Ancient Hate, New Remedies

On 10 July this year, Jillian Segal released her report as Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism. The report’s launch was overseen by the Prime Minister and supported by Tony Burke, the Minister for Home Affairs, who in turn carried with him the wishes of Anne Aly, the Minister for Multicultural Affairs. Flanked in person and spirit by Labor Right and Left, the PM set about managing expectations for the government’s response to Segal’s report as he introduced it. The report ‘of course reaffirms the fact that antisemitism didn’t begin on 7 October. And therefore,’ Albanese insisted, ‘it isn’t like two weeks extra paid parental leave, where you pass a piece of legislation and it’s done’. Antisemitism is at once deeper and more insidious. Albanese proposed that the government must: 

What at first seems a Bushism is at second glance less a slip of the tongue than a Prime Minister trying too carefully to give this particular hate – an ‘ancient’ one that ‘will never be totally defeated’ as Segal concedes – no quarter.  

To push antisemitism to where ‘it doesn’t belong’ echoes but overstates the report’s central aim. In documenting the ‘modern threat’ of antisemitism, the remit of the report is to push it back ‘to the fringes of society’. Subtitled ‘A policy-oriented framework for government and the Australian community’, the document is styled as a ‘call to action and a work plan’. As part of the latter, Segal sets out thirteen ‘strategic focus areas of action’. These include everything from formalising and adopting a definition of antisemitism in state and federal governments to ‘community education about antisemitism and cohesion-building’. 

The report is motivated by what Segal observes as an historically significant increase in antisemitism in recent years. She documents a ‘316% rise’ in antisemitic incidents (‘threats, assaults, vandalism and intimidation’) in the period from October 2023 to September 2024, and a ‘700% rise’ in October and November 2023 when compared with the previous year. The report cites ASIO Director General Mike Burgess’ remark of February 2025 that antisemitism represents ‘Australia’s leading threat to life’. (What he actually said before Senate estimates was: ‘In terms of threats to life, it’s [antisemitism’s] my agency’s number one priority because of the weight of incidents we’re seeing play out in this country.’) 

Across the report’s seventeen pages, Segal makes numerous far-reaching claims about the nature and prevalence of antisemitism in Australia, but furnishes no footnotes, references, or sources. Instead, she positions her report as interested primarily in remedies. As well as a ‘call to action and a work plan’, her report styles itself variously as a ‘policy-oriented framework for government and the Australian community’, ‘call for collective action’, and a ‘roadmap’. Because none of these require that claims be demonstrated, the document is almost entirely declarative rather than argumentative. 

In her public presentation of the document, Segal has refused to elaborate on the evidence for her claims. In a 7.30 interview with Sarah Ferguson, she sought to avoid debating the definition of antisemitism and would not adduce any examples of what she calls in her report ‘false or distorted narratives’ aired by ‘media organisations’ – organisations including the ABC and SBS over which the Envoy seeks new oversight. When questioned on the details, Segal said debate was not the purpose of the interview. Rather the ‘point of my discussion is to give you an holistic view’. It’s the vibe of the thing, in other words. 

Our goal here is to furnish the absent sources for the report’s declarations, especially, for reasons that will become clear, those that pertain to higher education. The scope of the Envoy’s recommendations is so extensive that, even if the government only chooses a few, these alone have the potential to reshape Australian public life. The report may also have a significant impact on Jews and Muslims in Australia in particular. Taken at its own word, the Report would give the Envoy the capability to monitor journalism about Israel and the Middle East, setting parameters according to her own sense of ‘impartiality and balance’ – likely functioning to limit commentary from Muslims, Palestinians, and others from whom we sorely need to hear in public discussions of the war in Gaza and its consequences for communal life in Australia. 

Both authors of this piece have either worked or are working in Australian universities, and both have written on Jewish literature and history. In our different ways, we are both Jewish – one of us attended a Jewish dayschool in Sydney, the other reconnected with his Jewishness as a young adult. Our reading focuses primarily on Segal’s recommendations for universities, which are some of her most far-reaching. Her preoccupation with universities is closely related to ongoing arguments over Zionism both within the Jewish community and more widely in Australian politics. It divulges much about how she defines Jewish life in Australia and about the institutions and discourses from which these preoccupations emerge. 

By looking carefully at the Envoy’s report, we seek to situate its claims within the constellation of studies of Australian Jewish experiences, as well as a broader historical context for understanding questions of racism, community identity, and social integration in Australia. We believe that discussions of antisemitism can and should invite others in to work toward solidarity. The Report, and much of what followed, has not done so.  

