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.”