A focus on sport, the arts and community inclusion

How a new Triguboff-funded Sydney sport camp brings Jewish and Muslim kids together

A witness giving evidence under the pseudonym AEB told the Royal Commission this morning how a sporting camp he helped design brought together Jewish, Muslim and Christian primary school children in an effort to rebuild trust between communities strained since 7 October 2023 and, more recently, the Bondi Beach terror attack.

AEB, whose identity and address are protected and whose image was withheld from the Commission’s live stream, has a professional background running sport-based youth development programs.

He told Counsel Assisting, Tamara Phillips, that Sydney property developer Harry Triguboff sought him out in January this year after becoming concerned about “a growing division between the Muslim and Jewish communities” and wanting to explore whether sport could help close it.

That conversation became Connection Camp – a two-day event at the West Tigers Centre of Excellence during the April school holidays, involving roughly 120 children in years 3 to 6. Participants include 50 Muslim, 50 Jewish and 20 Christian kids.

West Tigers and Western Sydney Wanderers players attended both days, and the camp was free, with transport provided from across Sydney.

AEB said the planning deliberately avoided pitting one community against another.

“Having a Jewish team versus a Muslim team might have the opposite effect that he was trying to create,” he told the Commission, describing how organisers instead mixed children of different faiths onto the same teams.

Off-field “icebreaker” sessions, run by one Muslim and one Jewish facilitator, focused on what the children had in common rather than their differences.

Catering was both kosher and halal, prepared with rabbinic and Islamic advice, so no child needed to eat separately, and children were given matching “One Team” T-shirts to wear on the second day.

The camp was marketed publicly as a sports camp rather than an interfaith one — a deliberate choice, AEB explained, though the interfaith character was made clear in the program detail, including references to kosher and halal catering.

AEB gave a vivid account of what he witnessed on the ground. Children arrived on day one in two distinct groups that were not mixing; by the end of that day, he said, “that barrier had been broken,” recalling a Jewish girl and a Muslim girl playing a hand game together.

He also described a child who clung to her mother’s leg on arrival, and who by the end of camp, was “hugging a girl from the other community… crying, saying, ‘I don’t want to say goodbye to you.'”

Parent survey feedback cited from AEB’s witness statement showed 22 of 24 respondents rated their child’s experience as very good or excellent, with all 22 saying they would recommend the camp and 21 saying their child would attend again.

Letters tendered to the Commission — one signed by Mr Triguboff and other community figures, another from a Muslim schools’ representative — praised the camp for fostering “friendship, confidence, and a strong sense of belonging.”

AEB told the Commission that a second Connection Camp is planned for October, with an intention to run roughly three a year, funded by Mr Triguboff, and eventually to expand beyond NSW. He cautioned, however, against relying indefinitely on individual philanthropy.

His central recommendation was that the model be embedded within the school curriculum rather than remain a “self-selecting” activity for families already open to it.

He proposed mixing children from different schools onto shared sporting teams, starting in primary school, so the experience reaches beyond those who volunteer to attend.

“Building this program… would have a material impact on young people’s outlook on people that are different to them within Australia,” he said.

Bell asks witness whether Zionism allows for two states

Commissioner Virginia Bell has asked a witness before the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion whether Zionism, as he understands it, is consistent with a settlement in which Israel and Palestine each enjoy self-determination.

Kevin Nafte, who played and later coached an Israeli-Palestinian Australian rules football team assembled by the Peres Centre for Peace, told Bell it was. “I would love to see that. I think nothing would bring me greater joy and happiness than seeing a two-state solution with Israel and Palestine,” Nafte said.

“And yes, I am a Zionist, and I think as a Zionist, you can believe in that two-state solution. And Israel exists as a secure and safe country for Jewish people, not only Jewish people, but all its inhabitants … there is a Palestinian state alongside, and they both are living free next to each other.”

Bell then asked whether, from the Palestinian players he came to know, he believed it would be possible for Palestinians to live alongside Israel while accepting the legitimacy of the Israeli state. “I did. I saw glimpses of that, but it felt like for them it was harder. There were more obstacles to go through,” Nafte said.

He said the players faced not only a physical wall but institutional ones, along with community pressure that left them wary of how their actions would be perceived in their villages. “But there was definitely a will there. I think it just needs more sustained programs and efforts from both sides,” he said.

Asked whether Israeli players had been criticised by family or friends for taking part, Nafte said some from more religious, right-wing backgrounds were given a hard time, and a number withdrew because they did not believe in what they were doing.

Earlier, counsel assisting turned briefly from sport to education, asking Nafte about an early learning centre he chose for his son on his return to Australia because of its educational philosophy and the diversity of its teaching staff. He said he discovered only after his son started that it incorporated a Jewish curriculum.

“A few days after the school started, our son came home singing Hebrew, and only then we discovered that there was a big Jewish part of the curriculum,” he said, adding that more than half the students were not Jewish.

He said the curriculum connected Jewish values to Australian ones, giving the example of the festival of the trees being linked to environmental protection. Children aged three and four learnt Hebrew songs and sang them at home to parents who knew nothing about Judaism.

“Given what has happened over the last few years here, I think that kind of inclusive model is an amazing concept to roll out in Australia,” Nafte said.