Jews in Australia 

Segal’s report defines Jewishness in Australia via official multiculturalism – Jews in Australia are an ethnic group among the other ethnic groups that make up the nation. Thinking in these terms  allows her to describe and then speak for a relatively coherent Jewish community. That community can form relationships with the other groups woven into the Australian social ‘fabric’, as she has it. In the ‘multicultural and interfaith engagement’ section of the report, Segal sets herself the task of ‘reach[ing] out, including through Jewish community organisations, to communities with which the Jewish community has had longstanding close relations, including the Indigenous community, to create a shared understanding of ways to combat discrimination and hatred’. One community to another – and each community alike – Australia will fight the scourge of antisemitism. 

This harmonious vision of Australia as comprised by different ethnic groups all woven into the social fabric bypasses the colonial history of Australia. Aboriginal Australians, who are the Traditional Landowners, are not a minority like any other. Where some groups might want respect, opportunity and safety, Indigenous Australians have been seeking sovereignty, reparations and historical truth-telling – and what the Uluru statement calls Makarrata, ‘the coming together after struggle’ in the form of Treaty. As Robert Manne and others have pointed out, when it comes to sheer threat to life, no form of racism in Australia comes close to that experienced by Aboriginal people.   

Multiculturalism also assumes a particular ethnic definition of Jewishness. Ethnic categories are never especially adequate – and they are strikingly inadequate in the case of Jews. The Australian Bureau of Statistics, following consultation with Jewish groups, decided to include Jews under the broad group ‘“North African and Middle Eastern” as this is where the Jewish culture originated’. This approach was adopted even though ‘Jewish people in Australia might not have ties with the Middle East and might consider classification within one of the European broad groups as more correct’.  The ABS definition insists on a geographic association that for Australia’s majority Ashkenazi Jews requires going back thousands of years.  

The idea of a Jewish community that is discrete and broadly uniform has a deep history in postwar Australian life – it is part and parcel of the wider changes that occurred in the period of the White Australia policy and afterwards. As Max Kaiser writes: 

For Kaiser, the paradigm of multiculturalism ‘became a means of governmental containment through an ethnic community leadership class’.  

Segal’s vision of the Jewish community, we might think, has a containing effect of the kind that Kaiser describes. The report is clear that there is a misalignment between the interests of Australian Jews and some prospective migrants to Australia, and uses this as the basis to recommend that immigration should be further monitored. ‘Australia has long welcomed people from across the globe with the clear understanding that imported hatreds have no place here’ [emphasis added], she writes. The section on migration calls for a review of Australia’s screening process in order to better weed out extremist and antisemitic ‘views’. ‘Migration policies must guard against the importation of hate’.  

The language used by the Envoy draws on longstanding rhetorics of local harmony and international discord – rhetorics that historically have been used to exclude Jews from the social ‘fabric’ but are now extended to other groups. At the infamous Évian Conference in 1938, the Australian delegate, Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas W. White, Minister for Trade and Customs, declared his opposition to ‘large-scale foreign migration’: ‘As we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one.’ 

In the story Segal tells, though, Jews are a model minority who have become part of mainstream Australian life seemingly without struggle or effort. She opens her foreword with the following comment: 

The focus on ‘integration’ in effect aligns Jewish Australians with the state, rather than with histories of dissent. Such an account elides knotty histories of colonisation, Jewish migration, official racism (including the White Australia policy), Christian antisemitism, and divisions internal to the Jewish community – each of which has profoundly shaped the lives of Jewish Australians. 

The truth is that, pace Segal, Australia has not ‘long welcomed people from across the globe’. Ashkenazi Jews, as seeming European aliens, gave a lie to the race science on which the White Australia policy was based – Jews in the mid-century were never quite the accepted kind of ‘white’. In 1945, there was a ‘public outcry’ about the 2,000 Holocaust survivors who were to be resettled in Australia in the next twelve months, ‘even though this quota was significantly lower than the annual number of 5,000 before the war’. It was this public pressure that saw a twenty-five per cent cap on the proportion of Jewish passengers for any ship or plane arriving in Australia around this time. As Suzanne D. Rutland records in The Jews in Australia, a representative from the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in Shanghai summed up the Australian position in 1949 as follows: ‘We have never wanted these people in Australia and we still don’t want them. We will issue a few visas to those who have relations there as a gesture’. 

