Australian Antisemitism: A Shocking and Shameful Descent

Netanyahu’s Warning Shot

It is not often that an Israeli prime minister directly rebukes the leader of a democratic ally. Israel does not lightly take to chastising its friends. Yet such is the depth of Australia’s crisis of antisemitism that Benjamin Netanyahu himself has now spoken in words that history will record as both searing and unprecedented.
In a blistering letter dated August 17, 2025, Netanyahu admonished Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for failing to confront the “epidemic” of antisemitism that has, in his words, “intensified under your watch.” He accused Albanese of “pouring fuel on the antisemitic fire” by promising to recognize a Palestinian state—rewarding Hamas terror, emboldening Israel’s enemies, and encouraging Jew-hatred to stalk Australia’s streets.

“It is not diplomacy,” Netanyahu declared. “It is appeasement.”

Netanyahu’s words came not in isolation but against the backdrop of escalating hatred in Australia: synagogues firebombed, Jewish preschools vandalized, Israeli restaurants ransacked, Jewish schoolchildren menaced on public transport, Jews assaulted on beaches, Jewish lecturers shouted down in their own halls, as I myself personally experienced in my last visit.

And the crisis has metastasized at the very top of Australian government. Last month Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke banned Israeli MK Simcha Rothman from entering the country. His crime? Not terrorism. Not extremism. Not incitement to violence. His crime was being an unapologetic Zionist member of Israel’s parliament, elected Democrat, in the only free assembly in the entire Middle East.

This disgraceful act was nothing less than state-sponsored antisemitism: the selective exclusion of a Jewish legislator of the only democracy in the Middle East, while Australia throws open its doors to Hamas apologists and radical preachers who call for the annihilation of Jews.

Netanyahu, in his letter, set a deadline for Albanese: the Jewish New Year, September 23, 2025. By then, Netanyahu demanded, the Australian prime minister must “replace weakness with action, appeasement with resolve.” He warned: “Antisemitism is a cancer. It spreads when leaders stay silent. It retreats when leaders act.”

History, Netanyahu said, “will not forgive hesitation. It will honor action.”
It was a remarkable moment: Israel’s leader compelled to lecture Australia’s prime minister on the elementary responsibility of government—to protect its Jews.
Interestingly, Australia fired back initially at Netanyahu’s letter claiming, disgustingly, that Israel uses bombs as policy rather than self-defense. And yet, two days later, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was forced to evict the Iranian ambassador from Iran to Canberra as Australia acknowledged that that vile regime was behind recent antisemitic attack attacks on Australian soil.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly lauded Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for finally acting decisively—breaking the Israeli reluctance to point fingers at Iran—and it appears this push helped spur Australia’s intelligence to expose Tehran’s role. ASIO confirmed that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), using intermediaries, orchestrated firebomb attacks on Melbourne’s Adass Israel Synagogue (6 December 2024) and the Lewis Continental Kitchen, a kosher restaurant in Sydney’s Bondi (October 2024). One worshipper was injured in the Melbourne attack, which caused massive damage, and although Sydney’s incident caused no injuries, both were branded terrorist acts. In response, Australia expelled Iran’s ambassador, began the process to list the IRGC as a terrorist organization, and escalated its security and diplomatic response.

A Riverboat in Germany

I wish I could say that my own recent encounter with Australians was detached from this wider crisis. First, let me be clear. I am married to an Australian wife and I have nine children who are Australian citizens. I spent two of the most formative years of my life as a rabbinical student in Sydney Australia and came to love the country as a second home. Sadly, that is all changing now based on shameful and unprecedented experiences.

On a recent river cruise through Germany where I am researching a new book on the first and second Crusades —landscapes soaked in Jewish blood, from Würzburg to Rothenburg to Frankfurt—my wife and I should have been absorbed in history and beauty. Instead, we were subjected to petty but poisonous antisemitism from fellow passengers, the vast majority of whom were Australian.

We kept kosher on the cruise, accommodated graciously by the ship with a vegan menu in new pots and pans. This meant a small reserved table tucked in the corner of the dining hall. Two Jews, out of 120 passengers. Yet somehow this became too much for many Australians to bear.

They whispered about “Jewish privilege.” They complained we received “too much attention.” They spoke openly in our presence about how unfair our treatment was. This while they all dined on sirloin steaks and we ate our tofu. They bristled at our tiny reserved corner table, even though it ofen confined us to direct sunlight in 100-degree heat while everyone else rotated freely across the panoramic dining room.
They grumbled we were disrupting the “rhythm of the ship.”

It was, transparently, nothing but Jew-hatred dressed up as fairness.

The Hypocrisy of Admiration

What struck me most was the hypocrisy.

Had my wife and I been Muslims in keffiyehs and hijabs, every Australian passenger would have stopped at our table to express admiration for our faith. They would have gushed at our devotion, praised our cultural pride, congratulated us for upholding tradition abroad.

