The report by Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism contains only one mention of Israel in the entire text — an embarrassment to our Government, writes Dr Evan Jones.
THE REPORT by Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal, was presented to the Government on 10 July. The Segal Report is an embarrassment, a diversion and an obscenity.
The Report (a mere 12 pages of text) is an embarrassment because of its vacuity. It is also an embarrassment for the Albanese government. How did this process under its nominal lead author, an evident Israel-firster, come to be established?
The Report is a diversion because it floats on an absent base. That base is Israel. There is only one mention of Israel in the text, and that mention is oblique.
The Report is an obscenity because its diversions strategically occlude recognition of and action against Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people.
Jillian Segal’s crusade is really about stamping out criticism of Israel and inhibition of those attempting to hold Israel’s criminality to account. How else to defend indefensible Israel than to deflect attention.
The Report cites figures on the recent seemingly dramatic rise in antisemitism. But they are not sourced. Par for the course, they lump in incidents directed against Israel and ardent supporters of Israel.
There is no context. Antisemitism, ‘as the world’s oldest hatred’, has supposedly simply been rekindled. The Report also claims:
'… young people raised on a diet of disinformation and misinformation about Jews today risk becoming fully-fledged antisemites tomorrow.'
Australians are said to be vulnerable to "extremist ideologies", "extreme ideologies", "extremist views", "far-right and far-left extremism and radical Islamism".
Nowhere acknowledged is the influence on young minds (or old minds) of daily images of a flattened Gaza – including targeted hospitals, schools and universities, mosques, public edifices – of dead children, maimed children, starving children. And their rational response to such carnage. Well-known and influential Gazans, journalists (the figure now reaching 270), medicos, aid workers, etc. – all targeted, now dead. This is the here and now. Israeli officials routinely lie about the killings and the destruction, vitiating their credibility.
The Report dictates that all institutions must adopt the (2016) International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.
The Report claims:
'Broad adoption of the [IHRA]’s working definition of antisemitism is key to distinguishing potentially legitimate critique from hate, especially when anti-Zionism masks antisemitism.'
The diversion is achieved by a simple abuse of language and abuse of those using language appropriately. Rather, anti-Zionism is anti-Zionism – period.
No explanation nor defence of the IHRA definition is offered – indeed, it is indefensible. The report claims:
'Having recognised its value and status, the Australian government should require consistent application and adoption of the IHRA definition across all levels of government, public institutions and regulatory bodies.'
Rather, some governments and institutions have adopted it gutlessly under pressure from the lobby. It has no value and no legitimacy. The lead author of this ‘working definition’, Kenneth Stern, has distanced himself from his ‘baby’ because of its weaponisation (Stern himself is a self-proclaimed Zionist).
Waleed Aly has noted the definition’s deliberate vagueness and that another contributor, Antony Lerman, had admitted that dramatic differences among the drafters regarding ‘illustrative examples’ of when criticism of Israel becomes antisemitic threatened to sink the whole enterprise.
Some academic specialists have found the IHRA definition iffy. Thus, in 2020-21, joined by several hundred colleagues of various political/ideological dispositions, they came up with the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism. Peculiarly, the Segal Report makes no mention of its existence and its seeming greater legitimacy for her cause.
The Jerusalem Declaration is an advance. But it is still focused on Israel (11 of the 15 ‘Guidelines’ or diktats). Thomas Suárez (author of the seminal 2016 State of Terror: how terrorism created modern Israel) is less than enthusiastic. In a March 2021 piece, Suárez notes:
'But no matter its authors’ best intentions, the JDA can, and thus will, be wielded in IHRA-esque fashion to muzzle honest debate, and – the very purpose of IHRA in the first place – to enable the Israeli state to continue its crimes by smearing critics...
And like IHRA, JDA dictates how people are, and are not, permitted to discuss what the Declaration defines as the Israeli-Palestinian ‘conflict’ — conflict itself a pejorative word in that it denies the reality of a massive military occupier trapping an indigenous population with no means of defence.
Amongst the list that appears in the category ‘Israel and Palestine: examples that, on the face of it, are antisemitic’ is no.10:
'Denying the right of Jews in the State of Israel to exist and flourish, collectively and individually, as Jews, in accordance with the principle of equality.'
