If overt absurdities are better than covert ones, Louise Adler’s criticisms of the action plan presented by Jillian Segal, the government’s Special Envoy to Combat Anti-Semitism, does have some redeeming merit.
And having been born to Jewish parents, which apparently grants her the right to string together as many offensive tropes as she pleases, Adler does not feel the need to conceal her absurdities in thick layers of hypocrisy.
But those small mercies don’t alter the fact that her commentary, published in The Guardian, is pervaded by statements that are manifestly incorrect, inherently objectionable and drenched in double standards.
Adler begins with a trope that would warm any anti-Semite’s heart. Why was the Segal report commissioned? Not because synagogues have been attacked, schools threatened, and individual Jews harassed and assaulted. Rather, it was because the “Jewish establishment” has “the ability to garner prime ministerial dinners”, mobilise “a battalion of lobbyists” and “corral more than 500 captains of industry”.
But Adler does not limit herself to claiming that the Segal report was a product of what used to be called “the Jews’ money power” when there was, in reality, nothing much to see. She adds that “Segal’s previous position as president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, an unequivocal advocate for Israel as the Jewish homeland, should have disqualified her for the role”.
Why? Has Adler not noticed that virtually every report Australian governments have commissioned in recent years on Indigenous issues has been led by men and women who have held senior positions in Indigenous organisations, have expressed strong views on Indigenous issues and have been prominent advocates of Indigenous causes? Or is it only to Jews that her interdict applies?
It gets even better, for Adler goes on to claim that Jews are receiving special treatment. “One might pause to wonder,” she asks, “what First Nations people, who are the victims of racism every day, feel about the priority given to 120,000 well-educated, secure and mostly affluent individuals”.
What is Adler suggesting? That ensuring citizens can live without fear of violence, harassment and intimidation is a zero-sum game, where protecting one group of citizens necessarily comes at the expense of another? Does she really believe that “well-educated, secure and mostly affluent individuals”, be they Hindus (whose educational attainment is at least comparable to that of Jews), Anglicans or atheists, are not entitled to be safe in their homes, schools and workplaces? Or is it only Jews she excludes from the blessings of the rule of law and its promise of equal protection for all?
No better are her criticisms of the definition of anti-Semitism prepared by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which has been widely adopted in Australia and overseas. Adler claims that under the IHRA’s definition, “anti-Semitism is anti-Zionism and anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism”.
That is blatantly incorrect: the IHRA statement makes it crystal clear that criticism of Israel is not, in and of itself, inherently anti-Semitic. But it equally notes that those criticisms can be anti-Semitic – for instance, when they are merely a way of articulating anti-Semitic tropes. It therefore stresses that the evaluation of contentious statements requires careful consideration of their context, their formulation and their significance to reasonable people.
It is, in that sense, true that identifying anti-Semitism can, in some cases, involve a degree of interpretation. And it is on that basis that Sydney University’s Professor Ben Saul, also writing in The Guardian, has echoed Adler’s concerns, denouncing the IHRA statement as “vague and overly broad”.
But a legal academic should know that it is one thing to say a term is vague and quite another to say its meaning is arbitrary or indeterminate. The law is replete with relatively open-ended terms, such as “reasonable” or “substantial”; the courts have, over the years, developed subsidiary rules that guide those terms’ interpretation, ensuring predictability in their application.
Exactly the same process is under way with the identification of anti-Semitism, as recent legal proceedings in the UK, Australia and the EU abundantly show. Institutions that turn to the IHRA definition therefore have plenty of guidance on which to draw.
Additionally, in this area as in many others, a degree of interpretative flexibility is not a weakness but a strength. A “bright line” definition, which rigidly specified what lay within and what lay outside its scope, would, in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous phrase, merely invite “the bad man to walk the line”. The fact that anti-Semitism is so protean, adopting changing forms and guises, makes it especially important that any definition be capable of accommodating its myriad mutations.
But even if all that was not accepted, a question remains: Why do Adler and Saul only object to adopting the IHRA statement, which is simply a guidance document, but not to section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, which is a coercive statute that is no less uncertain in scope and application? Or is it, yet again, solely when those being protected are Jews that they and others, including “our ABC”, suddenly come to fear that protective laws will be too strictly applied?
Perhaps it is. For according to Adler, Jews have a crippling defect all of their own: a “blindingly obvious connection” to Israel. Really? I thought the left insisted that there was a stark difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, and that while it condemned Israel’s conduct, it rigorously distinguished it from criticism of or hostility towards Jews. Not so, it seems: which is presumably why the overwhelming majority of the anti-Semitic incidents that have occurred since October 7, 2023 have not involved Zionist targets; they have involved attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions.
No one could sensibly deny that the conflict in the Middle East triggered those outpourings of hatred. But that can neither condone nor justify them.
Thus, even if the criticisms of Israel were entirely correct (which they are not), they would have no greater relevance to the right of Australian Jews to the equal protection of the laws than China’s conduct in Xinjiang has to the right of Australians of Chinese origin to live here in peace. Young Muslims may be angry; but their anger gives them no more right to harass, intimidate or attack Jews than young Jews, understandably appalled at Hamas’s ongoing atrocities, would have to harass, intimidate or attack Muslims.
It is the abject failure of significant sections of the left and of the Muslim community to accept that fundamental principle – whose roots lie in this country’s longstanding attachment to toleration, mutual respect and the rule of law – that underpins the present crisis. And far from undermining Segal’s report, that failure makes its full implementation all the more urgent.
Years ago, when he was asked why he didn’t respond more fiercely to provocations, Saul Bellow replied that he didn’t believe in blowing up latrines – it merely spread the muck. But nothing was of greater importance to the survival of a decent society than thoroughly cleaning them out. With the anti-Semitic muck piling up around us, it’s high time we took that advice.
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