Published: 17 July 2025
Last updated: 17 July 2025
I was born into a small religious community in Iraq called the Mandaeans, in a country where being a minority could mean hiding your faith to survive. We were often invisible — by necessity.
As a child, I learned to walk cautiously in public spaces, to downplay who I was, and avoid drawing attention to our distinct language, rituals, and beliefs. Later in life, as I found refuge in Australia, I felt something unfamiliar but liberating here: safety.
It is because of that personal history that I take antisemitism seriously. I understand, in my bones, what it means to live with existential fear — not just of violence, but of being misunderstood, excluded or erased.
That is why I read the newly released ASECA Plan to Combat Antisemitism with deep attention and concern. Its purpose is noble: to protect Jewish Australians from rising hate. In that, it has my full support. But while the plan is framed as a national commitment to safety, it risks undermining the very justice it seeks to uphold.
A necessary fight, a concerning path
The plan outlines a sweeping approach: reforms to law, education, arts funding, migration, digital regulation, and institutional oversight. It promotes the IHRA definition of antisemitism, a framework that includes certain forms of criticism of Israel and Zionism as potential manifestations of hate.
Rather than inviting a broad and inclusive conversation, the plan appears to have been developed through limited consultation, with no visible input from Palestinian Australians, Arab or Muslim communities, or refugee voices — which is especially important given the fact that much of the recent surge in reported antisemitism is linked to discourse and protest around the Israel-Palestine conflict.
These communities are often directly impacted by that conflict, and by extension, implicated in the very public debates and policy measures the plan seeks to shape. When antisemitism is interpreted through the lens of conflict-related expression, these communities must be at the table.
Many Palestinians, Arabs, and allies raise their voices not out of antisemitism, but out of a commitment to justice, dignity, and international law.
For a strategy meant to strengthen social cohesion, this lack of diverse engagement is deeply problematic. Without those voices, the plan risks overlooking one of the underlying dynamics that drive tensions in Australia today. Consultation would have improved both the fairness and the effectiveness of the plan, by ensuring that measures to combat hate do not inadvertently silence those expressing political grief or legitimate dissent. Including these voices could also help identify policy blind spots and ensure that antisemitism is not mistakenly conflated with protest or advocacy.
When protection feels like silencing
One of the core issues is the conflation of antisemitism with political critique, particularly around Israel. The IHRA definition includes examples such as "claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour" as potentially antisemitic. While intended to address genuine hate, this framing risks chilling legitimate political discourse — especially among people whose lives have been shaped by conflict.
A newly arrived Palestinian refugee who has lost family, home, or land may express pain, anger, or protest in language that reflects their lived experience. In some cases, that language can be politically inflammatory, though it is not born from ideological hate, but from a desperate effort to name the structures they feel have dehumanised them.
For many in the Arab and Muslim world, this language has evolved as a symbolic and rhetorical tool — a way of communicating resistance in a global discourse that often ignores their plight. If this tool is taken away or reclassified as hate speech, others will emerge, because the underlying pain remains. Suppressing language does not heal trauma; it just pushes it underground.
Of course, expressing political grief must be done in a way that respects others’ dignity. But policy cannot assume that all critique is hate. The challenge is distinguishing between dehumanisation and protest — and that cannot be done fairly without hearing from the people involved.
We must build a different kind of response — one grounded in shared humanity, not political alignment. One that recognises Jewish pain and also hears Palestinian pain.
Consider an artist who stages a work reflecting on occupation and dispossession. Or a university student who organises a panel on international human rights. These are not hypothetical cases. In today’s climate, both could be investigated or penalised under interpretations of the plan’s recommendations. The question is not whether hate exists — it does. The question is whether the tools we use to fight hate are precise enough not to harm those speaking from real experience.
When protection becomes confusion
This brings us to a deeper paradox. When the plan leans heavily on framing antisemitism through state-based lenses — particularly when critiques of Israel are treated as proxies for antisemitic belief — it risks blurring Jewish identity with political allegiance. This is not to say that Jewish identity and Israel have no relationship; clearly, they do. But when policy frameworks respond to criticism of a foreign government's actions as if they were attacks on an entire people, they risk encouraging the very conflation they aim to prevent.
That, in turn, can isolate Jewish Australians further. Rather than drawing a clear line between Jewish safety and political narratives, it muddies the water, making Jewish identity seem entangled with state power. That is a dangerous association for any minority to bear.
Many Jewish Australians are critical of Israeli policy. Some are non-Zionist or anti-Zionist. Their views deserve space, too. At the same time, many Palestinians, Arabs, and allies raise their voices not out of antisemitism, but out of a commitment to justice, dignity, and international law.
What real safety looks like
As a Mandaean who has lived as a minority both in the Middle East and here in Australia, I want something better — for all of us.
One experience stays with me. A close Jewish friend once confided in me, years into our friendship, that he had only begun to trust our bond when he saw that I respected his Jewish identity, not just tolerated it. What built that trust wasn’t agreement on politics, but our shared recognition of each other’s humanity.
It made me realise that real safety is not institutional alone. It grows from the daily, often quiet work of humanising one another. Our policies should reflect and encourage that spirit. They should not foreclose the possibility of empathy by turning speech into suspicion. Policy should build bridges where fear has dug trenches.
