PAUL RUBENSTEIN: Why I fear ‘respectable’ anti-Zionism more than right wing neo-nazism

On Tuesday, the royal commission into anti-Semitism opened.

Commissioner Virginia Bell appears to have internalised something that so many have not: that anti-Semitism manifests on both the right and the left. This is important because the lived experience of the Australian Jewish community over the past two years has been marred by a dramatic increase in both.

Right-wing anti-Semitism is real. Holocaust denial is real. Neo-nazi extremism is real.

Social media platforms such as Meta and TikTok have amplified it, monetised it and normalised it. These companies have serious questions to answer. This is the form of anti-Semitism many people readily recognise. It is crude, explicit and easy to condemn. It fits comfortably within our understanding of racism and extremism.

But if we are to understand the current surge in anti-Semitism in Australia, we must confront some harder truths.

Anti-Semitism has acquired a new respectability. It is increasingly expressed through anti-Israel behaviour and rhetoric, framed in the language of human rights, international law and social justice.

Criticism of Israeli government policy is legitimate — including its military campaign in Gaza. It is part of democratic life and Israelis know that more than anyone. But something deeper is occurring in parts of our civic culture.

The world’s only Jewish state is routinely singled out as uniquely illegitimate.

Zionism, understood by the overwhelming majority of Jews as the belief in Jewish national self-determination, is branded inherently racist or colonialist.

Israel is not merely criticised. It is described as genocidal, singularly evil and beyond the moral pale — and anyone who supports its continued existence is painted as deserving of punishment and ostracism.

These are not arguments about borders or governments or policies. They are moral indictments that render Jewish self-determination itself intolerable. No other people’s national movement is subjected to this categorical rejection.

Anti-Semitism has always adapted to the dominant moral vocabulary of its time. In earlier centuries it wore religious or racial garb. Today, in certain progressive spaces, it presents itself as anti-racism.

When Zionism, the mainstream expression of Jewish national self-determination, is categorically defined as a racist ideology, and denunciation of it is framed as a moral stand against racism, something perverse occurs.

A core component of Jewish collective identity is singled out as uniquely illegitimate.

More disturbingly, a cultural shift takes hold. A cloak of moral legitimacy descends, and more people in the mainstream — particularly idealistic young people — feel authorised to join in, often by specifically targeting Australian “Zionists” for boycotts and public shaming.

When anti-Zionism becomes a moral litmus test in activist networks, when students who identify openly as Zionist report social or academic pressure, and when parts of the arts community and sections of mainstream discourse treat the de-legitimisation of Israel as a given, hostility toward Jews is no longer confined to the fringes.

It circulates in respectable spaces. This is what has happened in Australia and large parts of the West generally.

Social media accelerates this transformation. Platforms reward outrage and absolutism. Narratives that frame Israel as uniquely monstrous spread rapidly, reinforced by algorithmic echo chambers. What begins as activism hardens into “truth”.

There is another uncomfortable reality. In recent years, elements of progressive anti-Israel activism have converged, tactically if not philosophically, with Islamist ideological hostility toward Israel and, in some cases, toward Jews more broadly.

These traditions arise from different intellectual histories. But they meet in a shared objective, the delegitimisation of Israel as a Jewish state.

This is not an accusation against Muslim Australians, who are entitled to safety and dignity and protection from discrimination just like every other community. This is an observation about the political ideologies of Islamist movements that openly preach hatred of Jews and have found common cause, at least out of political convenience, with Western activists who frame their opposition to Israel in secular human rights language. Strange bedfellows united by a common animus.

Since October 7, Jewish communities worldwide, including in Australia, have experienced a surge in hostility. That surge has not been driven primarily by fringe neo-nazi cells. It has been energised principally by a culture in progressive circles in which anti-Zionism is treated as a moral imperative and Jewish attachment to Israel as suspect.

As the nation embarks on a year of soul searching regarding the alarming rise in anti-Semitism, it is an opportunity not just to examine the forms of anti-Semitism that are easy to understand, but also to shine a bright light on this more socially sanctioned form of anti-Semitism now circulating in respectable spaces — lecture theatres, activist networks, the arts community and sections of mainstream discourse.

If we confine our concern to the crude and explicit, we will miss the even more dangerous hostility that now carries cultural confidence.

And if we fail to push it out of the mainstream and back to the fringes where it belongs, Australia will never recover from the explosion of anti-Semitism that has afflicted it over the past two and a half years.

Paul Rubenstein is the NSW chairman of the Australia Israel and Jewish Affairs Council