Making this Royal Commission count

The post-Holocaust West has mostly upheld an iron-clad mandate to denounce the racial vilification of Jews. Past acquiescence to antisemitism’s apparent moral, rational and fashionable allure haunts Europe’s footprints for all to see.

Despite consistent denouncement, vilification and violence towards Jews persists, seeing a marked increase in the aftermath of October 7.

But in the two years since, a new pair of glasses fashioned from the work of Naya Lekht, Andrew Pessin and Adam Louis-Klein have turned confusion into terrible clarity.

This new pair of glasses starts with some basic questions:
What if calling out “antisemitism” doesn’t work? What if explaining “Zionism” is irrelevant? What happens when the words we use are warped beyond the scope of common ground?

We are now living in the antizionism era. This is a word that is easily defined, easily explained, and never to be confused with “anti-Zionism” – a political conversation that died in concentration camps, only to be exhumed as a propagandistic sledgehammer by antizionists.

Antizionism is an ideology, or a lens through which we see the world. The lens comes complete with axiomata: Israel is genocidal, apartheid, settler colonial, and delights in the killing of children. It is uniquely evil and must be eliminated. Criticism of Israel’s actions are then retroactively fitted to this ideology to make eliminationism feel like a moral response to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In the wake of the Bondi massacre, this terrible clarity has galvanised an Australian Jewish community under desperate pressure to turn a rushed Royal Commission into something of material weight. Having considered antizionism to be a “criticism that can cross the line into antisemitism”, we inadvertently allowed bigotry to mask eliminationism as something that we Jews value: critical engagement.

In a sense, we’ve been betrayed by the better angels of our nature. But the mask has fallen. Antizionism is anathema to “political criticism” as it positions Israel as irredeemable. Moreover, antizionism is anathema to being “pro-Palestinian”, given how readily this movement sacrifices civilians for the possibility of erasing Jewish sovereignty.

Helping Australians to understand and combat antizionism marks a gargantuan strategic pivot. It takes the antizionist at their word when they say “I’m not an antisemite” and says “Who cares? Antizionism is bigotry. Stop abusing Jews.”

Understanding antizionism as a distinct pathway for vilifying Jews is paramount. What makes bigotry permissible is context specific, and requires specific strategies to combat it. The antizionist today is not stigmatised the way a classical antisemite is, despite causing almost all of the harm. Their ideology is not born of a conspiratorial conception of Jewish ethnicity, but of Jewish self-determination.

“Zionism” is invoked no differently to the invocation of “semitic”, yet neither are engaged with beyond the dogmatic recycling of eliminationist rhetoric. Much like their predecessor, this libellous construction of the “zionist” compels the antizionist to be engaging in a moral crusade against an innately, irrevocably corrupt thorn in the side of common decency.

The Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ), founded by PhD candidate at Canada’s McGill University Adam Louis-Klein, distills decades of research into a simple tool for discerning between “criticism of Israel” and antizionism.

MAAZ considers itself an “emergency response”, delivering trainings worldwide to those who have seen reality replaced with a fiction that stigmatises Jews worldwide and denies the moral gravity of the violence that this stigmatisation creates.

A crash course in antizionism positions it as a permutation of anti-Jewish vilification with its roots in the dovetailing of post WWII Soviet, Pan-Arab, and Islamist propaganda. The immediate inversion of the Holocaust on its victims has marred the very survivors of the Holocaust as genocidaires themselves. This inversion has created a paradigm in which the Jew continues to be hounded, not for this ethnicity, but for their

proximity – real or imagined – to the Jewish state.

Those who facilitated the doxxing of 600 Australian Jews, like recent Wheeler Centre People’s Choice Award winner Randa Abdel-Fattah, did not investigate whether the Jews whose lives they changed forever fit any “Zionist” criterion. Neither did the Polish government who, in 1968, exiled 13,000 Jews for being “Zionists” while Antisemitism was illegal.

Today, MAAZ AU now operates as an independent wing of a global movement. It is a single-issue tool-kit, with no political or ideological mandate. In its singleness of purpose, MAAZ AU is able to avoid schisms along political or ideological lines, focusing solely on the disambiguation of antizionism, the facilitation of rigorous critical engagement with world events, the identification of bigotry, and the tools to combat what we’re dealing with.

MAAZ AU seminars see vibrant conversations crop up between people from opposite political backgrounds – people who leave without knowing this about each other. This is as rare as hen’s teeth. Some attendees sob with relief, and many leave asking how they can help.

Australian Jews have spent over two years having their experiences of vilification being reduced to “political criticism”. With the Royal Commission upon us, and this new pair of glasses in hand, we now have what we need to pull the masks from the faces of the very institutions that condemn “antisemitism, Islamophobia, and all other forms of racism”.

Joshua Dabelstein is a freelance writer and the Australian liaison to MAAZ.