Antizionist hate rally for lost teens and has-beens

When Grace Tame led a crowd in chanting “globalise the intifada” at Town Hall, she sent a message that we can’t afford to miss.

Tame’s defenders were quick to insist that the chant was not antisemitic. She did not invoke Jewish ethnicity or spirituality.

Antizionists don’t need subscribe to classical antisemitism. Antisemites enjoyed the same distinction from their forebears, considering antijudaism distasteful and immoral.

While antizionism continues to be conflated with ‘political criticism’, it maintains social and institutional assent. The NSW government plans to criminalise the chant, but criminalisation and social permissibility are far from the same thing.

The most important difference between antisemitism and antizionism, as it is with all forms of bigotry, is permission.

Permission is granted when a society considers an idea to be important. The stigmatisation of any form of bigotry happens when the harms that are being produced from said bigotry begin to outweigh the once-axiomatic moral drive behind it.

The science of “race” under the Nazis was as warped as the politics of Jewish self-determination today. At some point, vilifying Jews for libels about Israel will be considered no less vulgar than antisemitism. We will regard October 7 and Bondi as examples of antizionism — which will be considered no more valid a ‘political critique’ of the Jewish state as antisemitism was a ‘scientific critique’ of the Jewish ‘race’.

Today, antisemites mostly conceal themselves. Permission to be antisemitic was revoked not through debate, but through recognition of harm.

Antizionism produces many of the same harms — vilification, intimidation, and violence — but does so through a an institutionally and culturally permitted ‘antizionist’ pathway. Their permission to incite violence against Jews results from the belief that if hostility does not explicitly name Jews as Jews, it cannot constitute anti-Jewish harm.

The word intifada refers to campaigns in which violence against Jewish civilians was normalised and celebrated. Seig heil translates to ‘hail victory’.

In the post-Holocaust era, antisemitism has been the umbrella term for anti-Jewish conspiracies, libels, and violence. When incitement deviates from classical antisemitism, we’re left with two options: force the antizionist hate speech to conform to classical antisemitism, or prosecute antizionism as its own distinct apparatus.

Terms like “Globalise the intifada” do not sit squarely inside the public’s understanding of antisemitism. We’re told, “I’m not antisemitic, I’m an antizionist”.

Considering how libellous and harmful antizionism is, and considering its overwhelming social license to undermine Jewish safety, should it matter whether Jews as a ‘race’ are tantamount to its rhetoric? Must a sexist be a racist?

All of these words are just ways to describe pathways used to moralise bigotry.

It’s about time we establish what antizionism is, and clarify to Ms Tame that it is mutually exclusive with ‘political critique’ or being ‘pro-Palestinian.’ There would be no war in Gaza if there were no obsession with destroying the only state forced to wall itself in.

Criticism engages actions and policies and presumes legitimacy. Antizionism constructs the Jewish state as uniquely illegitimate — colonial by nature, apartheid by design, and genocidal in essence.

Antizionism, unlike anti-Zionism — a pre-Holocaust conversation involving Jews about their future — is an eliminationist movement trading in the same core antipathy towards Jews driving prior centuries’ explosions of anti-Jewish hate.

Much like its predecessors, antizionists borrows the moral language of its context to whip up urgency, presenting itself as virtuous opposition to some religious or racial coloniser from within.

The global “Zionist” is everywhere. The intifada must follow.

Arguments about whether antizionism is “really” antisemitism often miss the point. The issue is not equivalence. It’s function. Between all anti-Jewish bigotries, there is a tremendous amount of fusion. Antizionism is often antisemitic, but doesn’t have to strictly conform to 20th century antisemitism to result in Jews being executed.

Grace Tame’s rhetoric illustrates Australia’s confusion perfectly.

By accusing Israel’s president of “inciting genocide” — a lie reliant on deliberate misrepresentation — she reinforces libels that encourage the Jew hunt. Within this framework, hostility toward “Zionists” appears not as prejudice, but as principle. Jews who object are accused of “weaponising” antisemitism rather than as citizens responding to a real threat.

This permissive framework is now reflected in Australian law.

In Wertheim v Haddad (2025), a Federal Court found that statements accusing “Zionists” of controlling media and politicians constituted political commentary rather than racial vilification.

That legal reality matters as Australia approaches a Federal Royal Commission into antisemitism.

A Royal Commission confined to insisting antizionism must ‘cross the line’ into antisemitism is in jeopardy, leaving untouched the primary mechanism driving contemporary vilification. Worse, it may entrench the very category error that has allowed antizionism to metastasise: the idea that whatever is not antisemitic is ‘political critique’.

Antisemitism is one pathway to harming Jews. Antizionism is another.

They are distinct, adaptive, and mutually reinforcing. One pathway has been closed. The other remains open. While antizionism retains moral licence, Grace Tame and her fellows will continue to exploit its permissibility.

When public figures incite antizionist violence, we have a responsibility to name it for what it is. By naming antizionism not as critique, but as eliminationism, we can allow it simply to stigmatise itself.

The Royal Commission must confront this directly. If it doesn’t, I fear for the thousands of Jews whose submissions may be considered ‘not antisemitic enough’.

Joshua Dabelstein is a freelance writer from Sydney.