Introduction
I make this submission as someone who has experienced the events since 7 October 2023 simultaneously through three lenses: as a Jewish Australian and father of four children, as president of the Zionist Federation of Australia, the elected representative body tasked with being the public voice of a traumatised community, and as a partner at Arnold Bloch Leibler, who advised around 100 individuals and organisations subjected to antisemitic discrimination across every major professional sector in this country. That combination of vantage points is, I believe, unusual, and it is what I hope makes this submission of value to the Commission.
Antisemitism takes many forms. The Commission will hear evidence of far-right extremism, radical Islamic extremism, and other manifestations of hatred that require no elaboration to be recognised as abhorrent. This submission does not address those forms, not because they are unimportant, but because they are not where my experience or expertise lies. What I focus on here is the form of antisemitism that is most contested, most difficult to confront, and most deeply woven into the crisis that has engulfed the Jewish community since 7 October: the antisemitism that operates through the delegitimisation of Israel and the weaponisation of the word “Zionist” as a proxy for “Jew.” It is this form that has driven the explosion of hostility in universities, in professional life, in cultural institutions, and in the public square. And it is this form that our political and institutional leaders have found themselves unable or unwilling to confront.
I write because I believe the Commission needs to hear not only from those who have been victims of antisemitic incidents, but from those who have watched, from positions of responsibility, as the fabric of Jewish life in Australia has been tested in ways that would have been unimaginable to many members of our community who came to this ‘lucky country’ to rebuild their lives after the Holocaust.
My account is structured around two covenants: the promises, one spoken and one unspoken, upon which Jewish life in this country was built. Those covenants are now broken. Understanding how and why they broke is central to the work of this Commission.
The First Covenant: Australia as a Haven
My family came to Australia in the shadow of the Holocaust. On my mother’s side, they arrived as refugees after the war. My mother was born in 1945 in Czechoslovakia and survived the war as an infant in hiding. Two of her older sisters survived Auschwitz. Most of the family that remained in Europe was murdered. On my father’s side, they arrived just before the war on the last boat out of Belgium. Both sides of the family lost parents, siblings and children in the camps. This story is common to many in the Australian Jewish community, known for having the highest proportion of holocaust survivors per capita, outside of Israel.
My family came to a country that offered them something beyond safety. It offered belonging. The covenant was straightforward: Australia would protect its Jewish citizens, afford them opportunity, and allow them to live openly as Jews. In return, they would contribute to, integrate with, and give back to Australia. My family took that covenant seriously. My father, Mark Leibler, dedicated substantial parts of his life to public service, particularly through his commitment to Indigenous reconciliation and human rights. The firm he built, Arnold Bloch Leibler, has a long tradition of public interest law, not only for the Jewish community but for Indigenous Australians, the Sudanese community, and all those who understand what it means to be considered ‘the other’.
I grew up in a Modern Orthodox Zionist family in Melbourne that lived the Australian multicultural promise: that we could preserve our Jewish culture, our religion, our way of life, including the integral role that Israel played in our identity, while being fully integrated members of Australian society. We lived it. I attended a Jewish day school. I spent a gap year studying in Israel. I returned and studied law and commerce at Monash University. I was always openly and visibly Jewish. I wore a yarmulke to the football, to university and in the workplace. I undertook clerkships at leading law firms other than Arnold Bloch Leibler. I never experienced any antisemitism of consequence. In many ways, I viewed the warnings of my grandparents about antisemitism as a relic of the past – something from the ‘old world’ that had been eradicated from this ‘lucky country’.
The security infrastructure around Jewish life in Melbourne was always there. Armed guards at synagogues, bollards outside schools, bag checks at community events. As a child, I assumed this was normal. It was only later that I understood what it signified. But the crucial point is this: despite the physical precautions, the psychological safety was real. We felt accepted. We felt equal. We believed, with good reason, that if antisemitism reared its head, our leaders and institutions would stand against it without hesitation. That belief was the first covenant.
The Second Covenant: Israel as Guarantee
The second covenant under which Australian Jews lived was the covenant of Israel. After the Holocaust demonstrated that no diaspora community could ultimately rely on the goodwill of its host nation for survival, the establishment of the State of Israel represented a guarantee: that there would always be one place in the world committed to the defence and protection of the Jewish people. A place where Jewish life would not depend on the tolerance of others.
For most Australian Jews, Israel is not a foreign policy question. It is not a distant country about which one might have political opinions. It is woven into identity, family, memory and faith. According to the Monash University Crossroads 23 survey, 86 per cent of Australian Jewish respondents regard the existence of Israel as essential for the future of the Jewish people. My brother lives in Israel. His children serve in the Israeli Defence Forces. Israel is where I studied during my gap year, met my wife, where many of my family and closest friends live, and where the continuation of Jewish civilisation is daily reality rather than historical memory.