But because we were Jews, their response was contempt, not respect. Resentment, not admiration.

Instead of praise, they muttered that Jews were demanding “special privileges.” Sound familiar? In Germany it sure did!

Instead of respect, they cast us as parasites siphoning staff time and energy. Again, pretty familiar slogans in Germany.

“Had we been Muslims in hijabs, the Australians would have praised our devotion. Because we were Jews, they mocked us.”

The double standard was chilling.

Shabbat Walks and “Privilege”

On Shabbat, my wife and I walked to a tour site rather than ride a bus, forbidden on the holy Sabbath —a fifteen-minute trek in blistering heat. No one was delayed. No one inconvenienced. Yet some Australians accused us of “special privilege.”
You can’t make this stuff up. We actually had an elderly Australian man that interrupted our Sabbath dinner and came and sat next to us and told us it was unfair that we walked instead of taking the bus. I asked him how that could possibly have bothered him? He answered that we should be joining the group. I answered that he should stop finding fault with Jews and should search his heart to discover if this is the man that he thought he would grow up to be.

Think of the absurdity: Jews walking in the burning sun while Australians rode in air-conditioned buses—and we were the ones supposedly privileged.
This was not reason. It was not logic. It was antisemitism pure and simple.
“They accused us of ‘privilege’ for walking in 100-degree heat while they sat in air-conditioned buses.”

History’s Echoes

As our ship sailed past towns where Jews had been butchered and annihilated utterly in Crusader pogroms, burned as plague-spreaders, and deported to Nazi gas chambers, I could not escape the historical echo.

Always the same charges: Jews are different. Jews are parasites. Jews are freeloaders.
The Crusaders said it. The medieval mobs said it. The Nazis said it. And in 2025, some some Australian tourists on a German riverboat said it again.

Antisemitism does not always scream in jackboots. Sometimes it mutters across Chardonnay glasses.

“Antisemitism does not always scream. Sometimes it whispers across a dinner table.”

Australia: From Opera House to Parliament

But let no one imagine this riverboat episode was isolated. It was a microcosm of what I have long warned: Australia is drowning in antisemitism.

On October 8, 2023, the day after Hamas’s massacre of 1,200 Jews, thousands gathered on the steps of Sydney’s Opera House—not to mourn Jewish death but to chant “Gas the Jews.” Not one person calling for Australian jury to be gassed was arrested by the police. The sails of that iconic building glowed red in supposed solidarity with Israel even as the mob beneath called for a second Holocaust.
Weeks later, I myself was attacked at Coogee Beach simply for being visibly Jewish. Videos of the attack went viral.

At a lecture I delivered in Dover Heights, a group of Israel haters tried to shut me down. Police removed them, then quickly released them.

Three synagogues in Melbourne were burned or firebombed after October 7. The city’s most active synagogue was burned to the ground. Prime Minister Albanese played tennis while it smoldered and refused to visit for four days.

And now, in the ultimate insult, Australia has barred a Jewish Knesset member, Simcha Rothman, from entry, while tolerating mobs screaming for Jews to be gassed on its streets.

This is not the Australia I knew when I married my wife, Debbie, in Sydney in 1988. This is a sewer of antisemitism, poisoning not only its streets but its halls of power.

Leadership Without Compass

The rot begins at the top.

Prime Minister Albanese pushes for recognition of a Palestinian state without any demand for democracy, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, or minority protections. Foreign Minister Penny Wong obsesses over Israel’s alleged “war crimes” while minimizing Hamas’s atrocities.

When mobs screamed “Gas the Jews,” both were silent. Silence emboldens. Silence spreads the cancer.

Netanyahu was right to call Albanese’s policy appeasement. It is worse: it is complicity.

“When mobs screamed ‘Gas the Jews,’ Albanese and Wong offered silence, not outrage. That silence was deafening.”

Conclusion: Australia’s Shame

Australia once prided itself on being warm, open, egalitarian. Today it is earning notoriety as a country where Jews are unsafe, unwanted, and unprotected.
On a riverboat in Germany, Australians muttered the same slurs hurled for centuries: Jews as parasites, Jews as freeloaders.

At the Sydney Opera House, Australians screamed the genocidal cry: “Gas the Jews.”
In Albanese’s office, Australian policy rewarded Hamas and punished Israel, silencing Jewish voices while empowering Jew-haters.

History will judge Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong harshly. Netanyahu’s warning will echo long after they are gone.

But what matters now is whether Australians themselves wake up and decide: do you want to be remembered as a nation that let antisemitism flourish, that silenced Jewish voices, that banned Jewish leaders, that looked away as Jews were firebombed and assaulted?

Or will you act—now, not tomorrow—to end this sewer of hate?

Because, as Netanyahu warned, “History will not forgive hesitation. It will honor action.”

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, “America’s Rabbi” whom The Washington Post and Newsweek call the most famous rabbi in America, served as co-founder of the Rabbinical College of Sydney, Australia, where he married in 1988.