How to recognise antisemitism

Israel is a country, with a government, a parliament, courts, a military and other institutions. Jewish people are a diverse global community, most of whom are not citizens of Israel. Jewish people live across every continent and hold many different political views. Criticising Israel as a country is not the same as criticising Jewish people because they are Jewish.

Collapsing the distinction between Israel and Jewish people is a recognised form of antisemitism. It treats Jewish people as answerable for a foreign government. For example, directing hostility at an Australian synagogue, because the synagogue is a place for Jewish worship, in response to events overseas holds Jewish people here responsible for the actions of a state. Any definition of antisemitism that identifies all Jewish people with the state of Israel reinforces that conflation rather than protecting Jewish people from it.

Zionism is a political ideology and movement seeking to establish and maintain a Jewish majority state in historical Palestine. It was promoted and popularised by the work of Hungarian Jewish activist Theodor Herzl in the 19th century. The movement led to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Historians, including Israeli historians working from Israeli archives, document that the creation of the state involved the unlawful killing and permanent displacement of Palestinian people. They record between 13,000 and 15,000 people killed, and between 700,000 and 750,000 people displaced. The ongoing effects of Zionism on Palestinian people are set out on the contested language page.

Zionism is a political question. Its central concern is the creation and maintenance of a state defined by Jewish national identity (sometimes called an ethno-state). That is a question about how a state is organised and run, and it affects another people – Palestinians.

Like any political movement, Zionism has both supporters and opponents, and both groups include Jewish and non-Jewish people.

Many Jewish people are Zionists and see Zionism as an expression of Jewish self-determination and a core part of their Jewish identity. Many are not Zionists, and don’t see Zionism as part of their Jewish identity.

Opposition to Zionism has a long history within Jewish religious and political thought. It includes religious traditions that opposed the founding of a Jewish state, because they held that a Jewish return to the land should await the coming of the Messiah. It also includes secular movements that advocated for freedom and equality for Jewish people in the countries where Jewish people already lived, and contemporary Jewish writers who argue that identifying Jewish people with the state of Israel harms Jewish people. Today a significant and growing number of Jewish people in Australia and elsewhere are critical of Israel or do not identify as Zionist. Jewish-led organisations advocating for Palestinian rights exist in many countries.

For this reason, the statement that ‘anti-Zionism is antisemitism’ is not correct. Anti-Zionism is disagreement with a political ideology. Antisemitism is hostility toward people because they are Jewish. Treating the two as the same mistakes a political position for racial hostility. Anti-Zionism is antisemitic only where it also contains antisemitic content – for example, a stereotype, or holding Jewish people in general responsible for Israel. Treating them as the same would also classify as antisemitic a substantial number of Jewish people, and long-standing Jewish anti-Zionist religious and political traditions.

Australian courts have found that Zionism is a political position that is not shared by all Jewish people. It is not a legally protected characteristic of Jewish identity. This remains the case even though many Jewish people experience Zionism as important to who they are. Australian anti-discrimination law protects people from being targeted because of protected characteristics. Political positions are not protected under anti-racism laws – they do not place a political belief beyond criticism, however sincerely or widely that belief is held in a community. The same is true of political beliefs held by members of any community.

You can read more about the relationship between Jewish identity and Zionism in the Jewish Council of Australia’s submission to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion. See page 8, from paragraph 20. The Not in Our Name: Jewish Australians Speak Out report provides a recent survey of diverse Jewish people’s positions on Israel and Zionism.

Criticism of countries, their government or institutions is often forceful, and democratic societies expect it to be. Australians express strong views about the governments of many countries, including their own, in parliament, in the media and in public. Hostility toward any state and criticism of its actions is not understood as racism against that state’s people.

The same standard applies to Israel. Criticism of Israel’s government, laws, military, other institutions, conduct or founding is expression about a state. That remains true however strong or sustained it is, and even if some people think it mistaken or unbalanced. As the Federal Court of Australia observed in a 2025 judgment, political criticism of Israel, however inflammatory or adversarial, is not by its nature criticism of Jewish people in general.

