Antisemitism - Australia's reckoning

By Freya Leach

First published in the MRC’s Watercooler newsletter. Sign up to our mailing list to receive Watercooler directly in your inbox.

This week, during Budget estimates, ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess made a sobering declaration: antisemitism is now the greatest threat to life in Australia. This is unprecedented in our nation’s history. Never before has a threat directed at a specific racial or religious group been our top domestic national security concern. We are confronting a crisis that exposes not only the fragility of our social cohesion but also the failure of our leadership to grasp the unique and insidious nature of this ancient hatred. 

The events of October 9, 2023, when hundreds of keffiyeh-wearing thugs descended on the Opera House, should have been a wake-up call for Australia. It was a moment that revealed the true nature of the so-called “pro-Palestinian movement” in Australia. This was not a cry for peace or solidarity with innocent civilians; it was a grotesque celebration of violence against Jews. For a brief moment, the mask slipped, and the depth of hatred was laid bare.

Yet, within weeks, the memory of that night faded. The movement rebranded itself, and the world moved on. But the shadow of antisemitism has only grown darker over Australia since then. Jewish communities across the country are facing unprecedented levels of hatred and violence. Synagogues have been vandalised, Jewish businesses targeted, and individuals doxxed and harassed. In December 2024, a terror attack that destroyed a Synagogue in Melbourne finally prompted the establishment of a special antisemitism taskforce. 

Why has the Government been so weak and ineffective?

The answer lies in a fundamental misunderstanding of antisemitism. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has repeatedly treated it as just another form of racism, lumping it together with other prejudices. For a long time, Government Ministers could rarely bring themselves to mention antisemitism without immediately mentioning Islamophobia in the same sentence.  In fact, in response to rising antisemitism the Prime Minister appointed a special envoy for both antisemitism and Islamophobia, allocated funding to both Jewish and Muslim organisations, and tasked the Human Rights Commission with a general inquiry into racism on university campuses. 

What Albanese doesn’t understand is that antisemitism is not like any other form of racism. It is a unique and pernicious evil, a shape-shifting ideology that has persisted for millennia. It is not just hatred of a racial group; it is a conspiracy that blames Jews for the world’s problems, whatever they are. For the last two thousand years, Jews have been all things to all people looking to hate them; too poor then too rich, rootless then too integrated, too weak but also controlling the world. This disease of hatred culminated in the murder of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. Today Australia is home to 2,500 Holocaust survivors, the highest on a per capita basis of any country outside Israel. 

By failing to see antisemitism as a singular and distinct threat that is worse than any other form of racism because of the ease with which it spreads, Albanese’s response has been outright negligent. 

Adding insult to injury, in an unprecedented move, Labor has abandoned Israel on the world stage. At the September 2024 meeting of the UN General Assembly, Foreign Minister Penny Wong found time to meet with Iran’s Foreign Minister—a regime sponsoring terrorism, antisemitism and the oppression of women—but failed to meet with anyone from the Israeli delegation. She did however find time to meet with the Palestinian Authority and Jacinda Ardern. Labor’s belligerence overseas has fuelled antisemitism at home. 

Antisemitism is not just a “Jewish problem”, and the Australian public is starting to realise that. It is a symptom of deeper issues that will affect all Australians. The cracks in our “multicultural experiment” are beginning to show. While we pride ourselves on being a multicultural, multi-ethnic society, Australian and Western liberal-democratic values are negotiable. Our success as a nation is built on the foundation of Anglo-Western civilisation, with its Judeo-Christian values of individual liberty, rule of law, personal responsibility and human dignity. These are the values that have made Australia one of the most desirable places to live on earth. 

The male Bankstown Hospital nurse who allegedly claimed to have killed Israeli hospital patients violated every single value we expect all Australians, including migrants, to uphold. He fled Afghanistan as a refugee. A couple of years ago he became a citizen. And yet his rhetoric could have been coming from the spokesman of the Taliban. This is a national failure.

In our efforts to accommodate incompatible worldviews, we have sometimes flattened, downplayed and even disparaged our own culture. I often heard in school that “Australia’s culture is multiculturalism”. The implication is that we don’t have anything special to preserve. Why should we expect new migrants to integrate into our social fabric if they are told there is nothing good to integrate into? We are generally a tolerant, peace-loving, multi-ethnic society, but that is only possible because of our culture, rather than our lack of culture. Thousands of migrants flee countries like Iran and Afghanistan and choose to make Australia their home, but virtually none go the other way. Migrants like my father, and many of our Watercooler readers, come here because they want to embrace our way of life, not to import the values of the regimes they left behind. 

Europe provides a cautionary tale. The failure of the major parties to address the social fragmentation caused by unchecked migration and poor integration in the name of multiculturalism has driven voters into the arms of alternative parties. In the UK, Reform is now polling ahead of the Conservatives and the Labour Government. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally won 34% of the vote in the last election, the most of any Party. In Germany, the anti-immigration AfD doubled its share of the vote (now 20% vs the centre-right CDU’s 29%). Among young Germans, the far-left Die Linke and the AfD are the most popular parties.

Affirming Australian culture and opting for assimilation over separatism is not about insisting we only eat meat pies and fairy bread. Eating a variety of food and celebrating different holidays creates vibrant cities, but all citizens must share a fundamental commitment to upholding our core values. On the whole, we have done this very well but our current antisemitism crisis has shown we still have a way to go. 

After nearly three years of the Albanese Labor government, Australia is more divided than it has been in over a decade. First, the Voice to Parliament referendum tried to divide us along racial lines. Now Jew-hatred is corrupting our country. Australians are fed up with it. In an act of pure hypocrisy designed to deflect blame, a core Labor talking point against Peter Dutton is that he is trying to divide the country. How ironic. As John Howard often says, there is far more that unites us than divides us. Our ultimate unity as a nation can be found in our shared values of individual freedom, personal responsibility, and human dignity.

It is time for our leaders to reaffirm these values, to confront antisemitism as the singular evil it is, and to rebuild the social cohesion that has made Australia a beacon of hope and opportunity. If they fail to do so, the consequences will be dire—not just for the Jewish community, but for all Australians.