Segal’s account of the Australian Jewish community also demotes longstanding and hotly contested arguments among Jews – it is here where the report’s regulative force on Jews is most keenly felt. As Kaiser notes, there have always been ‘significant internal political struggles and debates’ in Jewish communities in Australia, ones which have taken place against the background of the White Australia policy and official racism. The most significant such debate was after World War Two, between the anti-Zionist Jewish Labour Bund and the state-based Boards of Deputies, which were strongly aligned with Zionism. As David Slucki notes in his global history of the postwar Bundists, ‘Bund organizations opposed Zionism the world over, but [...] in Melbourne, the conflict was especially sharp’. 

At the report’s launch, Segal thanked ‘the leadership and dedication of Australia’s major Jewish community organisations with whom I’ve consulted on many aspects of the plan, and who have supported my work to date’. ‘Major’ is therefore an important qualifier – it is an acknowledgement of whose vision of the Jewish present and future is thought to carry the weight of community desire. In these comments, Segal is referring in part to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), of which she is the immediate past president, and which continues to advance similar positions on Zionism as the Boards of Deputies and their successor bodies (which make up the ECAJ). One of ECAJ’s goals is to affirm ‘Australian Jewry’s strong and unshakeable solidarity with Israel and her people’. The body stands against the unilateral recognition of Palestinian statehood, and calls on ‘the Australian government to recognise Israel’s sovereignty over Jerusalem and to transfer the Australian embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem’ – a position it shares with the Trump administration but not the Australian government.  

Certain politically active smaller Jewish groups have sought to build on the legacies of the likes of the Bund – most notably the Jewish Council of Australia (JCA), but also other organisations such as the Tzedek Collective, the Loud Jew Collective, and even the contemporary Bund itself. ECAJ has tended to describe these non- and anti-Zionist Jewish organisations as ‘fringe’, holding special animus for the JCA: it recently described the JCA as a ‘micro-group which represents only a thin sliver of opinion on the far-left margins of the Australian Jewish community’. Yet the JCA is symptomatic of the emergence of Jewish institutions explicitly founded on a critique of the particular line on Zionism the putatively ‘major’ organisations have put at the heart of their policy platforms. The JCA lists among its principles the belief that ‘Pro-Israel Jewish organisations’ have failed to ‘recognise the diversity of views among Australian Jews’. It is ‘fringe’ not just because of its membership numbers, but also because of how the borders of Jewish political belief have been established and then policed by the organisations that understand themselves to be ‘mainstream’.  

The best available statistics (which predate 7 October, 2023) show strong support for Zionism among Jewish Australians – but not unanimity. The Gen17 survey, published in 2018, used a range of recruitment methods and gathered more than 8,600 respondents, who answered a variety of questions about Jewish life. The survey ultimately captured a little under 10% of the total Jewish population of Australia; the responses were then weighted in line with census data. The survey shows that 69% of Jewish Australians responded ‘yes’ to the question: ‘Although there are different opinions about what the term Zionism means, in general, do you consider yourself to be a Zionist?’ Of those who did not respond in the affirmative, 22% said ‘no’, and 10% said they did not know (rounding means that the percentages do not sum to 100). Connection with Israel among Jews in Australia is clearly strong, with more than half of Jews in Melbourne and Sydney indicating that they have close friends or family in Israel. While changes in how questions are worded make comparison difficult, there is some evidence that self-identification as a Zionist has dropped over time (from 80% in a 2008 study). A companion report into Jewish schooling found that ‘the majority of respondents in each school group indicated that they regarded themselves as a Zionist’ even as that support drops later (‘the proportion who identified as a Zionist was lower in the older age group’). 

It is a crucial challenge of Segal’s report, which concerns the safety of all Jews in Australia, that it should extend equal protection and participation to secular, non-aligned, dissenting, and indeed oppositional Jews, as much as it does to those engaged with mainstream groups. Antisemitism and questions of Jewish safety, after all, affect all Australian Jews. The sectional attacks by community leaders on so-called ‘fringe’ Jewish institutions in the media and before parliament indicates that these principles of equal protection and participation fray when subjected to even relatively mild pressure. 

How the Envoy’s report understands what it means to be Jewish in Australia – who speaks for whom; who one is; and what one might believe – was always likely to be contentious. Today’s mainstream Jewish organisations draw a strong link between Zionism and Jewishness, just as the Boards of Deputies did through the middle of the twentieth century. Smaller groups, which in general understand themselves as founded on dissent, have historically refused, and continue to refuse, this connection. The truth is that it would take a gifted political actor to offer an account of Jewish safety and collective aspirations that reaches across community divides. Jillian Segal has not proven to be such a figure. 