This covenant was never about endorsing any particular Israeli government or policy. It was about something more fundamental: the recognition that Jewish collective survival required sovereignty. That in a world that had shown, repeatedly and catastrophically, what happened to Jews who lacked political power, the existence of Israel was a necessity for Jewish survival. To attack Israel’s right to exist was, and is, to attack the foundation upon which post-Holocaust Jewish life was rebuilt. In Australia, this covenant was sustained by something specific: the acceptance, across the political spectrum, that the Jewish connection to Israel was a legitimate part of Australian Jewish identity. That acceptance was strengthened by a close, bipartisan relationship between successive Australian and Israeli governments. It was part of what made Jewish life in this country whole.
The Shattering of Both Covenants
On 7 October 2023, Hamas launched the deadliest attack on Jewish life since the Holocaust. Approximately 1,200 people were murdered, thousands injured, and over 250 taken hostage. The attack was deliberately designed to maximise civilian casualties: families were burned alive in their homes, young people were massacred at a music festival, and men and women were subjected to systematic sexual violence. The hostages included elderly Holocaust survivors and infants.
For Australian Jews, 7 October did not happen at a distance. It happened to us. Many of us had family and friends in the line of fire. I was in Melbourne when the news broke celebrating the Jewish festival of ‘Simchat Torah’. I spent the following days glued to my phone, making phone calls to family and friends in Israel, not knowing if they were alive. The community mobilised immediately, but beneath the solidarity was a fear that most Australian Jews had never experienced: the fear that the promise of Israel, the second covenant, had been tested to breaking point. Israel was the place where Jewish helplessness was never supposed to happen again. On 7 October, it did. That memory will linger with this generation regardless of the military victories that followed.
What followed in Australia shattered both covenants. The first, the promise of physical and psychological safety, was shattered by what happened on the streets. The second, the acceptance of the Jewish connection to Israel as legitimate, was shattered by the campaign of delegitimisation that followed. Within days, before Israel had mounted any significant military response, protests erupted on Australian streets in celebration of the attack. At the Sydney Opera House on 9 October 2023, crowds chanted slogans calling for violence against Jews. The Jewish community was told by law enforcement not to attend the Opera House that night. The message was unmistakable: the iconic public spaces of our cities were off limits to Jews, and the police could not, or would not, protect us. What followed was revealing. The public debate focused not on why crowds were chanting against Jews two days after the deadliest attack on Jewish life since the Holocaust, but on the precise words used. A forensic analysis concluded the chant was likely “where are the Jews” or “f*** the Jews” rather than “gas the Jews.” That this distinction was treated as meaningful tells you everything about how low the bar had fallen.
The Erosion of Psychological Safety
What I have observed since 7 October 2023 is the systematic erosion of the psychological safety that Jewish Australians once took for granted.
This erosion has occurred across every sphere of public life. In universities, Jewish students have been subjected to hostile environments where expressions of Jewish identity, particularly any connection to Israel, are treated as provocations. Academics have used their positions to promote narratives that delegitimise the Jewish state, creating a climate in which Jewish students must choose between their identity and their safety. The response of university administrations has been, in most cases, woefully inadequate.
In the professional sphere, I have witnessed how the conflict has been weaponised. On the day that the Adass Israel synagogue was firebombed in December 2024, Damian Hazard, a partner at Herbert Smith Freehills, attacked me on social media, describing me as a genocide supporter who was weaponising antisemitism. The incident was covered widely in the press, both in Australia and globally. I receive a significant volume of antisemitic attacks. What made this one notable was not the personal impact on me but its context and source: a senior member of the legal profession, at a major international law firm, deploying these tropes on the very day a Melbourne synagogue around the corner from my house was burning. My immediate concern was for the many junior Jewish lawyers at Herbert Smith Freehills. How would they feel working for a partner who had publicly attacked a Jewish communal leader and fellow member of the legal profession in those terms, on that day?
To its credit, Herbert Smith Freehills acted appropriately. It moved to protect the wellbeing of its Jewish staff, and ultimately made the principled decision to terminate the partner responsible. Separately, a complaint was lodged against me with the Legal Services Board in connection with my communal advocacy. It was without merit and was dismissed. But both episodes illustrate something the Commission must understand: the label “genocide supporter” has become the mechanism by which antisemitism enters professional life with a veneer of political respectability. It is a phrase designed to place Jews outside the boundaries of legitimate discourse, to make their participation in public life conditional on their willingness to renounce a core element of their identity. It is, in function if not in name, a loyalty test applied to Jews and to no one else. I also sit on the Australian Takeovers Panel, a government appointment. After 7 October, there were campaigns calling for my removal from the Panel on the basis that I was a “genocide supporter.” The campaign had nothing to do with my conduct on the Panel. It was directed at my identity as a Jewish communal leader. That is what the loyalty test looks like when it is applied to public life: Jews may participate, but only if they are willing to sever their connection to Israel and to their community.
