Jillian Segal's 'Understanding Antisemitism in Australia': A lesson in propaganda

In the first of an IA two-part series, Dr Evan Jones examines the Australian Special Envoy for Antisemitism's 'Understanding Antisemitism in Australia' report and describes the handbook as a dangerous farce.

THE JILLIAN SEGAL ANTISEMITISM ENVOY roadshow came up with another report in April 2026. It is 78 pages and titled 'Understanding Antisemitism in Australia'.

Surprisingly, it has stayed under the radar, perhaps overshadowed by the Antisemitism Royal Commission hearings. It’s an embarrassment.

The opening sentence in a Foreword nominally by sometime Governor-General Peter Cosgrove is a clanger:

'Australia is a nation built on respect, fairness and the dignity of every person.'

Tell that to the Indigenous communities and the transported convicts.

The Foreword continues:

'The Handbook explains what the IHRA definition is, why it matters and how it can be applied responsibly in Australian contexts. It is intended as a practical resource for schools, universities, public servants, community organisations and anyone seeking to understand antisemitism today.'

That paragraph sums up the dangerous farce that is this handbook. The centrepiece of the edifice is a known flawed definition of antisemitism (IHRA), essentially oriented to the defence of the indefensible state of Israel. It serves as a vehicle for a forced propaganda and censorship campaign to inhibit domestic opposition to Israel’s barbarism and for insulating Australian Zionist forces in their ongoing uncritical support for the latter.

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The document claims legitimacy because the definition has been adopted by the Albanese Labor government in December 2025 in response to Segal’s initial July 2025 report. Yet the IHRA’s adoption (and elsewhere globally, beginning with the UK’s May Conservative government in December 2016) is the result of Zionist lobbying and cowardice on the part of myriad adopting governments and institutions. Here is the Segal machine presuming intelligence and independence on their part. Rather, it’s a circus of circularity.

Israeli academic Neve Gordon, at the London Review of Books (January 2018), noted the cynical mislabelling and instrumentalisation of antisemitism:

Historically, the fight against anti-Semitism has sought to advance the equal rights and emancipation of Jews. Those who denounce the ‘new anti-Semitism’ seek to legitimate the discrimination against and subjugation of Palestinians.

In the first case, someone who wishes to oppress, dominate and exterminate Jews is branded an anti-Semite; in the second, someone who wishes to take part in the struggle for liberation from colonial rule is branded an anti-Semite.

For his honesty, Gordon received myriad threats and was forced to seek asylum in the UK.

Academic Ruth Gould forensically dissected and repudiated the IHRA definition in 2020 under the title, The IHRA Definition of Antisemitism: Defining Antisemitism by Erasing Palestinians.

Some quotes are desirable:

With its intensive focus on the critique of Israel as a marker of antisemitism, the IHRA definition has been heavily implicated in the suppression of Israel-critical speech in recent years. …

It is precisely with respect to the difficult-to-determine boundaries between the legal and the non-legal that the IHRA definition poses the greatest risks. Its capacity to motivate authorities to censor Israel-critical speech is linked to the imprecision of its legal status. It is striking that, although the IHRA definition is merely a policy document, with no formal legal status, this non-legally binding definition is treated as if it had the capacity to render antisemitism extinct through criminal sanctions. …

In every context in which it has been adopted or applied, the working definition has faced sharp criticism. Scholars of Jewish and Holocaust studies have played a prominent role in exposing its shortcomings.

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I had earlier quoted Thomas Suárez’s indictment of the antisemitism industry in a two-part article on Jillian Segal’s first Report (July 2025) on this site (21 August and 23 August 2025).

The polymath Suárez is the author of State of Terror: how terrorism created modern Israel (2017), Palestine Hijacked: How Zionism Forged an Apartheid State from River to Sea (2022) and Palestine Mapped: From the River to the Sea in Early Geographic Thought (2026).

In the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (August/September 2021), Suárez notes:

'The very purpose of IHRA was to give perceived legal endorsement to Israel's use of Jewish identity as a human shield to empower its crimes. And its use of the word Holocaust in its title, exploiting the memory of Hitler's victims to empower new ethnic crimes, made it all the more obscene.'

Suárez notes that the 2021 Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, created to transcend the failings of the IHRA definition, is ultimately little better in that the quarantining of Israel is still there in the wings, writing the script.

The rot sets in from the beginning of the Segal Understanding Antisemitism document:

' [The IHRA definition] reflects the lived experience of antisemitism of Jewish Australians. As with other marginalised groups, Jews have the right to define their own oppression. Fundamentally, the IHRA definition is about anti-racism and the right to live free of vilification, harassment, discrimination and hate.' (p 6)

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Fundamentally, the IHRA definition is not about anti-racism, etc., but about Israel.

The document itself immediately exposes its emphasis:

'Hate directed towards Jews by its very nature distorts Jews and Judaism, and its modern form increasingly distorts representations of Israel and Israelis (as a Jewish collective).' (p 7)

Israelis are not members of "a Jewish collective", but citizens of the state of Israel, a multi-ethnic and multi-religious entity, albeit whose leadership has long been engaged in obliterating its "multi-" character.

What are the distortions? We hear that some Jews feel "oppressed" by witnessing people demonstrating against Israel’s barbarity. The poor dears. Such sentiments are symptomatic of a pathology, yet it is demanded here that we cater to it. Moreover, it is Zionism that has distorted and marginalised Judaism.

