Anti-Semitism is now an election issue for Anthony Albanese

Anthony Albanese tours the fire-bombed Adass Israel synagogue with community leaders.

The prevailing political view within government until this week was the anti-Semitism problem was in isolation from broader community concerns about increased crime.

That view has radically changed.

Anthony Albanese didn’t backflip on holding a national cabinet on Tuesday because he wanted to but because he had to.

It is clear the Prime Minister was compelled to cede to the demands from the Jewish community and the opposition in order to cauterise political damage that the perception of inaction was inflicting.

This is presumably based on a realisation that the violence now associated with these anti-Semitic attacks, and their increasingly brazen nature, risks shifting from a problem in and of itself to being emblematic of broader community concerns of a lawlessness that appears to have become an unprecedented feature of the federal political landscape.

Albanese, in an interview with The Australian late last year, identified anti-Semitism as an issue that should be treated separately and distinctly from other race and hate-related crime. For reasons that should be obvious to anyone.

Yet as it spreads, its impact is reaching beyond the Jewish community, as the recent fire-bombing of a childcare centre has demonstrated.

Voters looking at how the federal government is responding to the violence now associated with this wave of anti-Semitism will be considering this in light of their broader concerns about crime rates and the level of confidence they have in the government’s ability and willingness to deal with it.

It will quickly become a question of competence for the federal Labor government.

The national cabinet meeting produced nothing of substance. This was an embarrassment not only for Albanese but for the state and territory leaders.

But the Prime Minister now finds himself at the apex of an issue that has been further compounded by what appears to be a jurisdictional conflict between not only the federal and state policing agencies but presumably the national security agencies as well.

The fact that organised criminal elements are being looked at in terms of involvement in some of the more violent anti-Semitic attacks complicates not only the policing response but the political management of public expectations.

This has only come to light following AFP Commissioner Reece Kershaw’s decision to reveal on Tuesday that the AFP was looking into potential links with foreign actors paying criminals through crypto-currencies to stage attacks.

If true, this would be an alarming development.

NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb could barely disguise her displeasure with the AFP at a press conference on Wednesday, giving the distinct impression this was a line of inquiry no one had bothered to share with her.

Behind the scenes, a massive clean-up job was required to clarify just what on earth is going on.

Former Home Affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo backed Kershaw’s decision to go public on the possibility of foreign actors, given how serious a development this would be.

It was strategic in nature. Considering how difficult prosecutions would be for transnational crimes, calling it out can have a deterrent effect.

Pezzullo believes this would have been the motivation, and a correct one.

The problem is there is now a dispute over the intelligence to support it and the sharing of it with other agencies, including NSW police.

Jurisdictional tension over anti-Semitism crime is another element that Albanese now has to contend with at a time when the government wants arrests and charges laid to reassure the community it is on top of it.

If no one had noticed, Peter Dutton has been pulling the threads together not just on the current anti-Semitism crisis but on border protection and crime more generally in an argument that will ultimately cascade into accusations that the Albanese government’s dismantling of Home Affairs is part of the problem.