For real change, western governments need to remove their anti-Israel lens

Glistening in the warm summer sun while on vacation this week, my gaudy oversized Magen David — a Temu relic from my daughter’s Bat Mitzvah — must have caught the attention of a fellow traveller. He approached cautiously and asked where I hailed from. After getting his first guess wrong, he ventured that my accent might be Australian. His first question, delivered with trepidation, was: “Oh wow,  do you live close to Bondi Beach?”

Hailing from Winnipeg, Canada, we quickly established one another’s Jewish credentials, and that although I live physically distant from Bondi, in Melbourne, Australia, we are all — as Jews, and certainly as Australians — inextricably close to it.

Over the next hour, our conversation moved effortlessly between shared experiences in our respective cities: aggressive institutional anti-Zionism, emboldened Jewish pride since October 7, overt antisemitic vandalism of synagogues, violent street marches targeting Jews, and — perhaps most salient of all — governmental failure. For every event in Melbourne or Australia, there seemed to be a mirrored counterpart in his city. A macabre solidarity.

We were, quite unmistakably, conjoined by an intangible mix of shared trauma, resilience, and despair — the defining modus of our tribe in these times. Or, as President Isaac Herzog has described it: “one family.”

This is a seminal week in Australia. Following the terrorist atrocity on December 14, the deafening call for accountability — led by Bondi victims’ families, Jewish communal organizations, prominent Australians, and ordinary citizens — culminated in the announcement of a Commonwealth Royal Commission into antisemitism, the Bondi attack, security failures, and the amorphous concept of “social cohesion.” It is the highest form of governmental inquiry and will run for twelve months. It is also a government arriving extraordinarily late to the party — an apt metaphor for the past two years.

While many in our beleaguered community are relieved, and what might best be described as cautiously hopeful that this commission will mark the apex of contemporary Jew-hatred, I am less optimistic. This has little to do with the inquiry itself, and much to do with the breadth and depth of antisemitism and anti-Zionism that have infused almost every aspect of Australian life.

Institutional, policing, and security failures may be at least partially remediable. But how does one disinfect thousands — if not millions — of minds saturated with anti-Zionist propaganda and extremist religious ideology? I had the honor of visiting the mourners and injured in Sydney at the conclusion of their shiva. Strong and broken Jews. The human consequence of the world’s oldest, most resilient hatred. I had no words for them. Instead, they offered their own lucid explanations for how they had come to be mourners.

Blessedly, such an atrocity has not occurred in Winnipeg. Yet the same malignant ethos exists there, as it does across much of the world. Many governments have effectively thrown in the towel, choosing indifference or moral equivocation. In Australia, it took the public murder of Jews to force the government’s hand.

While Australia can only address its own circumstances, the broader project of restoring safe Jewish life in the diaspora has, history teaches us, always bordered on the impossible. Malign actors such as Qatar and Iran have spent decades and dollars refining anti-Zionism into a socially acceptable proxy for Jew-hatred. With remarkable success, they have led the demonization and relentless impugning of Israel to a global audience.

For any meaningful change to occur — and to avoid ever again looking into the eyes of fellow “Yidden” as mourners from murder, my Canadian counterpart and I agreed that our governments would need to execute a wholesale reversal in both posture and policy towards Israel. Ideologically and electorally, this appears a forlorn hope given the prevailing views of their political bases. 

In Australia, the governing Labor Party was once regarded as a staunch ally of Israel. Like many leftward “progressive” movements globally, that position has inverted. Many within the executive branch now hold views that are, at best, ambivalent and increasingly hostile towards the Jewish state.

How, then, can we reasonably expect animus toward Australian Jews — the vast majority of whom are Zionists — to soften within the broader population if the nation’s leadership adopts an adversarial posture toward Israel in word and deed? The government has already learned, belatedly, that pandering to perceived electoral sensitivities is not always rewarded. The wider public often tolerates and sometimes even respects moral clarity.

This Royal Commission, through its Terms of Reference, will barely interrogate government policy failures directly. Yet if any durable improvement in Jewish safety and belonging is to emerge and filter through to the wider Australian society — it will require a decisive return to an earlier posture: one in which Israel was unapologetically recognized as a liberal democracy in a hostile region; where bilateral relations were robust; criticism was proportionate rather than obsessive; and Israel’s precarious strategic reality was openly acknowledged.

Leading the national narrative without a hostile ideological lens toward Israel is not a peripheral consideration — it is the essential starting point. It must be articulated relentlessly by those who genuinely seek change.

Absent this, we are left attempting to rebuild Jewish security and civic equality with a fundamentally flawed framework. No commission, however well-intentioned, can compensate for a political culture that legitimizes hostility upstream and then expresses surprise when it manifests downstream.