Toward a shared justice
I do not write this to criticise from the sidelines. I write this as someone who believes deeply in justice, and who believes that fighting antisemitism must be part of that mission — but not at the expense of others.
Antisemitism, like all racism, thrives on fear and silence. We must not combat it by creating more silence.
We must build a different kind of response — one grounded in shared humanity, not political alignment. One that recognises Jewish pain and also hears Palestinian pain. One that draws strength from Australia’s diversity, not just from institutional power.
Because if we lose the moral clarity that makes our fight against hate just, then we may win the battle — but lose the cause.
Comments3
Paul Wilkins23 July at 08:02 am
I recommend this article by Patricia Karvelas
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-07/melbourne-synagogue-fire-an-attack-on-multiculturalism/105499896
Simon Krite17 July at 07:03 pm
Dear Nawfel,
Thank you for your honest and heartfelt reflection. Your words come from a place of real lived experience, the voice of someone who knows what it means to be a minority twice over: first in Iraq, then again in Australia. That perspective matters deeply, and your commitment to justice is sincere and evident.
It’s precisely because your intentions are so clearly rooted in compassion that I feel compelled to respond, not in opposition, but in conversation. What’s at stake here is not simply a disagreement over definitions or policies, but something deeper. Whether we can speak meaningfully about justice without distorting the very reality of antisemitism and the foundational role that Israel plays in Jewish life for religious, historical, and existential reasons.
The Moral Confusion of “Justice” Without Context
You speak of justice. But justice untethered from truth becomes sentiment and sentiment, when selectively applied, can become its own form of injustice.
The ASECA Plan is not a tool of erasure. It is a response to a specific, targeted, rising wave of hate. One that is unmistakably antisemitic in language, intent, and impact. When mobs chant “Death to the Jews” outside synagogues, when Jewish schools and businesses need security guards and locked gates, and when university campuses become hostile environments for Jewish students. This is not a misunderstanding. It is not “grief.” It is not “political critique.” It is a threat.
The IHRA definition, which you critique, is not perfect. But it does capture what modern antisemitism often looks like. Not just swastikas and jackboots, but the relentless denial of the Jewish right to self-determination, the singling out of Israel in a way no other country is treated, and the implicit message that Jewish peoplehood must justify its own existence in order to be accepted. I cannot accept this is “Justice”. Sadly, it is just bigotry repackaged in activist language.
Israel Is Not a Footnote to Judaism. It is a Pillar
You suggest that conflating Israel with Jewish identity risks harming Jews. I’d argue the opposite: denying that connection harms Jews even more.
Israel is not a “foreign government” in the Jewish imagination. It is the ancestral homeland. It is the spiritual and cultural centre of Judaism. Prayers for Jerusalem are uttered three times a day. The yearning to return to Zion predates modern nationalism by millennia.
So when critics say, “We’re not antisemitic, we’re just anti-Zionist,” it doesn’t wash. If you target the one Jewish state on earth, question its legitimacy, and call its creation a crime you are not engaging in “dissent.” You are denying Jews something you grant every other people, the right to exist as a nation, in their own land.
You may not mean to erase Jewish identity. But when you strip away Israel’s right to exist, that is exactly the effect. It is an erasure dressed up as activism.
Yes, There Is Pain on All Sides But Not All Pain Is Equal in Meaning
You speak movingly about Palestinian anguish, and that pain should never be dismissed. There are real losses, real traumas, and a generational wound that deserves attention and compassion.
But pain is not a blank cheque. Pain does not excuse demonisation. It does not justify double standards. And it does not override the fact that Jews in Israel and in the diaspora live under existential threat, often from the very movements that claim to speak in the name of “justice”.
A “shared justice,” as you propose, is only possible when both people’s narratives are recognised. But that recognition must start with one immovable truth: the Jewish people are not foreigners in Israel. They are not occupiers of their own homeland. And any definition of justice that ignores that or worse, seeks to undo it is not justice at all. It’s displacement by another name.
The Real Conflation Isn’t in the ASECA Plan. It’s in the Criticism of It
You worry that by protecting Jewish identity, we’re silencing others. But the irony is that the real conflation is happening elsewhere where critique of Israeli policy becomes a smokescreen for denying Jewish history, Jewish nationhood, and Jewish safety.
If the same standards applied to other nations, if critics questioned whether Japan should exist because of wartime history, or called Australia a racist endeavour and demanded it be dismantled those claims would be rightly rejected as offensive and extremist. And yet somehow, when it’s Israel, it’s called “justice.”
The ASECA Plan doesn’t criminalise criticism of Israeli policy. It draws a line when that criticism bleeds into the centuries-old practice of singling out Jews, vilifying them, and treating them as an alien force.
That line matters.
Not a Zero-Sum Game, But a Matter of Clarity
You close your piece with the suggestion that we must not lose moral clarity. I agree entirely.
Moral clarity begins by recognising that antisemitism today often disguises itself as activism. That Jewish self-defence, whether through security, advocacy, or even statehood is not “oppression.” And that building a future of mutual respect starts with accepting the Jewish people’s full identity: as a faith, as a culture, and as a nation.
Real justice begins there. Not by flattening the truth to make everyone feel heard, but by being brave enough to face what the truth actually is.
With respect and sincerity,
Simon
heather-rose17 July at 09:57 am
thankyou so much for this article, articulating with care and respect the case for prevention of harm very likely to eventuate from implementation of many of the report s recommendations.