the 14 December Bondi massacre — which precipitated the establishment of the commission — the pro-Palestinian movement had been blamed for the attacks.
A royal commission spokesperson told the ABC that applications for leave to appear were “considered and determined on a case-by-case basis”.
“For each hearing block, the royal commission invites persons who consider they have a direct and substantial interest in the scope of the hearing block to make an application for leave to appear,” the spokesperson was quoted by the ABC as saying.
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