‘Hatred normalised in plain sight’: Government hesitation helped foster antisemitism, Jewish leader tells probe

Government hesitation helped antisemitism flourish in the lead up to the Bondi massacre, one of the nation’s top Jewish leaders has argued in an emotional royal commission submission that decries the use of the terms “Zionist” and “genocide supporter” to attack Jews in Australia.

Zionist Federation of Australia president Jeremy Leibler, writing in a personal capacity, said the key covenants that underpinned Jewish community life in Australia since the Holocaust had been shattered following the October 7 attacks and subsequent war in Gaza, as Jewish Australians became targeted because of the conflict in the Middle East.

“What I have observed since 7 October 2023 is the systematic erosion of the psychological safety that Jewish Australians once took for granted,” Leibler wrote. “This erosion has occurred across every sphere of public life.”

The release of his submission came as royal commissioner Virginia Bell prepared to hand down an interim report on Thursday addressing policing and security failures that contributed to the attack that killed 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach.

Leibler argued that, despite attempts by the Albanese government to respond to the increase in attacks on Jewish Australians, a failure to move decisively enough to stamp out the surge “emboldened the forces that ultimately produced the violence at Bondi”.

“On 14 December 2025, the connection between unchecked rhetoric and physical violence was made horrifyingly concrete,” he wrote.

“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.”

Leibler, who has led the Zionist Federation of Australia since 2018, said Jewish Australians received “hesitancy and calculation” from political leaders after the October 7 attacks, when they needed urgency and moral clarity.

He stressed he was not accusing the Albanese government of being antisemitic, and praised the prime minister for increasing security funding for Jewish groups, passing laws to combat doxxing and inviting Israeli President Isaac Herzog to visit Australia in February.

“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,” he wrote.

“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.”

In January Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told relatives of the victims of the Bondi attack he was “deeply and profoundly sorry that we could not protect your loved ones from this evil”.

Albanese previously said “all governments should have done better” to combat anti-Jewish discrimination, as he defended his move to appoint the first special envoy for combating antisemitism.

Drawing on his role as a partner at law firm Arnold Bloch Leibler, which has acted pro bono for clients who experienced antisemitism and discrimination, Leibler cited examples of a university student evicted by housemates for being identified as a Zionist, children suffering abuse at school and campaigns to “deplatform” Jewish artists from festivals.

“In most cases, the artists targeted had never made any public statement about the [Israel-Hamas] conflict,” he wrote. “Many had never openly identified as Zionist. They were targeted because they were Jewish.”

He recounted walking through Melbourne when his young children expressed alarm that a nearby state school did not have armed guards, before realising that was because it was not a Jewish school.

“That moment is, for me, the most important thing I can tell this commission,” Leibler said.

“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.”

Leibler said health professionals had been targeted because of perceived sympathy for Israel, while non-profit rights organisations and community legal centres had become “environments of hostility and exclusion” for many Jewish staff.

“What connected all these matters was the use of the word ‘Zionist’ as a proxy for ‘Jew’,” he wrote. “It is the mechanism by which antisemitism is laundered into acceptable speech.”

Zionism describes the belief that Jewish people should have a nation in their ancestral homeland, and is commonly understood to mean support for the existence of Israel.

Leibler’s submission is one of more than 3500 lodged with the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, although community leaders in Sydney and Melbourne are concerned that some Jews are reluctant to tell their stories, fearful they will be identifiable and exposed “to further targeting or harassment”.

NSW Jewish Board of Deputies chief executive Michele Goldman said she understood the hesitation in coming forward.

“Many in our community have already endured so much, and being asked to put those experiences into words can feel overwhelming,” Goldman said. “However, the commission, and the broader Australian public, cannot fully understand what our community is living through unless people share their stories.”

Naomi Levin, chief executive of the Jewish Community Council of Australia, said writing a submission takes courage, but “these voices need to be heard and these experiences matter”.

The Hamas attacks on Israel in 2023 killed an estimated 1200 people and prompted a fierce Israeli response that led to 75,200 violent deaths in Gaza, according to The Lancet medical journal.

Quoting a 2023 Monash University survey that found 86 per cent of Jewish Australians regard the existence of Israel as essential for the future of the Jewish people, Leibler said Jewish Australians should not have to renounce Israel to avoid becoming targets of abuse or being branded “genocide supporters”.

An independent UN commission of inquiry last year found Israel committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, a charge Israel has denied.

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