Australia’s Antisemitism Commission: look to the Israel lobby

JVL Introduction

After the dreadful antisemitic attack on Bondi Beach in December 2025, Australia set up a Royal Commission on Antisemitism. Here Louise Adler looks at the nature of the witness testimony questioning how “(t)he Commission has given equal weight to actual events and feelings. Feelings and anxieties are established as reality.”  This seems to be par for the course in so much of the focus on antisemitism and does little to address the reality of antisemitism that was behind the vile attacks, eg at Bondi, Manchester and far too many other places.

There are many examples here of people feeling uncomfortable such as at the Opera House and in hospital despite getting excellent treatment and also because of “being held responsible for Israel’s actions in Gaza

As JVL and many other Jewish organisations across the world have done emphasised, Louise Adler says that “(g)iven the Jewish leadership insists it is axiomatic that criticism of Israel is antisemitic, it is unsurprising that diaspora Jews should be held responsible for Israel’s conduct. The insistence that antisemitism is exceptional, rather than a specific form of the racism that pervades our society more broadly, is not in the interests of the Jewish community and can only foster antisemitism.”

A reminder about who Louise Adler is: she is the child of Holocaust survivors and used to be a convinced Zionist until she visited Israel. She was the Director of the Adelaide Writers’ Festival but resigned when Palestinian writer, Randa Abdel-Fattah was “disinvited” from participating in their Writers’ Week. The event had to be cancelled as nearly all the other writers due to attend pulled out in protest.

This article was originally published by Deepcut News on Sun 28 Jun 2026. Read the original here.