Visiting Bondi, ADL chief slams anti-Israel protests

The head of the world’s oldest antisemitism watchdog has urged the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion to recognise anti-Israel protests as “pro-hate” as it prepares to examine the role of demonstrations and the hateful behaviour that can arise at them.

Speaking at Bondi Beach on Monday, Anti-Defamation League (ADL) chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt said the inquiry should use “the right language” to characterise the protests that have raged since October 7, 2023.

“We need to shed this illusion that these protests are anti-Israel. They are not. They are pro-hate. They are pro-incitement,” he said. “Does anyone still maintain the fiction that somehow these protests are focused on a peaceful resolution of the conflict? They are not. They are pro-conflict, because they bring the conflict here.”

Greenblatt, whose organisation has fought antisemitism for more than a century, said the pattern was global. “We see it in North America, we see it across Europe, and it’s sad and tragic that we’re seeing it here in Australia,” he said.

He pointed to the protest outside the Sydney Opera House days after the October 7 attack, and to the arrest of a Jewish man who confronted demonstrators with a flag. “If that is not an inversion of justice, I don’t know what is,” he said. “I’m glad the Royal Commission is looking at these protests. They are pro-Hamas. They are pro-hate, and they are wrong — wrong by any moral calculus.”

Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-CEO Alex Ryvchin, who appeared alongside Greenblatt, said examining the protests was “absolutely critical” and “long overdue”.

He noted that the first protest was organised while the October 7 atrocities “were still being carried out”, and that the demonstrations had continued unchecked on the false assumption they would run out of steam. “They operate as an incubator for hatred, and eventually the hatred that was expressed there manifested in our streets, our universities, our homes, our synagogues, and right here as well,” he said.

Greenblatt said he had travelled from New York to stand with the Australian Jewish community, describing 2025 as “one of the deadliest years for the Jewish people globally”, with 20 Jewish people murdered in antisemitic attacks in the United States, the United Kingdom and at Bondi. “We believe that the attack on the Australian Jewish community is an attack on the entire Jewish community, and solidarity matters, strength matters, and the resolve matters,” he said.

He credited the community with pushing for the Royal Commission. “The whole world is watching what happens here.”

He said visiting the site of the attack was “gut-wrenching”. “It is emotional to be here at Bondi … to see the memorial and the faces of these people,” he said, noting the dead ranged from a 10-year-old to people in their 80s, “whose only offence was their identity”.

Greenblatt said he wanted to ensure Australian Jews received not special treatment but “equal treatment” — the freedom to “show up, can worship, can work, can live as freely as their compatriots of other ethnicities”.

Ryvchin opened the appearance by thanking Greenblatt for the visit, describing him as “one of the world’s foremost defenders of human rights and advocates against antisemitism”, and thanked Australian Friends of Magen David Adom for facilitating it.

He said the community had felt “the embrace of our fellow Australians” after the attack. “It meant so much to us to have that solidarity in our darkest moment when we needed it most,” he said. “We are one people, and we feel this sense of kinship with fellow Jews around the world … they need to know that we stand with them as one people.”