To defend our democracy, PM must disavow and abandon Segal report

“A Zionist is a national socialist, a national socialist is a Zionist,” wrote Joseph Roth – one of the greatest Jewish writers of the 20th century and a prophetic observer of the rise of Nazism – in a letter in 1935, going on to say that what he wished “to do was protect Europe and humanity, both from the Nazis and the Hitler-Zionists”.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke and antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal at a press conference in Sydney. Credit: Dylan Coker

Roth’s opinions are not mine, but were Roth – whose books were burnt by the Nazis – alive today he would not be welcome to speak in Australia under the Trumpian recommendations made by the federal government’s new antisemitism report, written by Jillian Segal.

Despite the Segal report’s claims about rising antisemitism, some of which are contested as exaggerated by leading Jewish figures, it fails to provide a single citation in evidence. This gifts bigots the untruth that there is no ground for concern when antisemitism has lately presented in shocking ways.

Yet backed only by her unverified, contested claims, Segal recommends that the Australian government defund any university, public broadcaster or cultural institution (such as galleries and writers’ festivals) found to have presented the views of those whose views are newly defined as “antisemitic”. The Segal report would, if adopted, allow government the power to do what the Trump administration has done in the US: defund universities, cower civil society and curb free speech.

At the heart of the Segal report is a highly controversial definition of antisemitism. Created by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) for the purpose of organising data, it defines antisemitism as including criticism of the Israeli state, comparing Israeli government behaviour with Nazi behaviour, and “applying double standards” when other nations behave similarly. By the logic of the latter an Israeli speaking up for Indigenous Australians could be accused of anti-Australian racism.

There are numerous examples in other countries of the IHRA definition being used to muzzle critics of Israel’s policies towards Palestinians. No less than the IHRA definition’s lead drafter, Kenneth Stern, a Zionist, has warned of it being weaponised, and that using a data-collection definition as the basis of a new punitive state policy is “a horrible idea”. It evokes McCarthyism, he warns, and would mean that you would “have to agree with the state to get official funding”.

The ways in which the Segal report can deeply damage our democracy are frightening to ponder. Galleries would risk losing public funding if they exhibited an artist who had simply posted something about Gaza. Charities could lose their tax-deductible status if they featured a writer or artist who had, in whatever form, expressed an opinion deemed antisemitic. Writers, journalists, academics, broadcasters and artists would all immediately understand that there is now a sphere of human life about which they must be silent – or tempt being blacklisted.

To give an example: the distinguished Jewish critic of contemporary tyranny, the journalist M. Gessen, would be hard-pressed to find an Australian public institution prepared to allow them to speak, given they would be defined as antisemitic for writing in The New Yorker of Gaza: “The ghetto is being liquidated.”

The eminent Jewish historian, the late Tony Judt, put it this way in the leading Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2006: “When Israel breaks international law in the occupied territories, when Israel publicly humiliates the subject populations whose land it has seized – but then responds to its critics with loud cries of ‘antisemitism’ – it is in effect saying that these acts are not Israeli acts, they are Jewish acts: The occupation is not an Israeli occupation, it is a Jewish occupation, and if you don’t like these things it is because you don’t like Jews.

The Russian-American journalist M. Gassen at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney last year. Would they be welcome if Jillian Segal’s recommendations were adopted?Credit: Dion Georgopoulos

“In many parts of the world this is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling assertion: Israel’s reckless behaviour and insistent identification of all criticism with antisemitism is now the leading source of anti-Jewish sentiment in Western Europe and much of Asia.”

Anyone repeating Judt’s words would risk no longer being able to speak in mainstream Australia because they would have been branded as antisemitic. Similarly, a university or writers’ festival or public broadcaster could lose its funding for hosting Ehud Olmert, Israel’s former prime minister, who last week compared plans for a “humanitarian city” to be built in Rafah to “a concentration camp”, making him yet another antisemite according to the Segal report. Pointedly, Olmert said, “Attitudes inside Israel might start to shift only when Israelis started to feel the burden of international pressure.” In other words, leading Israelis are saying criticism of Israel can be helpful, rather than antisemitic.

Yet, even by me doing no more than quoting word-for-word arguments made by globally distinguished Jews, could it be that I meet the Segal report’s criteria for antisemitism? Would I be blacklisted for repeating what can be said in Israel about Israel but cannot be said in Australia?

At the same time, in an Australia where protest is being increasingly criminalised, the Segal report creates an attractive template that could be broadened to silence dissenting voices that question the state’s policies on other matters such as immigration, climate and environment.

That the ABC and SBS could be censored on the basis of “monitoring” by Jillian Segal, a power she recommends she be given as the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, raises the unedifying vision of our public broadcasters being policed from the Segal family lounge room.

No matter how much Segal seeks to now distance herself from her husband’s political choices, that his family trust is a leading donor to Advance – a far-right lobby group which advocates anti-Palestinian, anti-immigrant positions, publishes racist cartoons and promotes the lie that climate change is a hoax – doesn’t help engender in the Australian public a sense of political innocence about her report.

It is hard to see how this helps a Jewish community that feels threatened, attacked and misunderstood. Could it be that the Segal report’s only contribution to the necessary battle against antisemitism will be to fuel the growth of the antisemitism it is meant to combat?

If the ironies are endless, the dangers are profound.

It is not simply that these things are absurd, it is that they are a threat to us as a democratic people. That the prime minister has unwisely put himself in a position where he now must disavow something he previously seemed to support is unfortunate. But disavow and abandon it he must.

Antisemitism is real and, as is all racism, despicable. The federal government is right to do all it can within existing laws to act against the perpetrators of recent antisemitic outrages. Earlier this month, the Federal Court found Wissam Haddad guilty of breaching the Racial Discrimination Act with online posts that were “fundamentally racist and antisemitic” but ruled that criticism of Israel, Zionism and the Israel Defence Forces was not antisemitic. It is wrong to go beyond our laws in new ways that would damage Australian democracy and seem to only serve the interests of another nation that finds its actions the subject of global opprobrium.

The example of the USA shows where forgetting what is at stake leads. Just because the most powerful in our country have endorsed this report does not mean we should agree with it. Just because it stifles criticism of another country does not make Australia better nor Jews safer. Nor, if we follow the logic of Ehud Olmert, does it even help Israel.

As the Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi wrote, “we too are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our own essential fragility. Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death and that close by the train is waiting.”

The lessons of the ghetto are not the exclusive property of Israel but of all humanity. In every human heart as well as the lover and the liberator, there exists the oppressor and the murderer. And no nation-state, no matter the history of its people, has the right to mass murder and then expect of other peoples that they not speak of it. If we agree to that, if we forget our own essential fragility, we become complicit in the crime and the same evil raining down on the corpse-ridden sands of Gaza begins to poison us as well.

Richard Flanagan won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North. In 2024, he won the Baillie Gifford Prize (for non-fiction) for his most recent book, Question 7. He is the first writer to win both prizes.

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