The ECAJ Background 

Segal’s report draws from the practices and standards of ECAJ in her approach to and quantification of antisemitism. ECAJ lists among its principles the endeavour to base community advocacy ‘on the most reliable information available’ which, in the case of antisemitism, means their own. Since 1990 ECAJ has produced an annual report on antisemitism in Australia. These reports give a sense of the kinds of evidence that sit behind the statistics presented in Segal’s document, as well as their selection and deployment. 

The recent increase in antisemitism that the Envoy cites is documented across the ECAJ studies of 2023 and 2024. The data for the reports is collected from volunteer community security organisations, official ‘Jewish state roof bodies’, and the ECAJ’s own log of incidents. The data is sorted according to the ECAJ’s taxonomy. As with previous reports, the 2023 ECAJ report divides antisemitism into ‘incidents’  and ‘discourse’: ‘Incidents is what “is done to” Jews, while discourse is what “is said about” Jews.’ It also splits antisemitism along political lines, into ‘extremist right-wingers’ and ‘extremist Muslims (Islamists) and extreme left-wingers’. According to the report ‘right-wing antisemitism is overt, but marginalised; left-wing antisemitism is insidious, but mainstreamed’. It is significant, then, that Segal’s report describes antisemitism as ‘once dismissed as marginal’, but now a ‘mainstream threat’: the reports from the Council on which she formerly served give a clearer sense of the kinds of political actors she now has in her sights as Envoy.  

The reasons for this choice of target are made explicit by Julie Nathan, the 2023 ECAJ report’s author. She notes that while the ‘Neo-Nazi movement in Australia has been emboldened’ and that the Voice referendum was fertile breeding ground for right-wing antisemitic conspiracies, the October 7 attacks so altered the political landscape, giving rise to ‘anti-Jewish incidents’ of such ‘gravity and unprecedented nature’ as to redirect ECAJ’s attention.  

In the 2023 Report, this shift in focus is seen most vividly in the section on discourse. The criteria for selection is ‘discourse which is clearly and overtly antisemitic, according to the “IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism”’. Pro-Nazi groups like the Australian Sovereignty Alliance are listed alongside the Australian Palestine Advocacy Network on the grounds that both groups’ websites and social media pages have hosted antisemitic comments. A post commenting on the Adelaide Writers’ Festival and efforts to cancel an event with Palestinian writers is set alongside instances of blood libel. These instances are then compiled in the same category as the Australian Sovereignty Alliance post that describes both world wars as ‘banker’s wars, formulated by the international clique of Jews, dedicated to total global control and domination’. The 2023 Report also lists as instances of antisemitic discourse the resistance of certain universities and cultural bodies to incorporating the IHRA definition of antisemitism. 

The 2024 ECAJ report on Antisemitism in Australia marks both a major departure, in that it deals only with incidents and not discourse, and a culminating point in the identification of the pro-Palestine movement as the key source of antisemitism in Australia. The reason given for this narrowing of scope is that the period between October 2023 and October 2024 witnessed a 316% increase in antisemitic incidents. This is the source for the Envoy’s statistic at the start of her Report. 

The criteria for inclusion in the tally of antisemitic ‘incidents’ are narrower than those for ‘discourse’. ‘Incidents are classified as antisemitic if they meet the definition of racist violence,’ Nathan writes, ‘and the categories developed by the 1991 National Inquiry into racially motivated violence conducted by the then Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’. In its investigative phase that inquiry accepted ‘racist violence’ as including ‘verbal and non-verbal intimidation, harassment and incitement to racial hatred as well as physical violence against people and property’. The inquiry proposed narrower definitions in its final report ‘to avoid confusion’. These definitions included clear distinctions between, for example, ‘incitement to racial hatred’ and ‘racist violence’ – the latter was limited to ‘a specific act of violence, intimidation or harassment carried out against an individual, group or organisation’ on the basis of race, colour, national, or ethnic origin. However, because Nathan appears to be using the broader terms used in the inquiry’s earlier phases, the distinction between ‘discourse’ and ‘incidents’ becomes muddled – what is ‘said’ can be escalated to what is ‘done’, and ‘racist violence’ becomes a wider-ranging term.  

Nathan argues in the 2024 ECAJ report: 

Such an account, which emphasises October 7 but does not mention Israel’s ongoing response, identifies Islamic extremism with the broader pro-Palestine movement. This identification in turn creates problems for appropriately categorising data. Under the heading ‘posters’, the report notes that in October 2023, the National Socialist Network held up a banner at Flinders Street train station that said, ‘EXPOSE JEWISH POWER’. Likewise, a poster that blamed Jews for COVID was found in central Adelaide in the same month. These instances are listed as examples of ‘racist violence’ alongside a placard that said ‘End the Palestinian Holocaust’ at an anti-Israel protest in Perth.  

