Published: 14 May 2026
Last updated: 14 May 2026
Is prejudice impervious to education? How do we make people accept facts? These foundational challenges were brought front and centre at this week’s hearings of the Royal Commission into Antisemitism.
The Commission heard that 44 per cent of the respondents in a survey of Australian attitudes to Israel and Jews were unsure whether to believe media reports that Hamas murdered 1200 Israelis on October 7, 2023, while another 5 per cent believed they were broadly untrue.
This data, which was obtained through The Jewish Independent’s Crossroads25 survey, was delivered to the Commission by the survey’s designer Emeritus Professor Andrew Markus.
Professor Markus told the Commission that the data showed the general Australian population did not fully accept the events of October 7, which precipitated the Gaza War and were “a fundamental watershed in the Jewish community’s life in this country, and internationally”.
“And I don't for a second think that if we educate people, you're going to get around that. Some of them will say they're not sure, because they basically don't follow the news. [Their view is] ‘I believe what I want to believe’, rather than a simple statement of fact,” said Markus, who was previously Director of Monash University’s Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation.
Counsel assisting the Commission asked whether the question about October 7 “is really testing respondents’ beliefs about those events, rather than their [knowledge of facts]?”
Comments2
Simon Krite16 May at 03:18 am
Thank G-d for the As A Jew Council of Australia, bravely reminding us that when someone compares Jews to Nazis, or colonial oppressors we must not rush to judgment.
Seriously???
allen zeesman14 May at 01:26 pm
Another uncomfortable question sits underneath all of this.
Why does Israel generate such extraordinary moral fixation compared to conflicts producing comparable or even vastly greater levels of suffering elsewhere?
That does not mean all criticism of Israel is antisemitic. Democracies require open debate, including fierce criticism of states and governments.
But the scale of symbolic intensity, moral absolutism, institutional mobilization, and emotional fixation surrounding Israel often appears historically disproportionate. The issue is not criticism alone, but why this particular conflict becomes so uniquely central to the moral imagination of many educated institutions while other atrocities generate comparatively limited engagement.
At some point, the asymmetry itself requires explanation.
Historically, one recurring feature of antisemitism has been symbolic disproportion: Jews becoming not merely another people among others, but a concentrated site for broader anxieties about power, morality, modernity, capitalism, colonialism, or social corruption.
Something structurally similar may now be happening around Israel.