Curated accounts conveyed to Royal Commission without context

Hyperpartisan accounts of curated lived experiences failed to recall key facts at the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, writes Tom Tanuki.

YESTERDAY, Sami Shah wrote in Crikey about grim testimony shared by Jewish Australians, as heard in Hearing Block 1 at the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.

He talked about Holocaust survivors experiencing renewed fears about wearing Stars of David out in public, children physically attacked in their schools for wearing one and the account of a traumatised 13-year-old who was in earshot of the Bondi massacre.

Shah took aim at the delegitimisation of Jewish fear and feelings that have occurred in the wake of Israel’s unfolding genocide. I also think that needs urgent addressing. I am dismayed to see "anti-racists" discredit the notion of local racism because there’s also a genocide happening.

But Shah did not pause to mention that other "lived experience" testimony heard at the Royal Commission painted a more curated picture.

Deborah Conway, for example, remembered the graffiti calling her a "genocide supporter" and a "Zionist stooge", left on various buildings.

But she did not recall her lived experience, responding to concerns put to her on ABC Radio about the disproportionate amount of dead children in Gaza, saying:

“It depends on what you call kids.”

Sometimes lived experiences relate to other lived experiences, you see.

Antisemitism and Israel: A challenge to the Australian narrative

A provocative Royal Commission submission by Dr Evan Jones argues that Australia’s antisemitism debate cannot be separated from Israel, Zionism and their political influence.

Joshua Moshe testified that he was kicked out of his band and harassed after his contributions to a secret WhatsApp chat group were leaked online.

Joshua said of the experience:

“I think it’s profoundly unfair to target any member of any ethnicity and ask them to be a representative of anything you deem unacceptable by any government.”

But Joshua forgot that the harassment came after his lived experience of offering in the WhatsApp chat to target social justice commentator and activist Nadine Chemali. He had asked whether she could be sacked from her occasional work with SBS for being "wildly anti-Zionist".

Selective-memory lived experiences aren’t the worst of this curation. The worst is that the lived experience of anti-Zionist Jews was deliberately memory-holed by the Commission. Members of the anti-Zionist group the Loud Jew Collective reported that they were told they would not be given leave to appear.

The Royal Commission did afford the Jewish Council of Australia the opportunity to have its critical voice heard at later stages. But this Commission, pushed for by the pro-Israel lobby and by the right-wing press in Australia, has a political agenda on fairly evident display regarding what it seeks to produce as useful Jewish lived experience.

Campaigns begun in the WhatsApp chat group to have anti-Zionist voices punished, sacked or starved of opportunity were what first alerted me to the fact that tools once considered the domain of the liberal Leftist were being deployed against the liberal Leftist, in the wake of Israel’s genocide. (Similarly, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chair Alex Ryvchin spoke in late 2023 about the need to conspire with managers and employers to have young anti-Zionists sacked to send a message.)

Israel, that light unto the nations — including Australia

Decades of deference to Israel and the U.S. have shaped Australia’s foreign policy at a high moral cost.

The pro-Israel lobby has since put these practises to work against the liberal, radical and pro-Palestinian Left, to great effect.

They’ve wreaked havoc on the Australian arts, for example. Arts organisations in Australia have become forcibly tethered to the demand to pander to Zionist sensibilities to avoid being starved of funding.

This censorship has been hand-balled down to working artists, who are singled out for crucifixion in the pro-Israel Australian press before having their funding, grants or prizes taken away. This is to protect the lived experience of a curated selection of Zionist voices, whose perspectives are the only Jewish ones which deserve a big platform and government action.

As a result of the Australian pro-Israel lobby, the notion of ‘centring lived experience’ is no longer just discourse in critical, academic or social justice spaces.

In January, we passed it into legislation, when the Combatting Antisemitism Bill proposed to criminalise conduct that would:

'Cause a reasonable person who is the target, or a member of the target group, to be intimidated, to fear harassment or violence, or to fear for their safety.'

Hate crimes punishable by years in gaol based on the feelings of a special person in a special category. I remember joking at the time that the "reasonable person" the legislation imagined was Ryvchin.

But that’s less of a joke once you see the sample of testimonies sought by the Royal Commission, including ex-IDF members, Zionist lobbyists and people who curate their own life stories for political gain.

This hyperpartisan rendition of the "Jewish lived experience" is not being offered up in Parliament in the name of "preventing another Bondi", to be clear, because this Royal Commission didn’t happen because of Bondi.

It was already in the pipeline as a result of long-standing demands by the pro-Israel lobby and the right-wing media. This process is being used to prevent another pro-Palestine movement. Curated lived experience works as a kind of weaponised identity politics deployed to help speed up the process.

Beneath the anti-Zionist Big Banana

Our political leaders keep making tone-deaf, overbearing laws, then watch them get almost immediately wrecked by the courts.

I am not comfortable with much of the space created by less principled and much less anti-racist, "anti-Zionists".

Often, I have to watch "anti-Zionists" share popular videos of racist talking heads like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes crying crocodile tears about dead Arab children. Sharers perhaps weren’t interested in politics for long enough before 2023 to know or care that those same figures made their names pole-vaulting off dead black or trans bodies for money and clout (and much more besides).

Sometimes I have to read Matt Chun essentialising a dead child at Bondi into a Chabad ultra-Zionist in order to delegitimise Australians’ surprise or horror at a mass shooting that happened just down the road from where they live.

This kind of thing makes me sick.

But the pro-Palestine movement is not rooted in dismissing racism any more than it is in utilising the weaponised identity politics of the liberal, tools now deployed to criminalise us, silence us and fire us. It’s rooted in the vital politics of worldwide class solidarity, anti-racism and anti-colonialism.

We do what we can to defend Palestine from abroad by pressuring our government because we know its people are our brothers and sisters, who have undergone dispossession and displacement since 1948 and now, since 2023, a brutal, outright campaign of genocide.

We don’t know that from hyperpartisan accounts of curated, centred lived experience. It’s a statement of fact.

As anti-racists, we’re able to take the lived experience of Australian children encountering racism seriously, and also take the genocide seriously. Anti-racists have that much left in the tank.

Tom Tanuki is an IA columnist, writer, satirist and anti-fascist activist whose weekly videos commenting on the Australian political fringe appear on YouTube. You can follow him on Twitter/X @tom_tanuki.