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.
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.