The Special Envoy to Combat Anti-Zionism

On Tuesday, the federal government announced the appointment of lawyer and business leader Jillian Segal as Australia’s first special envoy to combat antisemitism.

Segal’s appointment, and the creation of the special envoy position itself, was met with widely differing reactions. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry, of which Segal is immediate past president, expressed “delight”, as did the Zionist Federation of Australia and the Australian Jewish Association.

Elsewhere, the government’s pick was less well-received. Segal’s scandal-plagued twelve-year tenure as a director of the National Australia Bank, her lobbying of university vice-chancellors to take disciplinary action against student protesters, her claim in November that “there is no evidence that Israel is not observing the laws of armed conflict”, her repetition of discredited claims about “infants [being] beheaded in their beds” on October 7, her criticism of the government using the term ‘occupied Palestinian territories’, her false assertion upon her appointment that Australia “has no history of antisemitic laws or institutional persecution of Jewish Australians”, and her expressed “determination to drive anti-Zionism and antisemitism back into the darkest and most disreputable corners of our society” have been exhaustively pointed out by others.

Especially prominent in this criticism was the Jewish Council of Australia, a coalition of Jewish Australians that formed earlier this year to provide an alternative voice to the uncritical support of Israel and Zionism expressed by ECAJ, the ZFA and other more established Jewish peak bodies.

‘To appoint someone who conflates Jewish identity with the state of Israel risks breeding and fuelling antisemitism against Jewish people by aligning us all with the state of Israel,” JCA executive officer Sarah Schwartz told the ABC. “It’s really important that we distinguish between genuine instances of antisemitism and legitimate criticism of the Israeli government and the Israeli military. If you conflate the two, as this envoy has done in the past, it risks watering down legitimate claims of antisemitism.”

Dr Na’ama Carlin, a member of the JCA’s advisory committee, says the JCA’s opposition to the genocide and to Zionism has made its members the target of antisemitic abuse from Zionist Jewish bodies and their supporters.

“There is extensive antisemitism that is directed by Jews towards other Jews who are critical of Israel or anti-Zionist. Anti-Zionist Jewish people and collectives frequently get messages that they’re self-hating, that their families should have been thrown in the oven first in the Holocaust. It’s horrific,” she says. “I’ve had family who perished in the Holocaust. It’s painful and really harming to see this, and it’s really alarming to see this used by other Jews to silence us.”

“I have personally received significant antisemitic language online, and it has come from other Jews. I have received much less such abuse from non-Jews,” Carlin says. “I have been called privately a member of the Judenrat, I’ve been called a kapo, and have had other violent comments made to me and about me.”

Alana Lentin is a cultural studies academic at Western Sydney University, a founding collective member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and a member of the Tzedek Collective, a Sydney-based group of anti-Zionist and anti-colonial Jewish activists.

“Our Twitter accounts get a lot of abuse from people in and around the ‘official’ representatives of the Jewish community — what we would call the Zionist community,” she says. “There’s actually no good evidence that the majority of Jews in Australia are pro-Zionist; we don’t have good figures on that. But the people in and around those groups are very active online, and they like to have all kinds of hissy-fits. The new thing is calling us the ‘as-a-Jews’.”

“There are a lot of people who receive abuse from within their family. That’s not a problem for me, I don’t have Zionists in my family, but it’s true of a lot of people.”

In an opinion piece for The Australian Jewish News in June, AJA CEO Robert Gregory called the JCA and other Jewish anti-Zionists “the enemies within our community” who pose “a threat to the Jewish community’s safety”.

“The phenomenon of Jews turning against their own community is not new,” Gregory wrote, comparing local Jewish anti-Zionists to the Verband nationaldeutscher Juden, a rightwing group of German Jews who supported the Nazis in the 1930s.

After the JCA published a list of Jewish signatories of its core principles, the AJA invited its supporters on social media to “browse the list and see if you know anyone” as “much of the Jewish community will choose to have nothing to do with these people”.

“To think that a Jewish person is only able to be critical of Israel because they have some sort of self-loathing is a caricature of a Jewish person as betraying, as an ‘enemy within’,” Carlin says.

“We all know the antisemitic tropes of Jewish people as ‘the enemy from within’ — we saw it in Nazi Germany. To use the trope of the ‘self-hating Jew’, the ‘unreliable Jew’, the ‘enemy from within’ inside the Jewish community – as the AJA, a fringe right-wing group, does — is to draw heavily on antisemitic tropes. It’s a term that is already fuelled with antisemitism, but it’s not really critiqued as such because it’s often employed by other Jews. This is a really devastating thing.”

Despite the prevalence of Zionist antisemitism — or maybe because of it — Lentin believes a younger generation of Jewish Australians are more willing to question and criticise the conflation of Zionism and Judaism that bodies like ECAJ and the AJA engage in.

“I think a lot of young Jewish people are now making the journey from critiquing Zionism to doing more radical things, like saying ‘I’m not going to sit at a community event with my uncle or my cousin who’s a rabid Zionist’, and take the risk that they’ll be ostracised by their families. That’s the risk we’re seeing people take,” she says.

Carlin concurs.

“Younger people have access to the internet, to a wealth of knowledge. They’re critical thinkers who understand that forms of oppression are connected. They understand that Zionism, racism, colonialism, gendered bigotry — all these forms of violence are connected, and we need to fight against all of them,” she says. “Speaking anecdotally to many young people who want to learn, they’re really concerned about the erasure of Palestinian narratives and voices, and their suffering.”

“I think it’s really horrific that at the moment where we’re witnessing what the International Criminal Court has ruled is potentially a genocide, the focus is on antisemitism,” Carlin says. “I think it goes to show that anti-Palestinian racism is so much more pervasive and sinister. Palestinians are deemed disposable.

“It really troubles me when so-called ‘progressive’ Jewish people get more upset about a Whatsapp thread being leaked than they do about thousands of people being massacred in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine. Yes, antisemitism is bad and we need to fight it. But who’s being oppressed here? Which form of racism is being accepted in the mainstream?”

What I’m looking at

• Overland — You don’t end racism with envoys

• “We keep us safe, we stop arming Israel”: Interview with Palestinian organiser Tasnim Sammak

• I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this for a while but I’m still coming up empty