Australia’s Antisemitism Inquisition: Grovelling Before Power

A sham royal commission weaponises “antisemitism” to shield Israel, suppress Palestinian solidarity and squander public money on propaganda masquerading as principle.

Image: AI generated

Back on January 9 this year, the Australian Federal Government continued its blind subservience to Israel with the establishment of its Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion and held its opening public hearing in Sydney on 24 February 2026 at 10:30 am.

Yesterday, “The Circus” (Royal Commission) of theatre and groveling held its first major block of public hearings – running from Monday 4 May to Friday May 15 - hearing two cases of antisemitism and ‘real hatred.’ Not trying to downplay their experience we’ve all experienced some form of hatred.

Antisemitism in Australia is unacceptable – however, how it is being sold to Australians is more about con and pedaling propaganda rather than understanding what antisemitism really is.

The royal commission into antisemitism is being sold as a moral necessity. Instead, the exercise is a political instrument designed to shield a state and its lobby, both of which have mastered the art of playing victim while inflicting extraordinary violence on others.

What the royal commission really is in essence is theatre - expensive and manipulative - staged to reassure Israel and its advocates that Canberra knows its place. The word for that is not leadership – but sycophancy.

The royal commission hasn’t emerged from any calm, sobre reflection on racism in Australia. It burst into existence in the middle of a storm: Gaza under bombardment, images of genocide on every screen, universities ringed by encampments, streets awash with anger, and a political class under relentless pressure from pro‑Israel advocates to “do something about antisemitism.” The commission became that something.

On its face, the establishment of the commission sounds unimpeachable. Antisemitism is real, ugly and unacceptable; any society that takes justice seriously should confront it head‑on.

However, the framing of the commission is anything but neutral. It’s built on a narrative that’s been meticulously engineered: criticism of Israel and Zionism is cast as inherently suspect; Palestinian solidarity is treated as a breeding ground for hate; and the greatest threat to “social cohesion” is said to come not from entrenched racist power, but from those who challenge it.

Australia hasn’t been offered a searching investigation into how racism works. Instead, the public is being sold a pre‑packaged story in which one state and its ideology are permanently cast as the victim, and anyone who questions that story faces being branded a bigot. That’s not scrutiny – it’s a con. Central to the con sits a deliberate conflation. Antisemitism is hatred or discrimination against Jews as Jews.

Zionism is a political project and a state‑building ideology, rooted in European nationalism and imposed in Palestine at the direct expense of an indigenous population.

The two aren’t the same, no matter how loudly the Zionist lobby and it’s band of evil propagators insists they are.

For decades, Zionist institutions and their allies have worked to erase that distinction.

Israel is relentlessly presented as “the state of the Jewish people”, the natural and sole political expression of Jewish identity. Once that frame is absorbed, the rhetorical trick becomes effortless.

Criticise the state, and the charge is an attack on the people. Call the project racist or colonial, and suddenly the accusation is hatred of “Semites.” Stand with Palestinians against dispossession, and the label is a threat to “social cohesion.” The royal commission has been conceived and structured inside this logic.

The more it treats sharp criticism of Zionism and Israel as automatically adjacent to antisemitism, the more it functions not as a defence against hatred but as an institutional shield around a political project that has left Gaza in ruins, fragmented the West Bank and turned Palestinian life into a permanent emergency.

What can never be denied is the existence of, a long‑standing Jewish presence in the region; those communities form part of the broader Semitic mosaic of the Middle East. That historical reality stands. But Zionism is not identical with Jewishness.

Zionism is a 19^th and 20^th century European‑shaped political program that has hijacked Jewish history and suffering to protect itself from scrutiny. It wraps itself in the language of “Semites” and “antisemitism” to claim a monopoly on victimhood, even as it presides over the ongoing dispossession of another indigenous people.

Rather than guarding the vital distinction between a people and a political project that claims to speak for them, the royal commission threatens to institutionalise the confusion that Zionism requires to survive.

Australians are being asked to bankroll a process that, dignifies and legitimises a lobby and a state that have done everything possible to cheat the moral ledger. Israel has perfected the performance of victimhood, invoking centuries of Jewish suffering - above all the Holocaust - as a permanent blank cheque for its own actions, no matter how brutal. This is not the posture of a besieged innocent. It is the posture of a state keenly aware of its protection, one that has learned precisely how to guilt Western governments into silence and complicity. It schemes, spins and manipulates, and it cloaks each manoeuvre in the language of safety and survival. The result is a grotesque inversion: the power that bombs, occupies and imprisons is constantly hailed as the victim, while those who resist or even describe that violence are cast as the real threat.

By building a royal commission on top of that script, Australia is not scrutinising propaganda; Australia is enshrining it. A propaganda line is being granted official, quasi‑sacred status. Instead of interrogating the ideology and networks of power that produced this moment, the government has chosen to formalise their demands. This speaks not only to analytical failure but to posture.

The royal commission allows the government to perform virtue while behaving as a client. It sends an unmistakable signal to Israel and its lobby: Canberra hears the complaints, Canberra is acting, Canberra stands in line. That is not independent judgement. That is flattery dressed up as principle.

What stands exposed is a three‑layered sycophancy: towards a foreign state that systematically violates international law; towards domestic lobby groups whose primary mission is shielding that state from criticism; and towards a ready‑made narrative in which Australian protesters, students and communities become the problem, rather than the policies and wars that provoked their outrage. All of this is wrapped in the language of a noble stand against hatred. At the very same time, a government that can suddenly find millions for a commission built on optics and propaganda cannot muster the political will to confront social crises in its own backyard.

Every dollar poured into this spectacle is a dollar not spent on what actually sustains safety and cohesion: housing, healthcare, education, community services, and genuine anti‑racism work that recognises the full landscape of bigotry -from antisemitism to Islamophobia, from anti‑Black racism to the ongoing racism directed at First Nations people. Instead, Australia has chosen to underwrite a grand inquiry whose practical effect will be to chill pro‑Palestinian advocacy and campus organising, encourage institutions to police speech according to politicised definitions of “antisemitism”, and leave the underlying structural injustices - both at home and abroad - untouched. This is a deliberate decision to channel public money into a performance calculated to impress the right capitals, the right lobbies and the right commentators, while ordinary Australians are told to brace for cuts, crises and “tough choices”.

Strip away the rhetoric and the picture is brutally clear. Antisemitism, a real and deadly form of hatred, is being deployed as a shield for a state and an ideology that now face unprecedented moral scrutiny. The royal commission offers that shield a formal, state‑backed shape. It tells Israel and its advocates that their narrative will be treated as Australia’s narrative, that their critics will be treated as Australia’s problem, and that their opponents will be watched.

None of this makes Jewish communities safer or Australia more cohesive. Nor does it bring justice any closer for Palestinians. What it does, is relentlessly, protect power by disguising it as vulnerability, by branding its challengers as dangerous, and by sending the bill for this performance straight to the public.

A serious response to antisemitism would begin by disentangling Jewish safety from Zionist impunity. Such a response would defend Jewish communities from hatred without turning that defence into a blank cheque for a criminal state.If it would listen seriously to Palestinians and recognise their struggle against dispossession is not bigotry but a demand for the most basic justice. The royal commission, as constructed, does none of this. It’s not a remedy; but part of the disease.

Australia is now being asked to applaud this spectacle has every right - indeed, every obligation - to see it for what it is: a costly act of sycophancy in support of an entrenched injustice, dressed up as a stand against hate.