On 14 December 2025, during a Hanukkah celebration attended by roughly a thousand people at Bondi Beach, two gunmen opened fire and threw homemade bombs into the crowd. Fifteen people were killed and forty injured. The attack was the worst mass shooting in modern Australian history, and it was, by the near-unanimous judgment of Australian authorities and the world's press, antisemitic — Jews murdered at a Jewish religious gathering for being Jews. Within weeks the Albanese government established the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, with former High Court Justice Virginia Bell as Commissioner, charged with investigating the nature, prevalence, and drivers of antisemitism in Australia, examining the circumstances of the Bondi attack, and assessing antisemitism's impact on the daily life of Jewish Australians. The Commission invited submissions, and especially encouraged Jews who had experienced antisemitism to make them.
Amnesty Australia's submission to the Commission is not meant to highlight the problem of antisemitism. It is meant to minimize it.
Amnesty starts with a definition of antisemitism that is surprisingly reasonable. It tells the Commission (1.2) that
At its core, antisemitism is racism; discrimination, stereotypical discourse and hostility directed at Jewish people, or people perceived to be Jewish, and/or their property, community or religious institutions, because of their identity, beliefs or heritage.
The rest of the twenty-five-page report works as hard as possible to chip away at Amnesty's own definition.
Zionism is a belief. The idea that Jews form a nation, and that this nation was formed in and is centered on the land of the biblical kingdoms of Judah and Israel, is a belief Jews hold; the daily liturgy is built around return to Zion and Jerusalem, and has been for two millennia. A modern political expression of that belief does not make it less a belief that Jews hold. Hostility directed at Jews for this belief is, by their own definition, antisemitism.
The existence of anti-Zionist Jews does not make an anti-Zionist attack on Jews any less antisemitic, any more than the existence of atheist Jews makes the firebombing of a synagogue any less antisemitic. A bigotry is defined by the hatred that drives it and the group it strikes, not by whether some member of the group declines to hold the targeted belief. The arsonist who burns a synagogue does not first poll the congregation for believers, and the relevant question was never whether a dissenting Jew can be found. It is whether the hostility attaches to Jews as such for a belief most of them hold — and the "beliefs" clause Amnesty wrote answers that before anyone can raise it.
The rest of the submission is the sustained labor of keeping that consequence out.
It begins by calling the Bondi attack "horrific" (1.3), and from that point forward antisemitism is never permitted to stand alone. It arrives chaperoned. The rise in antisemitism, the submission explains in the very next paragraph (1.4), "has occurred alongside increasing racism, vilification and hostility against Muslim, Arab and Palestinian communities, as well as other racialised and marginalised groups." Responses "should strengthen protections against all forms of racism and discrimination, rather than prioritising one community's rights at the expense of another's." A submission to a commission on antisemitism has, by its fourth paragraph, reframed attention to antisemitism as a threat to be managed — a possible act of prioritizing one community "at the expense of another." This is am implicit attack on the Commission itself, which is meant to understand antisemitism specifically — according to Amnesty an investigation into what causes the Bondi attack should not center on antisemitism at all. It must cover all forms of hate, and it must always, always mention the other forms together with antisemitism.
The dilution is Amnesty's major theme. Antisemitism is "part of the wider work governments must undertake against discrimination and different forms of racism" (5.9). It rises "along with" Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism (5.9).
Antisemitism is not interchangeable with the hatreds Amnesty keeps setting beside it. Most racism casts its target as inferior — lesser, backward, subhuman. Antisemitism characteristically casts the Jew as superior in malign power: the manipulator, the lobby, the hidden hand, the disproportionately guilty. A framework that can only recognize hatred as contempt for the inferior is structurally blind to a hatred that operates as resentment of the powerful. That blindness is convenient, because the genocide accusation, the fixation on the "Jewish lobby," and the singular obsession with one small state among the world's hundred conflicts are the contemporary grammar of the powerful-Jew trope. Police brutality in the US? Blame Israeli training. Amnesty's insistence that antisemitism is simply one more racism erases how antisemitism works - and how Amnesty promotes it.
While Amnesty pretends that antisemitism is the same as other forms of hate, it itself does not treat them the same. To Amnesty, only the fight against antisemitism endangers human rights. The IHRA definition, according to Amnesty, risks the right to free speech, even though its language says the exact opposite. But there is no section cautioning that combating Islamophobia might chill free expression, no warning that anti-racism measures for any other group risk infringing the rights of others. The entire apparatus of "human rights respecting," "proportionate," "do not unduly restrict" is deployed against a single form of hatred (9.1–9.11, 10.1–10.20). Of all the hate Amnesty names, only the fight against antisemitism is presented as a standing danger to everyone else's freedom.
When Jews are murdered, Amnesty names the killing antisemitic only when it cannot possibly find another justification. In Bondi, the target was a Hanukkah celebration and nothing else, a thousand Jews and no one else, with no second location and no broader civilian toll to fold the Jewish dead into. The antisemitism had no cover to dissolve into, so it had to be named.