The terms deployed against Jewish Australians since 7 October have not been random insults. They have been calculated: genocide supporter, white settler colonialist, racist, apartheid apologist. Each of these terms takes whatever the prevailing culture considers the most reprehensible qualities a human being can possess and attaches them to Jews, collectively, as a defining characteristic. The purpose is to place Jews so far beyond the pale that their exclusion from public life requires no further justification.
I hold strong convictions about the justice of Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself. I have not wavered in those convictions. But I would not be honest with this Commission if I did not acknowledge that the cumulative weight of these accusations takes a toll, even on those of us with the resources and resolve to withstand them. There are moments when the repetition wears at you, not because you doubt your position, but because you question whether the cost of continuing to occupy public space is sustainable. That is precisely what the labels are designed to achieve. They are not arguments. They are instruments of exhaustion. And if they can affect someone in my position, with the platform and support I am fortunate to have, the Commission should consider what they do to those who have neither.
In social and cultural spaces, the isolation has deepened. Jewish artists have been doxxed, deplatformed, had work cancelled, and in some cases been forced to seek new careers. Jewish businesses have been boycotted simply for being Jewish-owned or perceived as connected to Israel. I experienced this directly. The Spotlight Group, one of Australia’s largest retail conglomerates with over 145 stores and 8,500 employees, became the target of a sustained boycott campaign because I serve as a director of the Spotlight Foundation while also being president of the ZFA. The campaign explicitly identified my dual role and urged consumers to boycott all Spotlight Group brands because the foundation was, in their words, “owned and run by Zionists.” It included calls for my removal from the Spotlight Foundation board. Spotlight was not alone. Chemist Warehouse, Kogan, and other major Australian businesses were targeted in the same wave, each singled out because their founders or owners were Jewish. The basis for targeting was not corporate conduct. It was Jewish identity. The social licence to target Jews, provided it is framed as political commentary about Israel, has expanded dramatically, and has extended not only to Jews but to allies of the Jewish community who have themselves faced intimidation for the offence of standing with us.
What Arnold Bloch Leibler Saw
The third lens through which I experienced this period was as a partner at Arnold Bloch Leibler. In my capacity as ZFA president, my phone rang constantly with calls from Jewish Australians in crisis: people who had been targeted at work, excluded from professional spaces, threatened online, or simply did not know where to turn. The volume of those calls was overwhelming, and it was what led Arnold Bloch Leibler to establish a dedicated pro bono response. What our firm saw after 7 October 2023, through the matters that came to us, constitutes evidence that this Commission should weigh carefully. It is a window into something that would otherwise remain invisible, because the overwhelming majority of the people involved will never come forward publicly. I am grateful that the Commission has served a Notice on Arnold Bloch Leibler to provide documents which will give the Commission direct line of sight to the matters referred to below.
In the period following 7 October, Arnold Bloch Leibler acted for approximately 100 pro bono clients – mainly Jewish Australians who had experienced antisemitism and discrimination. I cite this figure because of what it reveals about the scale and nature of the problem. These were not marginal cases. They came from across the breadth of professional and institutional life in this country: from healthcare, from the arts, from academia, from the legal profession, from broadcasting, from publishing, and from schools. But they also extended beyond professional life. They included a university student evicted from her home by housemates for being identified as a Zionist. A person refused service at a salon. An Israeli denied a rental property. An author whose book was cancelled by their publisher after antisemitic pressure from bookstores. Children suffering abuse at school. The reach of what we saw, and continue to see, was not confined to any single sector. It had penetrated everyday life.
In each sector, the pattern was distinct but the underlying dynamic was the same. In the arts, pro-Palestinian activist groups mounted sustained campaigns pressuring venues, festivals and cultural institutions to deplatform Jewish artists. In most cases, the artists targeted had never made any public statement about the conflict. Many had never openly identified as Zionist. They were targeted because they were Jewish. The label “Zionist” was applied to them, without their consent and without factual basis, as the mechanism by which their exclusion could be framed as political rather than racial. The venues, facing organised pressure and fearing reputational damage, capitulated. Jewish artists lost work, lost platforms, and lost professional relationships, for no reason other than that they were Jews.
In healthcare, the weapon was the regulatory complaints process. Jewish medical professionals faced systematic, coordinated complaints lodged through AHPRA, the national health practitioner regulator. These complaints were not organic expressions of patient concern. They were organised campaigns designed to burden, intimidate and professionally damage practitioners whose offence, again, was being Jewish or being perceived as sympathetic to Israel. The toll on the individuals involved, people whose entire professional identity rests on their standing with their regulator, was severe.
In academia, Jewish academics and students faced intimidation that was at times physical and at all times exclusionary. They were pushed out of mainstream academic spaces, denied the collegiality and collaboration that academic life depends upon, and made to understand that their presence was unwelcome. The message was not subtle: your identity as Jews places you outside the community of scholars.
