Starvation is being used as a weapon of genocide in Gaza. Photo: Hosny Salah/Pixabay
Jillian Segal has turned ‘Trumpian’ in her demands to censor, defund and intervene in the arts, journalism and the right to speak out on genocide, writes David Lockwood.
Australia’s ‘Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism’, Jillian Segal, released her report last week. Segal is a former president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and the chair of the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce. Up to this point in her Envoyship, she had been noted for only two things. Firstly for enjoying a junket to Buenos Aires to chat with other special envoys. And secondly, for her opinion that Palestine solidarity marches are “anti-Jewish because they want Israel to disappear”, have morphed into “something more sinister” and should be banned from city centres and moved to “designated places away from the Jewish community” (SBS interview).
Not much sense was to be expected from this report and it certainly doesn’t disappoint on that score. Over seventeen pages, it manages to entirely avoid mentioning the destruction of Gaza, Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land and the many more than 60,000 deaths at the hands of the Israeli state. Naturally, the memory of 7 October 2023 is in the second paragraph – but in Segal’s view nothing very special happened either before or after that. From her Zionist perspective, you see, antisemitism is always with us – on this occasion, “driven by conflict in the Middle East” and by “manipulated narratives in the legacy media and social media and the spread of extremist ideologies”. We are left wondering as to where that conflict came from.
To prove that antisemitism is on the upswing, the report uses the spurious IHRA definition, which basically equates criticism of the existence of the state of Israel with antisemitism. It can then cite huge increases in ‘antisemitism’ in Australia. Given what Israel is doing in Gaza and the West Bank (and its intention to keep doing it until ‘Greater Israel’ is cleansed of Palestinians), opposition to the Israeli state is hardly surprising. And so, according to Segal and the IHRA, up goes the number of ‘anti-semites’.
Let’s be clear. Undoubtedly, since Israel’s onslaught on Gaza there have been instances of bad, even aggressive, behaviour towards those of Jewish origins, including incidents of antisemitism. But ‘a scourge’ (Albanese)? Or ‘vile antisemitism that has been allowed to fester’ (Dutton)? No. In fact, according to the Mapping Social Cohesion report (by the Scanlon Institute) in July 2024, 13% of respondents expressed negative attitudes towards Jewish people; in 2023 it had been 9%. This compares with 27% (2023) and 33% (2024) negativity towards Muslims. The statistic on Jewish people, the report remarks, “is in line with the share of people with a negative attitude towards Hindus and Sikhs”.
On close inspection (something no one could accuse Segal of), a goodly proportion of the ‘antisemitic’ acts that took place late last year and early in 2025 turn out to be nothing of the sort.
Do you remember the exploding caravan? An abandoned caravan was found in NSW containing explosives and the address of a Sydney synagogue. The Anti-antisemitism brigade went into overdrive. According to the Zionist Federation, this was undoubtedly the most severe threat to the Jewish community in Australia to date”. Segal herself declared: “With weekly protests marked by antisemitism, along with threats to property and attacks on places of worship, today’s events [the caravan discovery] are yet another escalation.”
Criminal con job
But they weren’t. A few weeks of police investigation (and some arrests) revealed that the caravan (and much of the other graffiti and arson) were a con job. An Australian Financial Review report told us in March: “Police believe that one organised crime mastermind was behind both the discovery of explosives in a caravan … and multiple crimes directed at Sydney’s Jewish community, and that personal gain not antisemitism was the motive.” It was ‘a fabricated plot’ and a ‘criminal con job’ designed to confuse the police and divert police resources. According to the Federal Police, none of the people under arrest displayed “any form of antisemitic ideology”.
Those waiting for an apology from Segal & co for their insinuations and accusations directed at the Palestinian solidarity movement waited in vain. What they got instead was a further round of repressive legislation from panic-stricken state Labor governments in NSW and Victoria. This is continuing. Victoria (supposedly in response to a miscreant trying to set light to a synagogue door) can look forward to a ban on face coverings at demonstrations, a ban on ‘locking on’ devices and the outlawing of demonstrations near places of worship.
Turning to the report itself, Segal specifically threatens the arts, the media and the universities. In the arts, it demands legislation “to ensure that public funding can be readily terminated where organisations or individuals engage in or facilitate antisemitism”. Meanwhile, media outlets will be monitored to ensure that they “avoid accepting false or distorted narratives”. And who will determine these things? Why, the Special Envoy of course.
Trumpian
Echoing the moves of Donald Trump’s administration against Harvard University, she also wants to intervene on the campuses, which have been centres of Palestine solidarity work. Segal wants the power to withhold funds from universities, programs and individuals that (in her view) “facilitate, enable or fail to act against antisemitism”. She also intends to issue “a university report card” to ensure that universities are carrying out her wishes.
Repression by state governments and the report’s recommendations reveal the real aim of the Anti-antisemitism lobby, together with the mainstream Labor Party leadership and the Coalition: to weaken and if possible suppress the Palestine solidarity campaign.
It should go without saying that we are not in favour of damaging Jewish owned property. But here we are saying it, such are the times. It is a worse than pointless exercise that capitulates to the idea that there exists an identity between Jews (and those of Jewish origin) and the Israeli state. By attacking the former, goes the argument, you are attacking the latter. But there is no such identity – despite Israel and its Zionist supporters fervently wishing it were so. Many Jews do not support the murderous state in Israel, do not support its occupation of Palestine and do not support its wars in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen and Syria. Their participation in the mass Palestine solidarity demonstrations both around the world and in Israel itself stands as proof.
Repression by state governments and the report’s recommendations reveal the real aim of the Anti-antisemitism lobby … to weaken and suppress the Palestine solidarity campaign.
But let us remember the enormous disproportion between spray-painters and even individual arsonists on the one hand and the Israeli armed forces on the other. In the latter case, we have the deliberate actions of a tooled-up merciless military state, determined to remove and/or eliminate a population that gets in its way. In the former (setting aside organised crime), the acts of misguided individuals, perhaps convinced that they were helping the Palestinian cause in some way. But they enable people like Segal and politicians of all stripes to promote the repression of civil liberties and the rights to protest. Today it’s ‘terrorists’ – tomorrow demonstrations.
For our part, we condemn utterly and in the first place the 60,000 plus deaths meted out by Israel in Palestine. And we condemn acts of vandalism against Jewish property as a stupid and ineffective way to protest against Israel’s genocide.
We doubt whether the federal government will implement much if any of the ill thought-out tripe that Segal recommends. Her post, after all, was created by a government wilting under the pressure of the Zionist lobby and beset by the antisemitism con-job. But the prospect of Segal, as Lord High Anti-antisemitism witchfinder, issuing edicts on the ‘suitability’ of cultural projects, university courses and public media content is probably too much for most Labor MPs to contemplate. Let’s hope so.
It was heartening to see the anti-Zionist Jewish Council of Australia reject the plan and also refreshing to see former Labor minister, now backbencher, Ed Husic tentatively speak out against the report, calling it ‘heavy handed’, but members of caucus need to find much more courage to speak out on this issue.
Our tip for Albanese and the team: bury this report, abolish the ridiculous Special Envoy position and sack Segal and her officers.