Over the past several weeks, we have witnessed some truly harrowing testimonies from Jewish Australians emerging from the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.
These testimonies, delivered by ordinary Australians and communal leaders alike, have laid bare deeply personal accounts of fear, intimidation, harassment and exclusion. They also serve as a stark reminder that the inquiry, established in the aftermath of the Bondi terror attack, was not only justified, but urgently necessary.
During the Commission, we heard a Holocaust survivor say how he is now too afraid to wear his Star of David necklace in public.
A Jewish teenager described how she was called “a filthy penny sniffer” while playing with fellow students.
A local Rabbi spoke about finding a mezuzah with the parchment replaced with the words “free Palestine”.
One person said she was asked by her employer to change her “Jewish sounding name” to appease a client with sensitivities about Israel.
We heard about children being regularly taunted, while their parents described the fear if they were publicly identified as Jewish by their school uniform.
Others told of being routinely harassed with slurs, including “dirty Jewish pigs”, “baby killers”, “Gas the Jews” and so on.
Many of the witnesses spoke about losing friendships, employment opportunities and a sense of belonging in their own country and communities simply because they openly identify as Jewish or refuse to renounce support for Israel.
This is the reality the Commission has been forced to confront: antisemitism in contemporary Australia is no longer confined to the extreme fringes. It has seeped into the mainstream, including our schools, workplaces, universities, social media and public discourse.
What has emerged from this Commission is not isolated prejudice, but a wholesale institutional failure. Again and again, witnesses described organisations that were indifferent, paralysed or unwilling to act when Jewish Australians sought support. Universities equivocated. Employers prioritised political “sensitivities” over discrimination. Even sport, which should unite young Australians, became another space where Jewish children felt isolated and afraid. Many Jewish Australians no longer merely feel unsafe; they feel abandoned by the very institutions meant to protect them.
Another deeply troubling thread to emerge from the Commission was the growing and relentless pressure on Jews to self-censor or hide their identities, whether as Jews or proud Zionists, in order to avoid becoming targets. Witnesses spoke of hiding symbols of Jewish identity, avoiding public events, concealing Hebrew or Israeli affiliations and remaining silent in professional and social settings out of fear of ostracism or retaliation. That is not the hallmark of a confident multicultural democracy, which Australia aspires to be, but rather a society where hatred has become normalised and where too many people have grown comfortable looking the other way.
Indeed, perhaps the clearest evidence of why this Royal Commission matters has emerged not only from the testimony itself, but from the reaction to those courageous enough to testify.
In recent days, Australia has learned that witnesses appearing before the Commission have been subjected to a shocking torrent of unadulterated online hatred and intimidation, with over 1,000 abusive posts and comments reported by the Dor Foundation, with material collated also by the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), from our own digital channels covering the Commission.
The abuse included Holocaust denial, calls for executions, dehumanising slurs, antisemitic caricatures and AI-generated images depicting Jewish witnesses as animals. One Bondi victim was labelled “subhuman.” Female witnesses were targeted with misogynistic abuse. Even a Jewish child who testified anonymously became the target of online mockery and hatred.
Some of the posts have now even been referred to the Australian Federal Police.
Most extraordinary of all was the intervention by Commissioner Virginia Bell herself. Royal Commissions in Australia are typically measured, restrained affairs. Yet Commissioner Bell felt compelled to publicly condemn the “dramatic increase in online hate messages” directed at witnesses and described the abuse as an “undiluted level of hatred and bigotry.”
That should alarm every decent Australian, regardless of political persuasion or views on the Middle East.
The online mobs targeting Jewish witnesses may believe they are undermining the legitimacy of the Commission. In truth, they are doing precisely the opposite. Every threat, every slur and every attempt to silence Jewish Australians only reinforces the central finding already emerging from this inquiry: antisemitism in Australia is real, growing and has been increasingly normalised.
The Bondi terror attack was the most horrifying manifestation of where hatred, if left unchecked, will lead. But as the Royal Commission is making painfully clear, the problem did not begin there – and unless confronted honestly, will not end there either.
Arsen Ostrovsky is a human rights lawyer and Head of Sydney Office of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC). He is a survivor of the Bondi terror attack
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