In the legal profession, the pattern took a particular form. It was not, in the main, lawyers in corporate firms who came to us. It was lawyers working within non-profit human rights organisations, legal aid services, and community legal centres. The spaces that define themselves by their commitment to justice and equality became, for Jewish lawyers, environments of hostility and exclusion. Lawyers who had dedicated their careers to human rights found themselves targeted within the very organisations whose stated missions were the protection of the vulnerable. For those lawyers, the betrayal cut to the core: the institutions they had believed in, and given their careers to, turned on them.
What connected all of these matters was the use of the word “Zionist” as a proxy for “Jew.” By framing their targeting as political opposition to Zionism rather than racial hostility toward Jews, activist groups created a layer of deniability that institutions were only too willing to accept. The word did the laundering. The effect was the same.
The overwhelming majority of the people we assisted did not want to go public. They feared professional retaliation. They feared social consequences. They feared that being identified as having complained would only deepen their isolation. Some were brave enough to speak publicly, like Deborah Conway, and their accounts have contributed to the record. But the Commission should understand that for every person who came forward, there were many more who did not, who endured in silence, sought legal advice they hoped never to need, and returned to workplaces and institutions where they no longer felt safe.
Approximately 100 clients, from a single law firm, across every major professional sector in this country, and reaching into the most basic aspects of everyday life. That is not a handful of isolated incidents. It is a pattern. And it emerged within months of 7 October, accelerating through 2024 and 2025. Arnold Bloch Leibler was not the only firm doing this work. We were simply the firm with the existing relationships, commitment, public interest infrastructure and depth to absorb the volume. The true scale of professional antisemitism in Australia after 7 October is, I am certain, significantly larger than what any single firm or organisation has seen.
Antisemitism in Public Life
What connects all of these matters are the conspiracy theories that have powered antisemitic ideas and perceptions of Jews throughout history.
In the past, these conspiracy theories centred on religious ideas (the blood libel that Jews ritualistically murder Christians), on racial ideas (the Jewish conspiracy to destroy Aryan Germans), or on political ideas (the Jewish doctors’ plot to sabotage the Soviets). Today, the conspiracies centre on the State of Israel, the only Jewish state. It is said that the State of Israel is a racist conspiracy to colonise, ethnically cleanse and commit genocide against Palestinians, and that Zionists in turn are a threat to international justice, order, human rights and law.
Today’s conspiracy theories are no different to yesterday’s in substance, only in form. The Soviets who boycotted Russian Jewish artists because they were “cosmopolitans” are no different from the Australian gallerists who boycott Australian Jewish artists because they are “Zionists.” In each case, the target is a Jewish conspiracy. A venue that would never have cancelled a performer for being Jewish can be persuaded to cancel a “Zionist.” A regulator that would never have entertained a complaint based on a practitioner’s religion can be made to process one framed in political terms.
It is not relevant whether every activist and group driving these campaigns understands precisely what they are doing, even though I believe many do. Some deliberately frame their targeting as political opposition to Zionism, rather than racial hostility toward Jews, to create a layer of deniability that institutions are too willing to accept. But many more turn a blind eye: they are aware of rising antisemitism, and choose not to confront the consequences of their own language.
There is a historical pattern the Commission should recognise. Antisemitism has only ever been unconditionally condemned when Jews are powerless victims. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, as survivors rebuilt their lives, and as a fledgling Jewish state fought for its existence against armies that sought to destroy it, opposition to antisemitism was uncomplicated. Jews deserved sympathy. Their suffering was recent. Their vulnerability was obvious. But as Jews built a functioning state, developed the capacity to defend themselves, and exercised the political agency that sovereignty confers, the sympathy curdled. The more Jews looked like agents of their own destiny rather than passive victims of someone else’s, the less comfortable the world became with offering them unconditional protection. What we are witnessing in Australia is a version of that same pattern. The Jewish community here is no longer seen as fragile or vulnerable, but as successful and established – and therefore, in some contexts, as a more acceptable target. At the same time, Israel is no longer perceived as a fledgling state fighting for survival, but as the successful embodiment of Jewish self-determination – and, for that reason, as a more legitimate object of hostility. The combination of these developments creates the conditions in which targeting Jewish Australians for their connection to Israel is increasingly treated as acceptable.
