Australian judges have found a loophole in antisemitism: Just call the Jews “Zionists”

An Australian court has come up with a remarkably convenient rule for deciding whether something is antisemitic. If someone says that Jews control the media and politicians, that can be antisemitic. But if he says Zionists control the media and Israel controls politicians, apparently that is just criticism of a political ideology.

That distinction appears in a recent New South Wales judgment, Farhat v Commissioner of Police, where Justice Fagan devoted a surprising amount of space to defining antisemitism and explaining why hostility toward Israel and Zionism should generally be regarded as something categorically different from hostility toward Jews. There are plenty of issues with his analysis, but perhaps the most revealing one comes from an earlier Australian case that he relies upon, Wertheim v Haddad. And the example he quotes from that case practically demonstrates why his theory doesn't work.

In Wertheim, a Muslim preacher had talked about media outlets owned by “Zionist entities,” referred to “Zionist backed media agencies,” and said that right-wing politicians supported Israel because “Israel holds their leash.” These are among the oldest and most recognizable structures of antisemitic conspiracy theory. The only significant difference is that the word “Jew” has been replaced by “Zionist” or “Israel.”

Yet Justice Stewart, deciding Wertheim, drew a sharp distinction. According to the passage quoted approvingly by Fagan, the statements concerned “Israel, the IDF and Zionists,” rather than Jews, and he explained that “disparagement of Zionism constitutes disparagement of a philosophy or ideology and not a race or ethnic group.” That sounds clean until you look at what was actually said. “Jews control the media” is an antisemitic trope, but “Zionists control the media” becomes criticism of an ideology. “Jews control politicians” is an antisemitic trope, but “Israel holds politicians on a leash” becomes criticism of a foreign government. Apparently antisemitism can be disinfected with a thesaurus.

Worse, the preacher had said explicitly antisemitic things earlier that very same day. Stewart found Haddad to have conveyed that Jews are conspiratorial, treacherous and scheming; that Jews love money; that Jews control banks; and other classic antisemitic ideas. The court ultimately characterized those lectures as “fundamentally racist and antisemitic.” But it separated them from the "Zionist" lecture by bizarrely claiming it was to a different audience. Yes, an antisemite can and would change his language to different audiences, that doesn't cleanse the statements. 

Yet Australian judges think so.

The problem is that antisemitism has never been defined simply by whether the noun Jew appears in the sentence. Antisemitic ideas have structures, stereotypes and recurring conspiracy claims: secret Jewish power, Jewish control of governments, Jewish manipulation of the media, Jewish financial domination and Jews operating through hidden networks. A speaker can express those exact ideas while substituting another word for “Jew.”

That is how dog whistles work, and to claim dog whistles aren't bigoted because of a simple word substitution is bizarre, to say the least.

Fagan then takes Stewart's distinction and turns it into something approaching a general theory of antisemitism. In Farhat, he argues that Israel and the Jewish people are “in every material respect different things” and therefore hostility toward Israel cannot simply be equated with hostility toward Jews. He repeatedly invokes anti-Zionist Jews and Jewish organizations as evidence that hostility toward Zionism cannot inherently constitute hostility toward Jews.

The first proposition is trivial: Israel is obviously not identical to every Jew in the world. But the conclusion does not follow. A synagogue is not identical to the Jewish people either. Neither is a Jewish school, a Jewish cemetery, Hebrew, the Star of David or a kosher supermarket. Attacks on any of them can nevertheless be antisemitic because antisemitism can target Jewish collective institutions, symbols and identities, not merely individual human beings carrying a label saying JEW.

Israel presents the same analytical problem on a much larger scale. It describes itself as the Jewish state, was created as an expression of Jewish national self-determination and is understood by both its supporters and its enemies as a Jewish collective entity. That does not mean criticism of Israel is antisemitic; of course it isn't. It means the question cannot be answered simply by saying Israel isn't Jews.

Nor does the existence of anti-Zionist Jews settle anything. Fagan repeatedly relies on the fact that some Jews oppose Zionism or harshly condemn Israel, as though this proves that anti-Zionism occupies an entirely separate conceptual category from antisemitism. But members of a group can endorse prejudicial ideas about their own group, and no characteristic needs to be shared by 100 percent of Jews before hostility toward that characteristic can be relevant to antisemitism. Most Jews do not observe Shabbat; that would hardly prove that attacking Jews for observing Shabbat has nothing to do with antisemitism.

This is precisely why the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism, which Fagan criticizes, emphasizes context. IHRA explicitly says that ordinary criticism of Israel is not antisemitic, but it also says that antisemitism can include targeting Israel when it is “conceived as a Jewish collectivity,” and gives as an example the use of “symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism” to characterize Israel or Israelis. It separately identifies conspiracy claims about Jewish control of “the media, economy, government or other societal institutions” as classic antisemitic allegations.

The Wertheim quotation used by Fagan is almost a perfect illustration of why those provisions exist. If someone says that Zionists secretly control media outlets and that Israel keeps politicians “on a leash,” the relevant question is not simply whether Zionist and Jew are dictionary synonyms. They aren't. The relevant question is whether an old antisemitic conception of Jewish power has been transferred onto “Zionists” and Israel.

This is the central intellectual failure in both judgments. They treat antisemitism as though it inheres principally in the explicit word Jew, rather than in ideas, stereotypes and conspiracy structures about Jews. That is not how antisemitism works, and historically it has never been how antisemitism works.

Antisemites have always adapted their vocabulary to the political environment around them. “Hebrews,” “Semites,” “cosmopolitans,” “Rothschilds,” “globalists” and now “Zionists” can function in different contexts as direct references, euphemisms, dog whistles or perfectly legitimate descriptive terms. You determine which one is being used by looking at the claim being made, not merely at the label attached to its subject.

The very word “antisemitism” illustrates the absurdity of this approach. Wilhelm Marr popularized the term in the nineteenth century precisely as part of an effort to recast Jew-hatred in supposedly racial and scientific language rather than as a crude religious attack on Jews. “Semite” was itself a substitute label for Jews.

By these judges’ logic, we would have trouble recognizing even antisemitism as antisemitic because the word itself does not say “Jew.” That is exactly the problem: Jew-hatred has always adapted its vocabulary. The relevant question is not which noun the antisemite chooses, but what ideas and stereotypes he is expressing.

Courts ordinarily understand this principle perfectly well. Racism and prejudice are routinely inferred from context, coded language, patterns of conduct and the targeting of particular institutions or communities. Nobody seriously believes that prejudice disappears whenever the speaker avoids saying the protected group's formal name. Yet that is remarkably close to the framework these judgments are constructing for antisemitism.

Once courts establish the rule that antisemitic tropes stop being antisemitic when the word “Jew” is replaced by “Zionist,” they haven't clarified the definition of antisemitism. They have written its easiest evasion manual.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)