It has been six months since 15 people were gunned down on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, prompting the establishment by a shocked government of a Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.
The Commission has received over 16,000 submissions, and a block of hearings is slated to begin at the end of June.
My organization Harif – the UK Association of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) – was asked to make a submission on behalf of the 10 to 20% of Australian Jews who are Sephardi or Mizrahi (easterners), i.e., hailing from the Middle East and North Africa.
They may be a minority within the Jewish minority, but their experience of living in Arab and Muslim countries and fleeing from these lands can bring an essential perspective to understanding the causes of antisemitism sweeping through the West today.
The Commission might be able to learn useful insights from them, the first being that almost a million Jews were ethnically cleansed from the MENA, even though they had no part to play in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Almost no Jews live in the Arab world today because Arab governments conflated Jews with Zionists. Jews were victimized as potential spies for Israel.
Whatever their political leanings and however spurious the pretext, Jews could be arrested, tried, and even executed for the crime of Zionism.
The second insight is that one cannot perceive a distinction between Jews and Zionists in Western antisemitism. Today, supporters of the Palestinian cause say they are against Zionism, not Jews.
When 'Zionism' becomes the cover
They point to the small number of Jews who join their protests.
However, it doesn’t take much to see that “legitimate criticism of the Israeli government” takes the form of verbal and physical abuse of Jews, firebombings, arson, and shootings at Jewish schools and synagogues, and ultimately, the murder of Jews simply for being Jews.
Left-wing Jews attempt to deflect by claiming that antisemitism is a problem for the Right. They claim that curbs on incitement proposed by the Commission are in reality limitations on free speech.
But the two gunmen who slaughtered Jews celebrating Hanukkah on Bondi Beach never asked what their victims’ views on Israel were.
Mizrahi Jews who are now resettled in the West are experiencing a sense of déjà vu, reliving the trauma they experienced in their birth countries. The bullying and harassment they thought they had escaped are back with a vengeance.
The slogans chanted in every anti-Jewish riot in Arab countries never did distinguish between Jews and Zionists.
“Itbah al-Yahud (slaughter the Jews)” and “Yahud kalb al-Arab (the Jews are the dogs of the Arabs)” are finding their echoes in barely-disguised genocidal chants like “globalize the intifada,” calling to replicate the spate in the early 2000s of suicide bombings, stabbings, and car rammings in Israel.
Any student of history can see that 20th-century episodes of deadly anti-Jewish violence targeted Jews, not Zionists: the non-Zionist students in the yeshivas of Hebron in 1929; the Jews in Iraq slaughtered in their hundreds in the 1941 Farhud – seven years before Israel was established.
Likewise, Mizrahi Jews are mindful of the deadly consequences of spreading antisemitic blood libels; the 1840 Damascus Affair, which accused Jewish notables in Syria of the murder of a monk, is a lesson for all.
Much anti-Zionist incitement today is based on falsehoods accusing Israel of genocide, apartheid, and settler colonialism.
Organizations like the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils have bought into these calumnies, reserving the right to “oppose Zionism and advocate for human rights without being treated as hostile to Jewish Australians.”
They are attacking ‘protected’ characteristics. Good luck distinguishing good Jewish Australians from bad ones.
Jews from Arab countries, who now comprise over half the Jews of Israel, can hardly be called settler colonialists. They lived in communities that predated Islam and the Arab conquest by a thousand years or more.
Indeed, it is the indigenous peoples of the region – Jews, Copts, Kurds, Amazighen, and Zoroastrians – who have been colonized, and the majority converted to Islam.
Genocide was the objective of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the wartime Palestinian mufti of Jerusalem, who collaborated with Hitler and spent four years as his guest in Berlin.
He planned the Final Solution for Jews across the region when the Nazis won the war. Genocidal antisemitism is inscribed in the Hamas charter and is a core ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Still today, the extermination of the Jews and the destruction of their state are the official goals of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
My advice to the Royal Commission is to take seriously, and not to minimize or dismiss, the antisemitism of political ideologies hiding under the cover of ‘free speech.’
The government must begin by banning the Muslim Brotherhood. Western governments need to show some spine dealing with incitement to violence.
At present, there is no price to pay, and the instigators act with impunity. Governments need to mete out harsh sentences to those who not only indulge in physical violence but also spread conspiracy theories and lies.
The writer is the founder of HARIF, the UK Association of Jews from the MENA, and author of Uprooted: How 3,000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight (Vallentine Mitchell, 2018) and the essay “Cast Out” (Jewish Quarterly, March 2026).