Others are paralysed. The Commission must understand why the institutional response to all of this has been so inadequate, because the answer goes beyond cowardice or indifference. Antisemitism, unlike other forms of hatred, now arrives wearing the language of human rights. The accusations levelled at Israel and, through Israel, at Jews, are framed in the vocabulary of progressive values: genocide, apartheid, colonialism, ethnic cleansing. These are words that public officials and institutional leaders have been trained to take seriously. When they encounter those words being used to describe Israel and its supporters, many freeze. They cannot distinguish between the legitimate use of this language and its weaponised deployment against Jews. The result is a paradox: the very institutions most committed to combating racism find themselves unable to recognise antisemitism when it presents in the form they least expect. They can condemn a swastika daubed on a synagogue wall. They cannot bring themselves to confront the academic, the human rights lawyer, or the activist who uses the vocabulary of justice to delegitimise Jewish existence. It is this paralysis, more than any active hostility, that has allowed antisemitism to metastasise through Australian public life since 7 October.
Government Failure
I want to be precise about what I am saying here, and equally precise about what I am not saying. I am not arguing that the Australian government’s foreign policy positions caused antisemitism or were motivated by antisemitism. Antisemitism has its own genealogy, and it predates any particular policy decision by any Australian government.
What I am saying is that when antisemitism surged after 7 October, the Jewish community needed its political leaders to demonstrate moral clarity. To call it what it was. To draw a line. What we received instead, across much of the political spectrum, was hesitancy and calculation.
The government condemned individual incidents of antisemitism. It criminalised doxxing. It funded security infrastructure. These were welcome. But they revealed a pattern the Commission should examine closely: public officials found it straightforward to condemn discrete incidents of antisemitism after they occurred, but proved unable or unwilling to confront the incitement that was producing them. They addressed symptoms while the disease spread unchecked. What the government could not bring itself to do was confront the antisemitic rhetoric that was dehumanising Jews in the public square. It failed to draw a clear line when protests crossed from legitimate free expression into incitement. It wrongly assumed the rhetoric would fade. It calculated that confrontation would cost more politically than silence. The result was that for over two years, the Jewish community watched while hatred was normalised in plain sight.
While the government’s failure was one of silence, others were active participants in the delegitimisation. Members of the Australian Greens, a party represented in the federal parliament, provided platforms for and amplified rhetoric that demonised Israel and, through the mechanisms I have described, Jewish Australians. The government’s silence was permissive of antisemitism. The conduct of the Greens proliferated it.
The institutional response was no better, and in some respects worse. When the taxpayer funded institutions did finally attempt to address antisemitism, they refused to name it on its own terms. Antisemitism was condemned only as part of a formula: antisemitism, islamophobia and racism in all its forms. Every statement, every institutional response, every university communique followed the same pattern. The Jewish community was told, in effect, that its particular experience of hatred could not be acknowledged without simultaneously acknowledging every other form of prejudice. When Jewish students were driven from campuses, the statement deplored hatred “in all its forms.” This never happens in reverse. When an islamophobic incident occurs, no institution insists on also condemning antisemitism in the same breath. The asymmetry tells you everything about how antisemitism is uniquely treated: as a grievance that cannot be allowed to stand on its own, that must always be diluted, contextualised, or balanced before it can be spoken aloud.
The compounding effect of certain foreign policy decisions deepened the community’s sense of abandonment. The damage was not primarily in the decisions themselves. The reversal of longstanding bipartisan positions at the United Nations, the premature recognition of a Palestinian state while Hamas held hostages in tunnels beneath Gaza: each of these may have had its own policy rationale. The damage was in what accompanied those decisions. Or, more accurately, in what did not.
In an environment where antisemitism was exploding across Australian public life, much of it grounded in the demonisation of Israel and using the coded vocabulary of Zionists and Zionism, it was reasonably foreseeable that government decisions touching on Israel, delivered without context or reassurance, would compound that demonisation. It was equally foreseeable that government silence in the face of the boycotting and exclusion of Israelis from Australian institutions would be read as acquiescence. At every such juncture, there was an opportunity to speak directly to the Jewish community. To draw a clear line between a specific policy decision and its meaning. To make plain that disagreement with an Israeli government did not go to the legitimacy of the State of Israel or, by extension, to the legitimacy of the Jewish identity that is bound to it. That opportunity was, time and again, not taken.
The damage was not in the decisions themselves. It was in the silence that accompanied them. When the Home Affairs Minister exercised his powers to exclude certain Israeli citizens from Australia, there was no accompanying message to reassure the Jewish community that their Israeli friends, family, teachers and colleagues remained welcome. When Israeli academics and medical professionals were boycotted at Australian conferences and institutions, there was no intervention. When the government reversed longstanding bipartisan positions at the United Nations, there was no acknowledgment of what those reversals meant to a community whose identity is bound to the legitimacy of the Jewish state. Each decision, taken in isolation, may have had its own rationale. But each was delivered into a climate of escalating demonisation, and each was met with silence.