The anonymous authors claim to have consulted widely in preparation of this document (p 10). What is 'the Australian Government’s delegation to IHRA' and who are its so-called 'Expert Members'? The Government has no expert members on this matter. The blatant partisanship highlights that no anti-Zionist Jewish organisations or (prominent) anti-Zionist individuals have been consulted. Their views cannot be accommodated in the pre-determined essence of the document.

Antisemitism, claims the document, moves with the times.

Thus (p 15):

'Today, the highest value of democratic societies such as Australia is international law and human rights and so many antisemitic tropes are conveyed and justified in the language of human rights and international legal arguments. For example, sometimes Jews are labelled and libelled as "settler-colonialists", "oppressors" …'

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Rather, Israelis are rightly labelled settler-colonialists and oppressors. Libelled, I don’t think so.

And straight after:

'In the modern form of antisemitism, hatred is increasingly directed towards Jewish peoplehood, undermining and delegitimising Jewish self-determination and sovereignty.'

The Zionists have dug the word "trope" out of relative obscurity to find antisemitism under every literary rock or bed. The above is the ultimate Zionist trope. There is no history of Palestine and Israel. There is no ongoing erasure of the Palestinian people. Undermining and delegitimising Jewish settlement [aka "self-determination and sovereignty"] on other people’s land is an entirely legitimate ambition.

The Antisemitism document cites longtime British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (1991-2013) as an authority (p 15):

'It is [now] hatred of Jews as a sovereign nation in their own land …'

The document fails to confront that Sacks, much feted and ennobled, was an unrepentant pro-Israel loyalist ("an unequivocal attachment to Israel"). For Sacks, any criticism of Israel reflects the mutation in forms of antisemitism; thus anti-Zionism is the new antisemitism. Tony Greenstein, the consistently principled Jewish anti-Zionist activist, has forensically exposed Sacks’ failings. It is not unexpected that this document could cite for support a man with such curious ethical principles.

Then there’s the land, to which this unholy diversionary diatribe is addressed, directly and indirectly (p 16):

'Judaism is the religion practised by the Jewish people. It began in the Middle East almost 4,000 years ago, and is centred on the land of Israel, where Jews have maintained a continued presence.'

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The "Middle East" has been populated by Jews and countless others of various ethnicities, from which the Jewish community differentiated itself and evolved. Don’t let these people near the job of census-taking. Moreover, the document implicitly conflates latter-day 'spiritual’ and 'political’ Zionism, consigning the former and its battle with the latter to irrelevance, indeed non-existence.

But what is this "land of Israel"? We have the Israeli "Right" and the settlers whining about non-Jews living on the ancient lands of Samaria and Judea (Israel and Judah) and their lack of unfettered access to it. The Biblical narrative is mythical, constructed later from oral transmission. Archaeological evidence is the great white hope, improving, but many of its inferences are disputed within the archaeologists themselves. On current "wisdom", historic "Israel" (the northern kingdom) existed in a decreasing range between the 10th and the 8th Centuries BCE. Historic Judah (the southern kingdom) lasted until the 6th Century BCE, albeit under vassalage for much of that time.

According to Israeli archaeologist Israel Finkelstein, respected in spite of not finding Jewish lineage behind every pottery shard, early Judah was inconsequential in population and character, not least compared to the Canaanite settlements to the West. Judah benefited from the fall of the northern kingdom with an enhanced population, fostering the rise of a ‘pan-Israelite ideology’ (Finkelstein, The Forgotten Kingdom, 2013). Then ‘the term Israel was transformed from the name of the northern kingdom to a concept of a future unified nation living under a Davidic king and worshipping in the Jerusalem temple’. Is this Segal’s land of Israel an ideological project from day one?

The lands of historic Samaria and Judea are unrelated to the dog’s breakfast 1947 UN Resolution 181 partition plan. So why didn’t the Zionist leaders, David Ben-Gurion at the helm, plug purely for the rough historical sites of Israel and Judah? Because they wanted the lot, and more.

The crudity of Segal’s presentation of the "land of Israel" beggars credulity. As with her general conflation of Judaism and Zionism, and the incorporation of the entirety of Jewry within the Zionist umbrella.

The document claims (p 17) that 'Some of the living traditions of Jewish communities include:' Tzedek (righteousness/justice), Gemilut Chasadim (acts of loving kindness) and Tikkun Olam (repairing the world). Later we read (p 34): 'Every human being is entitled to dignity and human rights.' What? This while all self-appointed "official" Jewish communities globally sit by and watch the Israeli genocide in play. Do the authors have any self-respect?

With more self-respect, a French anti-Zionist collective has named itself Tsedek.

Its website notes:

By transforming religious discourse into nationalist discourse, Zionism destroys and distorts the foundations of Judaism …

For us, the creation of an ethnocracy is not a prerequisite for Jewish emancipation and self-determination. We are reclaiming a Jewish identity by combining it with an anti-racist struggle and by proposing a cultural alternative that emphasises the preservation of Jewish cultures and solidarity with other historically oppressed groups and minorities.

Dr Evan Jones is a political economist and former academic.

This article is the first in a two-part series by Dr Evan Jones examining Australia's Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal's 'Understanding Antisemitism in Australia' report.