Some argue that the attention Israel receives is itself evidence of antisemitism. Disproportionate attention may be a fair criticism of a commentator, a newspaper or a movement. It is not evidence that anyone has been targeted because they are Jewish. In a legal opinion, Geoffrey Robertson AO KC notes that Israel’s history and actions are unlike those of any other country, so criticism of it and the amount of attention it receives may differ from other nations.

Applying the ordinary standard – who is targeted, and why – to expression about Israel is not special treatment. It is the same standard applied to expression about every other state.

This includes criticism directed at a state’s founding or its ‘right to exist’. Questioning whether a particular state should exist, or should exist in its current form, is a recognised kind of political argument. It is heard in Australia in other contexts, including from First Nations people in relation to the Australian state. Applied to Israel, such criticism concerns a state and its arrangements. It is antisemitic only if it targets Jewish people because they are Jewish – for example, by holding Jewish people in general responsible for that state, by using antisemitic stereotypes, or by denying Jewish people in Israel the right to live there with equal rights, as individuals and as a community.

Freedom, justice, equality and self-determination are rights. They are recognised in international human rights law and are held by all peoples, including Jewish people and Palestinian people. Advocating for these rights for Palestinian people is not an attack on Jewish people. How Palestinian self-determination should be realised is contested in international politics. However, the underlying rights do not depend on that debate being settled. Self-determination means that it is for Palestinian people themselves to determine their own political future, consistent with international law and the human rights of everyone. It is not for others to prescribe the form it should take.

When Palestinian Australians describe their own history – displacement, the killing and detention of civilians, life under blockade – they are describing the reality of their people’s lives under occupation by Israel. Recounting that history is not hostility toward Jewish people.

Because such speech is legitimate, wrongly labelling it antisemitic causes harm. It silences Palestinian people’s expressions of their own culture, for example by wearing the keffiyeh, describing their own history, or advocating for their own rights. A definition of antisemitism that has this effect is no longer identifying anti-Jewish hatred. It is operating as a form of anti-Palestinian racism. Accurate identification of antisemitism protects against both harms at once.

This distinction is about how the test applies when speech about Israel or Zionism feels uncomfortable. Political expression on this subject can cause genuine discomfort, including for Jewish Australians who feel a strong connection to Israel. However, discomfort is not the test. Speech does not become antisemitic because it is uncomfortable to hear.

Nor is disagreement the same as hatred. You may believe that a claim about Israel is factually wrong, historically unfair or put in excessive terms. You can hold that view and still recognise that making the claim is not an act of racism. Political expression does not have to be correct to be legitimate. Where a claim is believed to be false, the response is evidence and argument. Calling it racism does not answer it. It silences it.

As Jewish refugees fled pogroms in the Russian Empire, unions, politicians and newspapers objected to their arrival. They compared the refugees with Chinese migrants as threats to a ‘white’ Australia. Jewish people were often treated as white when it suited, and as alien when it did not.

At the Evian Conference on refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria, Australia’s delegate said Australia had ‘no real racial problem’ and was not ‘desirous of importing one’. Jewish people fleeing Nazism faced severe restrictions on immigration to Australia.

Holocaust survivors who reached Australia were described as ‘unassimilable’, ‘clannish’ and ‘black marketeers’. These terms closely mirrored those used against Asian migrants.

In December 2025, 15 people were killed in a terrorist attack on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach. Police have described the attack as inspired by Islamic State. It followed a wave of attacks on Jewish targets in Sydney and Melbourne. They included arson at a kosher deli in Bondi and at Melbourne’s Adass Israel Synagogue, and swastikas painted on synagogues in Allawah and Newtown.

ASIO has assessed that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps directed two of these attacks, and likely others, through criminal intermediaries. Iran denies the allegation. Police allege that criminals for hire carried out further attacks. These attacks are distinct from the everyday prejudice Jewish people encounter. They are better understood as targeted violence by a small number of people and organisations. Islamic State has long urged sympathisers abroad to carry out attacks on their own initiative. This strategy became more central after it lost its territory in Syria and Iraq. Islamic State had historically shown little interest in Palestine, and has denounced Hamas. After 7 October 2023, however, it recast attacks on Jewish people anywhere in the world as part of its war.