Jewish communal life in Australia is entirely dependent on intellectual and human capital from Israel. Israeli teachers staff our schools. Israeli educators lead our youth movements. Israeli academics, rabbis and professionals sustain the institutions that make Jewish life in this country possible. Our family and friends visit from Israel constantly. The cumulative effect of these decisions, unaccompanied by reassurance, sent a message that the Jewish connection to Israel was a problem to be managed rather than a legitimate part of Australian identity. The message received by the Jewish community was that it could no longer take for granted the ability to live openly and fully Jewish lives in this country. The message received by those targeting Jews was that the government was not willing to spend political capital to push back. Every failure to speak was read, by both the Jewish community and its antagonists, as a signal. And both read it the same way. The question is not whether any individual decision was antisemitic. The question is whether the cumulative effect of those decisions, delivered without reassurance, without context, and without evident concern for how they would land on a community already under siege, constituted a failure of leadership. I believe it did.
That failure had consequences beyond those that were visible on the streets. The erosion of psychological safety forced the Jewish community into a posture it never sought. A community whose life is built around the richness of Jewish values, the rhythm of the Jewish calendar, the celebration of identity, learning and tradition, found itself consumed instead by the need to identify, document and combat antisemitism at every turn. That shift, from celebration to vigilance, from confidence to defensiveness, is itself a profound loss. It is a loss the government’s leadership could have mitigated. I believe the failure was one of political courage and moral clarity, not one of prejudice. But the cost of that failure extended beyond the hostility we endured from others. It changed the character of Jewish communal life itself.
That failure of leadership also emboldened the forces that ultimately produced the violence at Bondi. On 14 December 2025, when political leaders had equivocated, when universities had allowed hostile environments to persist, when media outlets had provided uncritical platforms for the delegitimisation of Jewish identity, including to fringe Jewish groups whose activism provided cover for that delegitimisation, and when regulatory and law enforcement bodies had failed to act against incitement, the connection between unchecked rhetoric and physical violence was made horrifyingly concrete. The persons who carried out the Bondi attack did not act in a vacuum. They acted in a climate in which “Zionists” could be boycotted, harassed, intimidated, and ultimately, violently attacked.
But the story of government failure is not the complete story. I believe that the severity of the Bondi attack produced a shift, whether conscious or unconscious, in the government’s recognition that the unchecked demonisation of Jews and Israel had played a role in creating the atmosphere in which such an attack could occur.
In February 2026, the Prime Minister recommended that the Governor-General extend a formal invitation for a state visit to the President of the State of Israel, Isaac Herzog. That visit, and the respect and dignity afforded to President Herzog throughout, was profoundly significant for the Jewish community. It did not require the government to change any of its foreign policy positions. It did not require agreement on the conduct of the war, on the recognition of Palestinian statehood, or on any of the substantive issues on which I and many in the community continue to disagree with the government. What it did was demonstrate something far more fundamental: that a government can have serious disagreements with the government of Israel while still treating the Jewish state, and by extension the Jewish community’s connection to it, with respect rather than hostility.
That is the leadership the Jewish community needed from 7 October onwards. The Herzog visit proved it was possible. It modelled how a government navigates genuine policy disagreement without demonising a community or giving licence to those who would. It was an example of how little it would have taken, all along, to maintain the psychological safety of Jewish Australians without compromising a single policy position. The fact that it took Bondi to produce that leadership is the measure of the failure that preceded it.
The Personal Toll
I have four children: a daughter now aged nineteen, a son aged sixteen, and identical twin boys aged thirteen. They were seventeen, fourteen, and ten at the time of the 7 October attacks.
I do not think I knew what pressure was until after 7 October. I deal with pressure professionally every day. High-stakes transactions, hostile negotiations, disputes where careers and fortunes are at stake. None of it came close. Because in those contexts there is a transaction, a structure, an endpoint. After 7 October there was none of that. There was only the knowledge that people who I had been tasked to represent, people I cared about, people who looked to me for direction and reassurance, were in genuine trauma, and that I was expected to be their voice at the same time as I was processing my own grief and fear.
In the months that followed I was rarely home. I was on television, in meetings, on the phone at all hours to community members in crisis. I shed tears privately many times. For the first time in my life, I experienced what I can only describe as a mental fog. Things that had always brought me joy stopped reaching me. I went through the motions but felt numb. The distance between what I was projecting publicly and what I was experiencing privately grew wider every week.
I was privileged to have both the resources and the self-awareness to seek support. Many in the community who contacted me during this period had neither, and were experiencing the same sense of intimidation and abandonment in isolation. The mental health toll on the broader Jewish community has been immense and, I believe, still not properly understood.
The threats I received were not abstract. In December 2025 and January 2026, I made two formal statements to Victoria Police in relation to sustained, escalating harassment directed at me, my father, and the staff of both Arnold Bloch Leibler and the Zionist Federation of Australia. The harassment spanned multiple phone lines and social media accounts over a period of weeks, and included threats of adverse consequences for me and my family. The individual responsible was eventually identified and charged. These are not the actions of someone engaged in political debate. They are the circumstances of someone who requires police protection to continue doing his job and serving his community.