What? Given that Israel was constructed and is sustained as an apartheid state, there is no equality possible — by definition. Some luminaries (including strong critics of Israel) figure amongst the signatories; how can they have put their name to this and other glaring anomalies?
The Jerusalem Declaration begins with this simple sentence:
'Antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish).'
As Suárez notes, if it had left it at that and scrapped its obsession with Israel, it might have attracted more sympathy.
In short, the IHRA and the Jerusalem Declaration are less about antisemitism than about shielding Israel.
The Segal Report continues:
'Antisemitism is evident within schools and universities and has become ingrained and normalised within academia and the cultural space.'
Complete and utter rubbish.
The Report wants a national syllabus that includes 'an understanding of the Holocaust as a major case study of where unchecked antisemitism can lead …'. How can one teach the Jewish Holocaust out of context?
The proposed structure for the new NSW History 7–10 syllabus is here. Under pressure, the Jewish holocaust will be treated but apparently in the Australian history section in the context of the experience of Jewish Australians (i.e. out of context), and as an option. A fig leaf for a demand that could not be accommodated?
The Jewish Holocaust needs to be placed, at the least, in context in the evolution of the Nazi regime and during World War II. The Nazis also interned and murdered Leftists, homosexuals and Romani, and then, in war, turned their attention to the systematic killing of Jews and other untermenschen – Slavs and Poles. Well over 20 million of the latter died.
Then there’s the attempted collaboration of a Zionist cabal with the Nazis themselves, as documented in Lenni Brenner’s 1983 Zionism in the Age of the Dictators and his 2002 edited 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis. Establishment of a Zionist state in Palestine took precedence over facilitating the security of the maximum number of European Jews. Thus did the National Military Organisation (relabelled Lehi, better known as the Stern Gang) present a document to German diplomats in Vichy-controlled Lebanon in 1941, which contained:
The NMO, which is well-acquainted with the goodwill of the German Reich government and its authorities towards Zionist activity inside Germany and towards Zionist emigration plans, is of the opinion that:
1. Common interests could exist between the establishment of a new order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the NMO;
2. Cooperation between the new Germany and a renewed folkish-national Hebraium would be possible; and
3. The establishment of the historic Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, bound by a treaty with the German Reich, would be in the interest of a maintained and strengthened future German position of power in the Near East.
The ethno-nationalism of Nazism and of Zionism both finding fertile soil in late Nineteenth Century Europe, the new Zionist state could readily find its own untermenschen in indigenous Palestinians — subjecting them to the Nakba, institutionalised discrimination and repression, heritage obliteration, and now to their own Holocaust. Palestinians as the new Jews. Add the racist discrimination against Mizrahi Jewish immigrants by the then Israeli Ashkenazi leadership (the "Jewish victims of Zionism" as described by scholar Ella Shohat), welcomed to Israel to beef up the Jewish population.
Israel’s stark ethno-nationalism has since found admiration elsewhere, not least in Narendra Modi’s Hindu India, Volodymyr Zelenskyy's Russophobe Ukraine, Javier Milei’s Argentina and in far-right movements globally — all of which Israel has in turn sought to reinforce. A light unto the nations.
Will any insertion of the Jewish Holocaust into Australian school curricula also allude to this fuller story?
The Segal Report makes a complementary demand:
'The Envoy will provide recommendations to government on enhancing education about Jewish history, identity, culture and antisemitism in high school curricula to promote understanding and counter prejudice.'
How is this going to happen? Will there be distinct departments of Jewish Studies in schools, and compulsory? Will other worthy ethnicities get a look-in somewhere? The demand is simply unworkable, preposterous. Syllabus committees are already belatedly trying to fit in coverage of long-ignored Australian indigenous histories.
Presumably, one essential element in Australian Jewish "identity and culture" requiring attention is the widespread attraction to a foreign country; more, one that is grievously on the nose. All self-styled representative Australian Jewish organisations are fully supportive of and lobby for a racist foreign state. Most Australian Jewish ‘faith’ schools socialise their students into "a love of Israel". There has been no stepping back from this devotion, none, from any of these institutions. Any curriculum devoted to Australian Jewish identity and culture should necessarily account for this peculiarity.
Of course, it isn’t going to happen.
Dr Evan Jones is a political economist and former academic.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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