The criminals hired for other attacks may have had no ideological motive at all. Even so, the targets were chosen to terrorise the Jewish community. An effective response requires understanding and confronting the networks that organise this violence. Blaming protest movements or Muslim communities misreads where the danger comes from. It also divides the communities whose solidarity is needed to confront it.

Antisemitism and white supremacy are key aspects of far-right ideology, often casting Jewish people as the hidden force behind immigration, multiculturalism, feminism, LGBTIQ+ rights and the political left. Conspiracy theories such as the ‘Great Replacement’ and ‘Cultural Marxism’ cast Jewish and Muslim people, migrants and other minorities as parts of a single imagined plot. These theories have motivated mass-casualty attacks, including the 2019 Christchurch massacre. These ideas are also moving into mainstream politics. Survey research has found that One Nation voters are the most likely of any voter group to hold traditional antisemitic views. Confronting antisemitism means confronting this wider worldview. It targets Jewish people and other racialised communities together.

International studies have found that antisemitic incidents tend to rise after Israeli military operations. This is because some people treat Jewish people everywhere as collectively responsible for the actions of the Israeli state. Criticism of Israeli conduct is not the problem. The harm comes from conflating Jewish people with a foreign government. This conflation has a history. Since the Cold War, Israel has taken a more central place in Western strategic policy. Over the same period, Australian political debate has increasingly presented Jewish communities as part of the justification for Western support for Israel. The result is a common habit of treating Jewish people as representatives of Israel, or as interchangeable with it. This habit is widely reflected in the media and in culture.

Jewish people are diverse. Any act that treats all Jewish people as one thing is antisemitism.

Statements that start with ‘All Jews are …’ or just ‘Jews are …’ will almost always meet this test. They are antisemitic even when the statement appears to be flattering – for example, ‘Jews are smart’ or ‘all Jews are good with money’.

Like any large group, some Jewish people are wealthy or hold positions of influence. Some Jewish organisations, including advocacy and lobbying groups, are influential, and some work together to pursue shared goals. Observing that a particular person or organisation is wealthy or influential is not antisemitic. What makes a conspiracy theory antisemitic is the move from particular people to Jewish people as a whole. That is the claim that Jewish people, as a group, secretly hold or coordinate power because they are Jewish.

• Physical violence, or threats of violence, against people because they are Jewish.
• Harassment, abuse or intimidation of a person because they are Jewish.
• Damaging, defacing or destroying synagogues, Jewish schools, Jewish cemeteries, kosher businesses or other Jewish property because it is Jewish in order to frighten Jewish people.
• Displaying Nazi symbols, or celebrating the Holocaust or Hitler, to threaten or demean Jewish people as a group.

• Claims that all Jewish people as a group secretly control governments, banks, the media, or world events.
• Claims that all Jewish people act together to harm or exploit others.
• The medieval Christian European ‘blood libel’ and similar inventions: false claims that Jewish people ritually harm others because they are Jewish. This takes modern forms such as the QAnon conspiracy theories. It is clearly distinct from descriptions of war crimes by Israel’s military.
• Describing Jewish people as all being dishonest, disloyal, greedy or malevolent.

• Denying that the Holocaust happened, or that Jewish people were its principal victims.
• Grossly minimising the number of victims, or claiming the Holocaust is exaggerated or invented.

• Treating a Jewish person less favourably in employment, education, housing, services or public life because they are Jewish.
• Excluding Jewish people from an activity, a space or an organisation because they are Jewish.
• Holding all Jewish people worldwide responsible for the actions of the state of Israel, or of any individual Jewish person, sometimes called collective blame.
• Requiring a Jewish person, because they are Jewish, to condemn Israel, or to state their political views, as a condition of being included, employed, or treated fairly.