My children watched all of it. They watched me on the news. They saw the abuse directed at our family online. They knew about the additional security arrangements. They saw their father, who had always been present and steady, consumed by something they were too young to fully understand but old enough to feel. My daughter, then seventeen, read the death threats. My son openly questioned why we havent packed up and left this country. The twins, who were ten, began asking questions that no child in Australia should need to ask.
At first, what I found most confronting was watching them begin to question their own place in this country: whether Australia was really theirs, whether its promise of belonging applied to them.
But what I found even more disturbing was what came after the questioning: the normalisation. Some months later, we were walking past Caulfield Junior College, a state primary school near our home. My children stopped and said, with genuine alarm: where are all the security guards? That is so dangerous. Why do they have such low fences? Then they caught themselves: Oh, it is okay. I remember now. It is because they are not a Jewish school, so they do not need it.
That moment is, for me, the most important thing I can tell this Commission. Not the threats, not the harassment, not the professional attacks. The fact that my children, who are growing up in Melbourne in 2026, have internalised as normal the idea that Jewish institutions require armed protection and non-Jewish institutions do not. They did not learn this from me. They absorbed it from the world we have allowed to take shape around them. That is what the erosion of safety looks like when it is complete. Not violence, but the quiet acceptance by children that their lives will always require a level of vigilance that their neighbours’ lives do not.
These are my experiences as a Jewish leader with the resources and platform to withstand them. I shudder to think what others in the community, without those advantages, have faced in silence.
Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism
The Commission will encounter the argument that anti-Zionism is merely a political position, distinct from antisemitism, and that criticism of Israel should not be conflated with hatred of Jews. The distinction, as it is commonly drawn, has caused real harm to real people.
Criticism of the Israeli government is of course not antisemitic. I am at times critical of Israeli government policy, as are most Israelis. The right to protest, to disagree, to advocate for Palestinian rights and statehood: these are legitimate expressions of political conscience in a free society, and I would defend them.
But what has occurred in Australia since 7 October has not been mere criticism of the Israeli government. It has been a sustained campaign to delegitimise the existence of the world’s only Jewish state and, through that delegitimisation, to strip Jewish Australians of a core part of their identity. When Zionism, the belief that the Jewish people have a right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, is treated as a moral crime, the overwhelming majority of Jewish Australians who hold that belief are being told that a fundamental part of who they are is illegitimate.
There is a deeper dimension that the Commission must grapple with. For the Jewish people, the State of Israel is not merely a geopolitical fact. It is the answer to a question that history posed in the most brutal terms imaginable: how do a people who have been shown, repeatedly and across centuries, that no host nation can be permanently relied upon for their protection, ensure their collective survival? The answer was sovereignty. Not because sovereignty is a guarantee against tragedy, but because the alternative, permanent dependence on the goodwill of others, had been tested to destruction. To deny the legitimacy of that answer is to tell the Jewish people that they alone, among the peoples of the world, must accept powerlessness as their permanent condition. That is not a political critique. It is a demand that Jews learn nothing from their own history.
This is why anti-Zionism, in practice, functions differently from other forms of political opposition. It does not merely disagree with a government. It denies a people’s right to the political agency that every other people takes for granted. And it does so by holding Jews collectively responsible for the exercise of that agency. The individual Jew becomes answerable for the Jewish state in a way that no individual American is held answerable for American foreign policy and no individual British person for the actions of the British government. When, on top of this collective attribution, Israel’s conduct is exaggerated beyond all proportion to reality, when it is accused not merely of policy failures but of being a uniquely evil state, the harm to the individual Jew held answerable for that state is exponentially compounded. The more monstrous Israel is made to appear, the more monstrous every Jew associated with it becomes in the eyes of those who accept the caricature. This collectivism, this insistence that every Jew must account for Israel or be complicit in its deficiencies, is not a feature of political discourse. It is the defining feature of antisemitism throughout history: the treatment of Jews not as individuals but as a collective bearing collective guilt.
The comparative evidence makes this plain. When Australians protested the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, they did not call for the dismantling of the United States. They did not demand that Americans in Australia disavow their country to participate in public life. They did not boycott American businesses, doxx American citizens, or chant for the death of American soldiers. American stores were not vandalised. American cultural figures were not expelled from festivals. When people protest in connection with Israel, and only in connection with Israel, the response extends beyond policy disagreement into the denial of a people’s right to exist. That is not a political position. It has a different name.
A sceptical Commissioner might put the question this way: Mr Leibler, you have taken a prominent public position on a divisive conflict. Is what you have experienced not simply the rough and tumble of political debate?
