The evidence is in our pages

Last week, The AJN lodged its submission to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.

For more than 130 years, this masthead has reported on Jewish life in Australia. We have chronicled the community’s triumphs and its sorrows, its simchas and its struggles. We are journalists, not litigants. Our place is usually in the gallery, not at the witness table.

But these are not usual times.

At the heart of our submission is an index of 342 articles published in these pages and/or on our website – news reports, features, tributes and editorials documenting the rise of antisemitism in Australia in the period leading up to and following December 14, 2025.

We believe this archive tells a story that no single witness can.

Taken one at a time, each article records an incident. A student motion here; a defaced shopfront there. A sermon, a rally, a firebombing. Each was reported as it happened, in close to real time, by the publication closest to the community affected.

Read together, they record something else entirely: a trajectory.

This is the central message of our submission; that the Bondi Beach terror attack did not come out of nowhere. The earliest material in our index concerns words – slurs, boycott resolutions, motions passed in student unions, the rejection of the IHRA definition of antisemitism by institutions that should have known better. The later material concerns synagogues set alight, explosives found alongside a list of Jewish targets, a vehicle allegedly driven at Jewish children.

And then, 15 precious souls murdered at a Chanukah celebration.

Our submission identifies three patterns in the coverage, which we state plainly.

The first is escalation. What began as rhetoric hardened into harassment, then vandalism, then arson, then mass murder. Anyone who reads our index from beginning to end will struggle to say the attack came out of the blue. The writing was on the wall from the steps of the Opera House on October 9, 2023. We said so at the time. We have the pages to prove it.

On October 26, 2023, when the Al-Ahli hospital blood libel raced around the world, we warned on our front page that slander against the Jewish state, left unchallenged, would not stay confined to Israel. It never does. It always finds its way to Jews living in the Diaspora.

The second is normalisation. Conduct that would once have been unthinkable came to be tolerated, excused or reframed – in student bodies, unions, parts of the media, local councils and elements of our political class such as The Greens. Acts of hatred resulted in no consequences. Warnings were discounted. The burden of response fell, again and again, on the community itself. Our coverage records Jewish doctors and patients hiding their identity. It records security as a routine feature of Jewish life, even for our children.

The third is the response gap. Across our reporting runs a sustained distance between the alarm raised by our community and the response of the institutions charged with its safety. Universities where Jewish students reported they were unsafe. Enforcement that lagged behind the scale of the problem. Public broadcasters that refused to adopt the definition of antisemitism used by the Royal Commission itself. The appointment of Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, only for her recommendations to gather dust. And, most damning, a warning of a heightened security risk weeks before the massacre.

Our communal leaders pleaded for action lest the rising tide of Jew hatred one day claim a life. We ourselves wrote in a May 30, 2025 editorial – included in our submission – about the killing of two Jews in a terror shooting in Washington, DC, “It is not a matter of if what happened in Washington, DC, happens here – it’s a matter of when.”

And so it was.

We have also told the Royal Commission about the positives, because our pages record that too. The interfaith statements. The allies who stood with us. The thousands who gathered to combat hatred with love. The community that rose, held each other up, and refused to let darkness define its place in this country and its future.

Some might ask why a newspaper should make a submission. The answer is simple. Royal commissions deal in evidence, which is what we hold. Not recollections softened by time. Not accounts assembled after the fact. A concurrent record, published week after week, of what was happening at that moment to Jewish Australians and what was – and was not – being done about it.

We are buoyed that our submission joins more than 15,000 others that have been sent by people and organisations who feel that this issue is important enough that they want to engage with the inquiry. We hope that you, reading this, authored one of them.

This Royal Commission represents the best chance this country has had to honestly confront what has festered here, how it has been enabled, and to chart a new course.

Our submission asks only this: read the record. Follow the trajectory. Understand that 15 people did not have to die. Learn the lessons.

Our pages tell the story. Now the Royal Commission must hear it.

Gareth Narunsky is the editor-in-chief of The AJN.