Avoiding fundamentals will mean an opportunity lost

Liberal NSW Senator Dave Sharma recently pointed out in an interview with The AJN that the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion had already achieved important things, especially providing insights for non-Jewish Australians into the lived experience of Jewish Australians. It was important for the rest of Australians to hear these things, because they realise “how unacceptable and intolerable it is” he said.

We can be confident that Royal Commissioner Virginia Bell will make some useful recommendations. The government will adopt some of them. The truth telling aspect of the Commission’s work, as Sharma notes, has been important. Easy recommendations will be made on school education, university culture, healthcare, extremism and social media. Overall, the commission’s work will have been a net plus.

But I worry that the commissioner will avoid more difficult recommendations that go to the fundamentals. I’d nominate the following six areas that I fear may not receive the central attention they deserve in the commission’s final report.

First, the commissioner must demonstrate she understands the links between criticism of Israel, antizionism and antisemitism. If she comes down on the side that “antizionism is merely a political position” and that it “can’t be antisemitism” then that would be a terrible outcome. If she doesn’t understand the linkages or misinterprets them, she’ll do damage to Australian society. That’s because it’s here that one of the principal modus of modern antisemitism can be found.

The second area that should be considered by the commission is Islamic antisemitism. It’s a wide field but ranges from the rejection of Israel’s legitimacy, the Koranic/Hadith roots of antisemitism, and looking at issues of foreign funding and propaganda organisations such as al Jazeera. Bondi didn’t occur in a vacuum: the commission should set out the Islamic State’s sustained call to target Jewish targets and what was done in response to this.