Compare this to the 2008 Mumbai attacks, where terrorists deliberately sought out the Chabad House at Nariman House as a Jewish target, murdered a rabbi and his pregnant wife, and — by the testimony of one convicted attacker — chose it on the belief that it was "used as a front for the Mossad." Amnesty condemned the Mumbai attacks as terrorism and noted the Jewish center factually, but I cannot find a single instance where Amnesty characterized the targeting of Nariman House as antisemitic. There were other targets, so the specific targeting of Jews can be watered down as a simple terror attack against civilians.
The same dissolution serves for the Har Nof synagogue massacre of 2014, where Palestinian attackers butchered four rabbis at prayer with axes. Amnesty has never called this, or to my knowledge any Palestinian attack, antisemitic. I cannot find anywhere Amnesty calls the Hamas charter, with its citations of the Protocols and its invocation of the hadith calling on Muslims to kill Jews hiding behind rocks and trees.
Amnesty's only consistency with antisemitism is to make its surface as small as possible. If the Bondi murderers had written a manifesto saying that Israel is engaged in genocide and the Chabad that sponsored the Chanukah festival was complicit because it does not oppose Israeli policies, Amnesty would have had a problem with calling that antisemitic — because that is Amnesty's own logic in opposing anyone, any organization or any company from maintaining normal relations with Israel. It wrote in a September 2025 briefing, "Amnesty is calling on states and public institutions to... immediately, whether independently or collectively, suspend all activities that contribute or are directly linked to Israel’s unlawful occupation, its system of apartheid against all Palestinians whose rights it controls or the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Otherwise, they risk complicity in the crime against humanity of apartheid, genocide, and other crimes under international law." Their definition absurdly includes companies like Expedia and Airbnb and can be infinitely expanded.
Amnesty Australia joined with other groups to condemn arson against Jewish targets in their country. It gave three examples:
The antisemitic attacks include the January 21 arson attack and spray-painting of antisemitic graffiti of a childcare centre in Maroubra which is located near a Jewish school and synagogue; attacks on the former home in Sydney of a prominent Jewish individual which involved the destruction of cars with fire and antisemitic graffiti; and the vandalism of two Sydney synagogues in one week which were both graffitied with swastikas.
Every one of those attacks either included swastikas or language like "Fuck Jews." But at the same time there were other vandalism attacks against Australian synagogues that also said "Free Palestine."
It it a strange coincidence that Amnesty and the other groups cannot bring themselves to define attacks on synagogues as antisemitic if they can avoid it. This is what minimizing antisemitism looks like.
Each of these is a way of exempting Jews from the definition in paragraph 1.2. The last movement of the submission does something worse: it violates its own definition.
The submission refers to Israel's "genocide against Palestinians in Gaza" (9.5) and to "Israel's genocidal acts" as settled fact, asserted without the qualifier that any contested legal claim demands. It rests this on Amnesty International's own December 2024 report. That report contains, on page 101, the sentence that collapses the entire framing. Amnesty there describes the prevailing legal standard for genocidal intent — the standard the International Court of Justice has applied, under which intent must be the only reasonable inference from a state's conduct — as "an overly cramped interpretation of international jurisprudence and one that would effectively preclude a finding of genocide in the context of an armed conflict."
The bar for the gravest accusation in international law is set high precisely to prevent the term's use as a political weapon. Amnesty looked at that standard, acknowledged in writing that applying it honestly "would effectively preclude" the conclusion it wanted, and then set the standard aside in favor of a looser one of its own construction.
Amnesty's flat characterization of Israel's actions as "genocide," using a definition it fabricated for Israel alone, is itself discrimination against the Jewish people — a standard built for Jews and applied to no one else. No wonder the submission objects that IHRA's "double standard" example is too "vague" to count as antisemitism. The problem was never vagueness. It is that the example describes Amnesty perfectly.
Amnesty says antisemitism is hostility directed at "Jewish people, or people perceived to be Jewish, and/or their property, community or religious institutions, because of their identity, beliefs or heritage." Amnesty never wrote "all Jews." It wrote the community and its institutions, targeted for identity, belief, or heritage — and that is a perfect description of Amnesty's own campaign against Israel. The identity is Israeli Jews. The community and its institutions are the Jewish state and the companies and citizens who sustain it, whom Amnesty has declared complicit in genocide. The belief is Zionism. The heritage is the claim that Jews have a right to the land of their origin. Amnesty has assigned collective guilt to a people for the belief that constitutes them, judged that people by a standard it built for no one else, and directed the verdict at the largest Jewish communal institution on earth. By the definition Amnesty handed the Commission, Amnesty qualifies.
This is why the definition given by Amnesty itself had to be minimized. A standard applied honestly would have caught its author. Bondi and swastikas stayed in the definition because Amnesty couldn't find a reason not to include them. Amnesty did not bring the Commission a definition of antisemitism. It brought a procedure for shrinking antisemitism until it all but disappears.
To Amnesty, "complicity with genocide" can include almost everything; antisemitism can include almost nothing. Hostility to Israel is infinitely flexible, hostility to Jews infinitely diminished.
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