The ECAJ statistics, coupled with the organisation’s increasing focus on antisemitism as a phenomenon primarily of the left and pro-Palestine protest movements, provide an important context for how the Envoy defines her task. The central occupation of the Envoy, to borrow the terminology from the ECAJ reports, has been the much vaguer category of ‘discourse’ rather than ‘incidents’ – perhaps in part because what is said is increasingly understood to be what is done. This point of focus gives her considerable latitude to seek to regulate those institutions from which such discourse might arise, universities first among them. 

Antisemitism on Campus 

Campus culture exerts a gravitational pull on the report – even in recommendations that are seemingly unrelated, higher education often makes an appearance. Recommendation five concerns ‘security, law enforcement, and coordination’. Two of the three ‘key actions’, as we might expect, concern security needs in light of heightened risks of violence and terrorism. The other is as follows: 

Tellingly, the only kind of institution named in this sentence is the university. 

Likewise, recommendation three, which primarily concerns Holocaust education in schools, shifts into an attack on ‘the normalisation of antisemitism within the education system’ before expanding to encompass ‘publicly funded media organisations [which] should be required to uphold clear editorial standards that promote fair, responsible reporting to avoid perpetuating incorrect or distorted narratives or representations of Jews’. To conflate curricula with media standards, as the Envoy does, is to enlist the campaign against antisemitism in a wider culture war. 

Recommendation four addresses universities most directly, and has in turn received the most media attention. Segal writes: 

The Envoy proposes four ‘key actions’ in response. The second suggests that funding be withheld ‘from universities, programs or individuals within universities that facilitate, enable or fail to act against antisemitism’. She further advocates that ‘all public grants provided to university centres, academics or researchers can be subject to termination where the recipient engages in antisemitic or otherwise discriminatory or hateful speech or actions’. The third action imagines ‘a commission of inquiry into campus antisemitism, including the sources of funding for organised clusters of antisemitism’. The last suggests that the Envoy will work with other government agencies to ‘ensure that systemic action is taken to reverse a dangerous trajectory of normalised antisemitism in many university courses and campuses’.  

These are remarkable remedies, commensurate, it would seem, with the dramatic problems that Segal describes. Antisemitism is ‘normalised’ in not only student clubs, but also ‘university courses and campuses’. There are ‘organised clusters of antisemitism’ at universities, some of which even receive direct public grants. Moreover, ‘foreign sources of funding for antisemitic activities’ are seeping into Australian academia. Universities sound like deeply unsafe places for Jews.   

It is notoriously hard to prove definitively that something does not exist; what is suggested here is not impossible. It is a matter of public record that an overseas political group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, was involved with student protests – in fact it was well reported by those very ‘legacy media’ organisations at which Segal takes aim in her report. ASIO has said it has ‘credible evidence’ that Iran was behind at least two antisemitic incidents, including the arson of the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne. But there is a strong sense of alarmism in Segal’s pronouncements. It is difficult to sustain the idea that ‘foreign sources’ have been funding ‘antisemitic activities and academics in Australian universities’. The notion that there are ‘organised clusters of antisemitism’ feels similarly hard to credit in a context in which the majority of university activities, research centres, and academic research are public-facing in one form or another. If there were centres of antisemitic research and teaching, it seems likely that we would already know about them, just as we would if there were centres of race science.  

Segal’s claims align with concerns from mainstream Jewish organisations that predate October 7, and form part of longstanding efforts to push back against what they understand to be a crisis of antisemitism on campus. A July 2023 report commissioned by the Zionist Federation of Australia (ZFA), and prepared by the Social Research Centre, the ‘Jewish University Experience Survey’, found that Jews experienced high rates of antisemitism in Australian higher education: 

The ZFA put together a press release in August 2023 that described the study as evidence of ‘widespread antisemitism on Australian university campuses’, and the outcomes of the report were covered in Jewish media outlets such as the Australian Jewish News and the Jewish Independent. 

The findings of the ‘Jewish University Experience Survey’ were in stark contrast to the Gen17 report. In the five pages that address antisemitism, the Gen17 authors do not mention university campuses or culture. Instead, questions were split between perceptions of antisemitism, experiences of antisemitism online, and experiences of physical violence and verbal insults offline. The authors show that concern among Jews about antisemitism, after peaking in the 1990s, had been broadly stable over the previous decade: in both the 2008 and 2017 surveys, around 5% of respondents said that antisemitism was a ‘very big problem’, and around 36% said that it was a ‘fairly big problem’. The Gen17 report also asked questions based on what participants had directly experienced or observed. In 2017, almost one in ten (9%) reported that they had observed ‘verbal insults and harassment’. ‘Strictly Orthodox’ respondents aged 18 to 39 were about twice as likely (31%) to say they had experienced insults and harassment over the past year than other less visible groups in the same age cohort, such as Modern Orthodox (17%) and secular (14%). 