He said it was open to anybody, and there could be equivalent models built around a Muslim curriculum. “Really, just giving people and kids at an early age an understanding of different cultures and incorporating into song and food and environment, I think it’s a really powerful model.”

AFL peace team model could work here, commission told

A man who played Australian rules football alongside Israelis and Palestinians in a team assembled by the Peres Centre for Peace has told the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion the model could be adapted for Australia.

Kevin Nafte, who grew up in South Africa, moved to Australia at 16 and moved to Israel in 2007, returning to Australia in 2024, heard about AFL tryouts near Jerusalem in 2008. He said he had missed playing the game, and only later discovered the project used AFL to build trust between Israelis and Palestinians who had never played it.

“I remember that first tryout very well. It was quite tense. Most of the players, Israelis sitting on one side, Palestinians on the other,” Nafte said.

The team trained for six or seven months, and Nafte said football’s physicality helped.

“There was a lot of animosity probably at the beginning between players who didn’t really trust each other, but when you’re on the field and someone comes and gives you a bump or shepherds you … you automatically start to develop that trust,” he said. “Sports is like a universal language.”

A formal dialogue component began halfway through, facilitated by an Israeli and a Palestinian. Israeli players spoke about military service, while Palestinians described growing up in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. “It was a real eye opener just to hear the other side face to face and from a human perspective, very different to what you hear on the news,” Nafte said.

The team travelled to Melbourne for the 2008 AFL International Cup. Because the visit fell during Ramadan, players broke the fast together at iftars with Muslim groups and visited a mosque, and also attended Shabbat dinners with Jewish families.

Nafte, who is Jewish and describes himself as a Zionist, said he had never met a Palestinian before joining the team. He later attended a teammate’s wedding in the West Bank, and invited the Palestinian players to his own wedding in Israel in 2013, obtaining special permission for them to enter.

He returned as head coach for the 2011 International Cup alongside former Hawthorn champion Robert DiPierdomenico, with about half the squad returning.

Nafte told the commission the Palestinian captain, who played in both teams, was later ostracised by his community after his father-in-law accused him of normalising with Israelis, and was forced to divorce his wife.”I think for myself and for a lot of people, we kind of lost a lot of hope after that,” he said.

Nafte said grassroots initiatives were essential because politics alone would not change everything, and that Australia was well suited to such programs, with clubs in most places including remote communities, along with schools and professional athletes. “There is a lot that can be done with social cohesion and allowing different communities, minority communities, to learn more about other communities,” he said.

‘Harmony can conceal what’s going on’, commission hears

Social cohesion should not mean asking people who experience racism to stay silent for the sake of harmony, the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion has heard.

Reflect Forward founder Jamal Elsheikh, a Sudanese Australian who migrated after living in Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania, Oman, Turkey and the United Kingdom, is undertaking a PhD in sociology at the University of Melbourne examining how anti-racism interventions are operationalised across Australian sport.

Asked how he would approach social cohesion, Elsheikh noted that March 21 is observed internationally as the Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, but is marked in Australia as Harmony Day, now Harmony Week.

He said he was not against harmony, but that more was needed. “If we can’t talk about racism, I think harmony can conceal maybe what’s going on. We don’t even know what’s happening,” he said. “Acknowledging racism does not create division. No, it’s the opposite. It actually creates social cohesion by rejecting racism, but acknowledging that it’s not a statement, it’s not a window dressing, it’s an everyday action.”

Elsheikh told the commission his belief in the potential of sport was grounded in experience rather than an assumption that sport is automatically inclusive. “Sports is a microcosm of society, so whatever happens in society happens in sports,” he said, adding that this created a dual responsibility, because sport was a social fabric connecting Australians from the local level to the elite.

He described watching the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup semi-final between Australia and England in Sydney, at a time when he was himself becoming Australian. “For those 90 minutes, no one really kind of questioned who’s Australian and who’s not. Everyone belonged,” he said. “I’ve never witnessed anything like that in Australia, and it’s one of those unteachable lessons.”

Elsheikh founded One Love Australia after consulting more than 2500 Australians in 2019 about how racism was understood and experienced. He said the main insight was that the organisation should be mission-led on anti-racism rather than focused on any single community.

Reflect Forward grew out of that work as a racial literacy program using sport and elite athletes to engage bystanders and first responders. Elsheikh said the emphasis was on early, practical intervention. “Ultimately it’s about what can you do in the moment,” he said.

He said Reflect Forward expected to train more than 150 clubs and 3000 leaders over the next six to eight months, and described a Victorian government-funded initiative run with Professional Footballers Australia and the state’s two A-League clubs, Melbourne City and Melbourne Victory, which he said had leveraged their rivalry to communicate that opposition on the field does not justify racial hostility.

He also described a Courageous Conversations for Change series, built on the finding that bystanders most often failed to intervene because they lacked comfort or confidence.

Asked what else was needed beyond campaigns and shared events, Elsheikh said the key question was what problem an intervention assumed. “If you assume the anti-racism intervention is education, probably the assumption here it’s an ignorance problem. If it’s compliance, we assume it’s a policy regulation,” he said. “I think we need a bit of all.”

At a macro level, he said, independence was needed. “Sports is great. Sports can do a lot of things, but sports alone cannot do that.”