Published: 11 August 2026
Last updated: 12 August 2026
Imagine if a Melbourne councillor spent every council meeting debating Donald Trump's immigration policy, or a New South Wales State MP made abortion law in Texas the centrepiece of their legislative agenda.
Most Australians would rightly ask what any of that had to do with their jobs of collecting rubbish, improving the roads, maintaining the local parks or approving planning permits for new buildings.
Yet over the past few years, councils across Australia and MPs in State Parliaments around Australia have spent hours discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the war in Gaza.
Lobbying federal MPs on Australia's position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war in Gaza or Australia’s position on Israel, is understandable. Federal elected representatives have some power to change Australia's foreign policy positions.
But local government level and state MPs have no role in shaping Australian foreign policy on the conflict and the war in Gaza.
State and local governments are there to maintain parks, open libraries, organise rubbish collections, approve planning permits and fix potholes on our roads. None of these jobs has any capacity to end a war more than 8,000 kilometres away from Australia. Their motions and resolutions on Gaza have never once shifted anything in Washington, Jerusalem or Gaza City.
What these motions have done, consistently and measurably, is reshape the temperature for Jewish life in Australia.
In the past month, there have been two disturbing allegations of violence and threats against Jews in Australia. In Bentleigh, in Melbourne, a young visibly Jewish student from Canada was assaulted on the street, punched in the stomach, threatened with a knife and antisemitically slurred. In Sydney, Alex Ryvchin, co-chair of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) and one of the country's highest profile Jewish leaders, along with his employee Evan Zlatkis, who was shot and survived the Bondi Chanukah attack, were allegedly antisemitically slurred by a woman at the site of the Bondi massacre.
Comments3
James Carleton13 August at 07:17 pm
Nomi assumes council attention to conflicts overseas causes violence against Australians linked to them, but doesn’t rule out a plausible alternative: both the motions (right or wrong) and the violence (always wrong) could be independently driven by the conflicts themselves with no causal link running between them.
Wesley Parish13 August at 07:53 am
I think the key is to dissociate the local Jewish communities from Israel; if instead of defending Israel’s indefensible actions, the local Jewish communities would speak out against them as against any other crime against the Jewish people – isn’t the same what is demanded of the Muslim communities? – things might be different. Calling it antisemitism to oppose the IDF’s killing of Palestinian children just means that the people making that call, are slandering all Jews as child-killers. And as you’ve just argued, that is very much in the interests of local Jewish communities.
Gabrielle Walters13 August at 07:50 am
I very much agree with you.