How could antisemitism be experienced by one in ten in the Gen17 report and more than two in three in the ZFA-sponsored survey of Jewish experiences at universities? We might be led to conclude that either: universities are spaces in which antisemitism is dramatically more likely to occur than elsewhere; there are major distinctions between the sampling groups; there are differences in how antisemitism is understood; there have been major changes between 2017 and July 2023; or some combination of all four. 

It is important to understand the distinct sampling approaches in the Gen17 report and the ‘Jewish University Experience Survey’. By contrast with the wide-ranging and comprehensive sampling efforts of Gen17, the latter survey mainly sought participants from the Australasian Union of Jewish Students’ (AUJS’) database and through the ZFA’s own communication channels. Of the 3,330 AUJS current or former members invited, just under 400 (around 12%) responded. The remaining 167 respondents entered via a ZFA link. The data is unweighted.  

Problems with this approach are readily apparent, especially when it comes to understanding matters of prevalence. Students who are part of AUJS are more likely, in the words the Gen17 authors use to describe their own sampling strategies, to be ‘communally engaged and connected as compared with communally distant and less engaged Jews’ – this leads to risks of oversampling. This approach is also highly likely to attract participants who have higher motivation to respond, rather than those who think of antisemitism as less relevant to their experience.  

The ‘Jewish University Experience Survey’ has helped to frame the sense of an antisemitism crisis on Australian university campuses. Segal herself has cited its claims about prevalence on a number of occasions: twice, in fact, in her September 2024 submission to the Senate inquiry regarding a ‘Commission of Inquiry into Antisemitism at Australian Universities’. The survey’s findings in turn accord with original research included in that submission, in which her office interviewed 65 Jewish university staff and students over the previous month. In the words of the submission: ‘Their testimonies, and the data from other surveys [the “Jewish University Experiences Survey”] demonstrates a truly alarming increase in antisemitic incidents and discourse at Australian universities in the lead-up to, and particularly since, the October 7 massacre by Hamas in Israel.’ 

Segal’s interviews are at once revealing and limited in scope. Participants describe antisemitic incidents on university campuses, including students saying ‘gas the Jews’ to the AUJS stall at a university clubs day, as well as insistent comparisons between Nazism and Zionism. Jewish staff members recall being faced with students performing Nazi salutes; one describes being spat on. Excerpts from several interviews also show participants proposing that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic. ‘We know that anti-Zionism is antisemitism’, claims one informant. ‘For most Jews, anti-Zionism, opposing the right of Israel to exist, opposing the right of Jews to believe that they should have their own state, is in fact, quintessential antisemitism, no matter what it’s covered up with’, says another. In the submission, Segal does not articulate a distinction between on the one hand frustration with reading groups that focus on Israel and colonisation, and on the other the performance of Nazi salutes. Instead, she uses these divergent experiences and accounts of antisemitism as equivalent illustrations of categories such as ‘vilification’ and ‘discrimination’. In this taxonomic approach her submission shares much with the ECAJ reports. 

In a sense, Segal’s approach could well be an appropriate strategy given that her sampling method was designed to solicit information rather than statistical indications of prevalence – she sought a group of volunteers to describe their experiences in ways that made sense to them. The invitations for interview were advertised as follows: 

While the materials Segal gathered may be useful for understanding how Jewish university students and staff describe their institutional experiences, they cannot be abstracted into reliable quantitative data for much the same reasons as the ZFA-sponsored survey. Yet Segal in her submission attempts to do just that: ‘Eighty per cent of student interviewees experienced an antisemitic incident or discourse in a lecture or tutorial,’ she writes. ‘Nearly 70% of university staff, including academics, experienced an antisemitic incident or discourse in their immediate workplace’. 

A more deeply researched report, the ‘2024 Survey of Antisemitism in Australian Universities’, was published in March 2025 by the Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism (‘5A’). The group has campaigned actively, such as when it wrote to the Bendigo Writers’ Festival to warn against giving a platform to Randa Abdel-Fattah (the group suggested she would ‘pose a direct threat to the Jewish community in Australia’). 5A’s report draws largely on evidence from an online survey the authors developed. Participants were recruited through direct outreach of 5A members as well as institutions such as the ZFA and the AUJS. The authors of this report also seek to present quantitative data that demonstrates the prevalence of antisemitism on campus. For example, the authors note: 

These are stark numbers and would be cause for concern if they represented Jewish experience at large. 

