Jewish groups condemn court’s antisemitism findings

Australia’s peak Jewish organisations have condemned a NSW Supreme Court judgment that dismissed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, describing the decision as a serious setback in the fight against anti-Jewish hatred.

Justice Desmond Fagan last week rejected a NSW government application for an extended supervision order against Mohommed Farhat, 22, who pleaded guilty to property offences after a 41-minute vandalism spree through Woollahra in November 2024.

Slogans including “Fuk Israel” [sic] and “PKK coming” were spray-painted on cars and buildings; two vehicles were burnt and damage exceeded $100,000.

The judge found Farhat – who sports a Hezbollah tattoo – was a vandal for hire, paid to paint slogans he did not choose, and that the state had not established to a high degree of probability that he posed an unacceptable risk of committing a serious terrorism offence.

Having dismissed the application, the court went on to make findings about Israel, about 1948 and about the meaning of antisemitism itself, in a case where neither party had led evidence on any of it.

The judgment described the IHRA definition as “verbose and imprecise” and detached from the ordinary Australian understanding of the word.

Justice Fagan held that hostility towards Israel did not automatically amount to hostility towards Jewish people, and that Zionism, as an ideology of Jewish nationalism, was open to political criticism.

He also said that it was “understandable” for people with Lebanese Shia Muslim heritage to sympathise with Hezbollah and referred to “Israel’s genocide of the Gazans”.

Columnist Henry Ergas, in a commentary published by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, said the court had strayed into extraneous matters on which it proved “inconsistent, ill-informed and, ultimately, incoherent”.

His central objection was to the court’s treatment of context.

The judgment accepted police evidence that Farhat received instructions to spray-paint antisemitic phrases, and that 13 related attacks in the same campaign involved antisemitic symbols and slurs against targets associated with the Jewish community. Yet Farhat’s own attack, Ergas wrote, was severed from that evidence and treated as though the words stood alone.

That matters, he argued, because contemporary antisemitism rarely announces itself. It travels through coded phrases whose meaning is plain in the moment and deniable the instant they are challenged. A court that refuses to read such phrases in context gives that tactic “a free pass”.

The ECAJ, which was not a party to the proceedings and was not represented, was described by the court as a pro-Israel lobbying organisation without an opportunity to respond.

Delivering the ECAJ report to the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies AGM last Thursday, ECAJ head of legal Simone Abel called the judgment devastating and urged communal cohesion.

“I think we can all agree that the [Farhat] judgement is really objectively a real setback and something that we hope will be challenged,” she said.

Abel said she understood about 150 people were being prosecuted for hate crimes involving antisemitism, and that defence lawyers often approached what they perceived to be the community’s weakest link, seeking to persuade communal figures that a client had reformed.

“Once a letter is provided in court and unsworn evidence is given, it can, in fact, have really significant ramifications,” she said, asking affiliates to consult the Board of Deputies or the ECAJ before responding to such approaches.

Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council director of public affairs Jamie Hyams said that whatever the merits of the supervision order decision, the judge appeared to have had no independent expert evidence before him on contested questions of history, politics and international law.

“It would be regrettable, especially at this volatile time, if this decision made the crucial battle to combat antisemitism in this country even harder to progress,” he said.