My answer is this. I welcome debate. Often, I relish it. I have spent years engaging with those who disagree with me, and I have always sought to do so respectfully. But legitimate debate presupposes that both sides accept the other’s right to exist. When the other side’s position is that my identity is inherently evil, that the Jewish state is a crime, and that my connection to it makes me complicit in genocide, there is no debate to be had. There is only intimidation dressed as argument. And when that intimidation is accompanied by death threats, professional attacks, sustained harassment of my family, and the need for armed security to attend a community event, we are very far from the rough and tumble of democratic discourse.
The Commission should also consider what it means when the word “Zionist” itself is weaponised. In contemporary usage, particularly since 7 October, “Zionist” has become a proxy that allows the speaker to target Jews while maintaining deniability. The Bondi attacker targeted “Zionists.” The protest chants call for death to “Zionists.” When 86 per cent of Australian Jews identify the existence of Israel as essential to the future of the Jewish people, the claim that “Zionist” refers to a political position rather than a people is a fiction. It is the mechanism by which antisemitism is laundered into acceptable speech.
Reflections on the Path Forward
I will leave specific policy recommendations, on law enforcement, education, legislative reform, and institutional accountability, to the institutional submissions that will be made by the collective Jewish communal leadership, including the Zionist Federation of Australia. I will contribute to some of those processes separately.
While law reform is undoubtedly part of the solution, it is not the heart of it. A significant part of the erosion of psychological safety that I have described in this submission could have been addressed, and can still be addressed, by stronger leadership at every level of public life. The laws and tools to act were largely already available. What was missing was the willingness to use them, and the moral clarity to speak without equivocation when it mattered most. Leaders who failed to stand up when Jewish Australians needed them to should be identified and held to account. Not as an exercise in blame, but because accountability is the only mechanism by which future leaders will understand that silence in the face of hatred carries consequences.
What does repair look like? It does not require unanimity on the Middle East. It requires leaders at every level, in government, in academia, in the arts, in professional bodies, to call out antisemitism with the same clarity and urgency they bring to every other form of hatred, including when it manifests in progressive spaces, within their own political parties, or within communities where confrontation is politically uncomfortable. It requires a red line: that whatever foreign policy positions a government takes, it accompanies those positions with the leadership, the language, and the reassurance necessary to ensure that Jewish Australians are not demonised as a consequence. The Herzog visit demonstrated that this is not difficult. It simply requires the willingness to do it.
Fifty years ago, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution declaring that Zionism is a form of racism. It was a lie then and it is a lie now. What made Australia’s response remarkable was not simply that it opposed the resolution, but that it led the world in having it rescinded. Prime Minister Bob Hawke and Foreign Minister Bill Hayden, from the Labor Party, expended precious political capital to defend the legitimacy of Jewish self-determination at the United Nations. The Australian Parliament was the first in the world to call for the resolution’s reversal. Washington, London, and Paris followed.
That is the tradition this Commission should invoke: not the Australia of the past two years, but the Australia that once had the moral confidence to call antisemitism by its name, to lead rather than calculate, and to defend a community’s right to its identity without qualification. The Hawke and Hayden example is proof that Australian leadership on this issue is not only possible but has precedent.
The work of this Commission will matter only if it is willing to name the problem clearly. The problem is not merely that individual acts of antisemitism have increased. The problem is that a climate has developed in which the delegitimisation of Jewish identity, through the delegitimisation of Israel, has become normalised in parts of Australian society. That climate was not inevitable. It was the product of failures of leadership, of moral cowardice, and of a willingness to tolerate in relation to Jews what would never be tolerated in relation to any other community. Bondi was the consequence.
I said at the outset that two covenants have been broken. I still believe they can be repaired. I still have faith in Australia and in Australians. That faith is not abstract. It is grounded in the many non-Jewish Australians, friends, acquaintances, and strangers, who reached out to offer support in the darkest moments of this period. And I want to acknowledge in particular the partners and staff of Arnold Bloch Leibler, many of whom are not Jewish, who stood beside me and beside the Jewish community with a solidarity that I will never forget. They are a reminder that the failures of leadership I have described in this submission are not failures of the Australian character. They are failures of specific people in positions of responsibility who chose not to lead. The Royal Commission itself is evidence that this country retains the capacity for honest reckoning. But reckoning without consequence is performance. The Commission must be willing to make findings that are uncomfortable, to identify where institutions and leaders failed, and to insist on changes that will ensure those failures are not repeated.
The first covenant, the promise that Australia would protect its Jewish citizens and allow them to live openly as Jews, is not a relic of history. It is a living obligation. This Commission exists, in part, because that obligation was not met. I hope the Commission is not only able to document what went wrong, but to ensure that the covenant is restored and enforced, so that the next generation of Jewish Australians does not inherit the broken promise that this generation has endured.
The Jewish community does not seek special treatment. We seek what we have always sought: to live openly, safely, and without apology as Jews in this country. That should not be a contested proposition in Australia in 2026. The fact that it is tells you everything you need to know about why this Commission matters.