However, while there were indeed significant numbers of students and staff who filled out the survey (an ‘achieved sample’ of 548 responses), it is again highly likely that the survey over- and under-samples in ways that call into question its quantitative claims. Despite weighting the survey outcomes against census data, there was ultimately little attempt to recruit Jewish students and staff in any controlled manner. The authors defend their methodology as follows: 

We do not share the authors’ confidence. The authors describe in a footnote how expensive a probability sample would be. While this is no doubt true, more sophisticated sampling methods such as those adopted by the Gen17 report – which in fact shares a lead author, Andrew Markus, with the 5A study – would give greater justification to its claims. Without such methods, the statistical claims made in these various reports should not be treated as reliable indications of the wider prevalence of antisemitism on campus. 

Better research, too, would have to make determinations about antisemitism that Segal, the authors of the 5A study, and the ‘Jewish University Students Survey’ all seek to avoid – the same problems that trouble the ECAJ report. In the 5A report, the instances of antisemitism cited by the authors follow participants’ own definitions and include both a university tutor wearing a keffiyeh and a student performing a Nazi salute – an approach that removes qualitative distinctions between protest activity and hate. It is also consistent with the view that keeps on returning in these documents, namely, that the threat of antisemitism lies primarily in the discursive positions and platforms associated with higher education and cultural institutions. Intervening in these spaces thus becomes a high priority.  

Despite all the interviews and reports, there is still a lack of methodologically rigorous studies about the prevalence of antisemitism on campus. Monash University has launched a series of research projects addressing antisemitism – the inaugural report, which is qualitative in nature, draws from focus groups, workshops, and interviews, and is centred on the creative industries. One of its current projects is on antisemitism in universities. Research that allows for quantitative conclusions to be drawn is time-consuming, expensive, and has uncertain outcomes. At present, we have a set of texts that encompasses everything from signing a petition to being spat on, places them on an equal footing, and attempts to turn these accounts into statistics that demonstrate the extraordinary prevalence of antisemitism on campus. It makes for good headlines, but not good data. 

The Foreign Threat 

In her 2024 submission to the Senate inquiry, Segal specifies the more unlikely claims about foreign interference in narrower terms than in her special report from July this year: 

Juxtaposing the two documents perhaps brings a logical slippage into view. When Australian Jewish benefactors withdraw support, universities have sought to replace their funding with money from overseas sources (Segal does not specify whether these sources are individuals, states, businesses, or NGOs). In the Report, Segal then proposes investigating whether there are ‘foreign sources of funding for antisemitic activities and academics at universities’. Is she referring to two different sets of overseas funds? Or is she now identifying foreign replacement funding as being ‘for antisemitic activities’? 

Segal’s Senate submission also describes the engagement of external actors in campus protests about the war: 

Hizb ut-Tahrir’s involvement in the Sydney-based encampment was well-documented, and there is merit enough to these comments. However, by the time of the report, Segal’s concern about external involvement had dramatically expanded; it was no longer student encampments, but academics themselves who may be funded by foreign actors to undertake antisemitic activities. Evidence of entryism into the political left had become a nationwide conspiracy in which antisemitic groups might even have recourse to large amounts of overseas funding. 

In its focus on the role of international actors, Segal’s report shares at least one of the key assumptions with Project Esther, the Heritage Foundation’s political strategy document from October 2024, published just before the United States’ presidential election. The document is concerned mostly with winning the battle against universities, describing how ‘Hamas Support Organizations’ have sought to ‘corrupt the US education system’. The authors describe the considerable efforts of foreign funders to direct institutions to oppose Israel and Jews generally: 

As evidence, the report cites a US Department of Education report from October 2020 concerning universities’ compliance with the legislative requirement to declare foreign gifts and contracts. However, that report is mainly worried about how state actors, such as Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, and others, might use US universities to advance their national interests, and has nothing to say about Israel. Unsurprisingly, Project Esther also draws on longstanding right-wing antisemitic conspiracy theories that accuse the likes of George Soros’ Open Society Foundations of meddling in national culture (indeed, the authors suggest that the foundations are part of a ‘Hamas Support Network’). 

In the cases of Project Esther and Segal’s submission and special report, there are similar efforts to claim that national institutions are beset by curricula and beliefs drawn from antisemitic foreign funders. None of the claims are demonstrated. In the US, Project Esther has become a blueprint for the Trump administration’s unprecedented attacks on universities, which, following a now familiar pattern, are justified as a shield against foreign influence and a protection for Jewish students. 

Definitions

The question of what constitutes legitimate criticism of Israel constantly reappears in public discussions of antisemitism and all the reports we have discussed so far. While Israel and Zionism are only mentioned once each in Segal’s report (and the latter only as ‘anti-Zionism’), the document becomes easier to understand – certainly more consistent – if we take her to be linking antisemitism to cultural and political debates, particularly as they pertain to Zionism. To what extent is criticism permissible? When might such criticism become antisemitic?  

Segal advocates implementing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA’s) definition of antisemitism, the main text of which is as follows: 

The definition specifies that antisemitism can entail undue or obsessive criticism of Israel, understood as a realisation of legitimate Jewish political desires. Its most contested clause is in the list of examples, which are used to illustrate the main definition:  

Segal is clear in her 2024 Senate submission that the IHRA definition ‘does not automatically characterise as antisemitic any criticism of Israeli laws and policies’. It instead helps us to differentiate, she writes in her 2025 report, ‘legitimate critique from hate, especially when anti-Zionism masks antisemitism’. 

In practice, however, Segal’s writing and public statements do little to distinguish critique from hate. She juxtaposes criticisms of Israel and antisemitism throughout her submission to the Senate committee: ‘Every single interviewee, irrespective of their university, described the proliferation of posters and stickers on campus, many of which contained antisemitic content or anti-Israel content.’ The terms are treated interchangeably elsewhere: ‘antisemitic or anti-Israel discourse’; ‘dissemination of antisemitic or anti-Israel discourse’; ‘anti-Israel or antisemitic activity’; and so on. In a 2021 address at the ‘Rally for Peace and Solidarity with Israel’, Segal, then ECAJ president, said that she was determined ‘to drive anti-Zionism and antisemitism back into the darkest and most disreputable corners of our society from where they emerged’. Segal may suggest in her report that the IHRA definition ‘is key to distinguishing potentially legitimate critique from hate’, but when it comes to actually existing criticism, and the places from which criticism emerges, she does not separate anti-Zionism from antisemitism.  

This is troubling given that Segal’s report has the potential to transform universities, public and private media, and other public institutions such as arts councils. There is little need to speculate how this could play out given how precarious things already are. Journalists and writers across the country have already felt the effects of institutional efforts to avoid the controversy associated with giving platforms to those publicly opposing the war in Gaza: from Antoinette Lattouf’s sacking by the ABC, to the State Library of Victoria’s cancellation of workshops by pro-Palestinian writers, to the revocation of KA Ren Wyld’s State Library of Queensland Fellowship. There have been ministerial interventions into academic funding, while academics critical of Israel are being sued by colleagues under the Racial Discrimination Act. If Project Esther provides any indication, we can see how accusations of antisemitism have been mobilised to curtail academic freedom. Even at UC Berkeley, once a home of the free speech movement, pressure from the Trump administration led University management to offer up a list of 160 scholars they investigated for ‘alleged antisemitic incidents’. Prominent members of the anti-Zionist Jewish left such as Judith Butler were among those named. The efforts to discipline academia and thereby chill resistance to America’s continued support for Israel are stark.   

The Special Envoy’s report absorbs, even as it tries to deflect, the struggles that are taking place elsewhere, beyond its pages. How could it not? It is clear that Segal does not want to talk about the war, famine, and what both Israeli and international human rights organisations have labelled as a genocide in Gaza. It is also clear that she does not want to talk about the relative merit of the critiques of Zionism that have become more widespread in Australia, both within and outside Jewish communities. But the weight that the document bears is the knowledge of what it is not saying – and it can be felt in the insistent return to universities and matters of ‘discourse’. Segal wants to regulate these sources of discomfort, to root out what she thinks of as antisemitism that has become ‘ingrained and normalised within academia and the cultural space’. Yet the weight of what is unsaid will not go away. It will remain until there is a deeper reckoning with the war and its consequences. Or, more hopefully still, until there is an equal share of human freedom. 

None of this is to deny the rise in antisemitism in Australia, and the fear and sense of alienation that this causes Jews. Indeed, the authors of this article have experienced this as part of the reality of their lives. Nor is it to deny that anti-Zionism and antisemitism can exist together, and, at times, have done so in the protest movements. However, besides anything else, attacking universities, protestors, the media, and arts organisations will not make it easier to live as Jews in Australia. We should ask for better.