The CHAIR:  Thank you very much for coming, Mr Ryvchin. Would you like to make a short opening statement?

ALEX RYVCHIN:  Thank you. I’m deeply grateful to Mr Borsak and the members of this Committee for your work, which goes to the heart of freedom and fairness in this State that we are blessed to call home. I appre­ci­ate the oppor­tun­ity to meet before you. I’d like to speak about the impact that antisemitic incidents have on indi­vidu­als and families by sharing how my family was affected by the attack on our former home in Dover Heights in the early hours of Friday 17 January of this year. I became aware of the incident at around 5.00 a.m. that morning. My family and I had returned the previous evening from a holiday in Brisbane. The day after the incident I was due to fly overseas. The Friday on which the attack occurred was supposed to be the solitary day of rest at home with my family, ushering in the Sabbath before taking off again. My wife shook me from my sleep and handed me her phone. It was footage taken by our old neigh­bours across the street — flames rising high into the night sky, scorched cars with the words “Eff the Jews” and “Eff Israel” daubed on them, and the facade of our former family home dis­figured with red paint.

I switched on my phone and it began ringing imme­di­ately — one after another, journ­al­ists offering con­dol­ences with one breath, looking for the scoop that it was indeed my former home with the next. We thought about our three daughters, who would soon be awake and jumping into our bed as they do every morning. My wife arranged for her mother to collect them to allow us to deal with the chaos. By early afternoon the story broke that the house had for five years been our family home. My wife and I then walked to the house to inspect the damage, to comfort our friends and neigh­bours, and to answer the questions of the media assembled there. That evening I asked my wife if I should cancel my trip. How could I leave them? “How could I not go?”, she said to me. As much as she wanted me home, what could be more fateful and appro­pri­ate than rep­res­ent­ing the community at the eightieth anniversary of the lib­er­a­tion of Auschwitz, to honour and remember, to con­tem­plate man’s capacity to burn and destroy, and to hear the final testi­mon­ies of the survivors?

So at 6.00 a.m. the following morning I was on the plane, leaving my wife to answer the questions of our daughters and to explain to them why someone had replaced the whitewash I had lovingly applied with the red paint sig­ni­fy­ing blood, why they had scrawled words cursing the Jewish people on the cars out front, targeted the place where we had built our family and exper­i­enced the happiest days of our lives — a suburban street where families slept just metres from the inferno — and the toughest question of all, which came repeatedly from our middle daughter, aged nine: “Are we safe now? Are they going to come for us again?” It’s a question we still don’t fully know how to answer without deceiving ourselves and them.

A few weeks later, as I was boarding the long flight home, I checked in with my wife and my col­leagues. At that moment, news about the Dural caravan was breaking. I received the update that a list of Jewish targets was found in the caravan. There were rumours that an attack was imminent. Fear was sweeping through the community. My wife asked me another question I didn’t know how to answer: Was it safe, or should she wake the kids and leave the house? This is, of course, how terror is intended to work — to alter our per­cep­tions and decision-making through fear, and shatter the sense of pre­dict­ab­il­ity and order, which allows us to live our lives. For the Jewish community, we have been targeted day after day, and it has forced families to ask whether their children are safe sitting in a classroom in a Jewish school or are they sitting ducks. Would their loved ones receive proper care in our hospitals, or would they encounter more people who thought and felt like the Bankstown nurses? Could they enter our CBD with a Star of David necklace or a Jewish head covering? Was that a humble act of faith or just asking for trouble?

In reflect­ing on the attack on my former home, I don’t wish to mislead this Committee. I’m here giving something of a victim impact statement, but I in no way consider myself a victim. The attack may have made national and inter­na­tion­al headlines, but it is not nearly the most serious or life-altering incident. Every day for 20 months I’ve spoken to members of my community who have been abused and threatened, and who face the risk of being pushed out of their industry, of losing their live­li­hood, of being denied the ability to do what they love, because they are Jewish and hold ordinary, main­stream views. Each such incident changes a person. It changes their sense of worth, their state of mind and how they engage with those around them. This, in turn, changes how com­munit­ies interact and how society functions.

The summer of fire­bomb­ings may have passed, but the daily exper­i­ences of Jews in New South Wales and around the world has not changed. Indeed, in the short weeks between the hearings of this Committee, we entered a dangerous new phase. A young couple engaged to be married were murdered, shot to death from point blank range outside a Jewish community event in Wash­ing­ton, DC, hosted by an organ­isa­tion that is a close partner of my organ­isa­tion. Eight people were burned during a peaceful walk in Boulder, Colorado, to raise awareness about the plight of Israeli hostages. An 88-year-old woman, a Holocaust survivor, remains in a critical condition. In both cases, the ter­ror­ists yelled “Free Palestine” as they attempted to kill innocent people in a Western country. A few days ago, a long time organiser and leader of the Free Palestine Movement in this country, an academic at Sydney Uni­ver­sity, said he wanted to see Zionists executed.

The inability to dis­tin­guish between political activists and those who just want to execute Zionists has allowed antisemitism to shift from the margins to main­stream, even educated and fash­ion­able, society. And it has signalled to other violent elements, including neo-Nazis and organised crime, that publicly attacking Jews is a legit­im­ate and effective form of action. Those who deny antisemitism, say it is provoked by things Jewish people say or do or think it is invented as a ploy to shield Israel from criticism, not only reinjure those who have suffered; they threaten the stability of our society. Excusing attacks on one minority serves to normalise abnormal conduct that threatens society as a whole. If we don’t solve this problem, antisemitism will degrade this country and strip away the virtues of fairness, ration­al­ism and decency that make it the greatest country in the world. I wish you great success in your important work. Thank you very much. 

The Hon. CHRIS RATH:  Thank you so much for appearing today and for your opening statement. The two indi­vidu­als that that were involved in the incident on your former home have now been charged. My under­stand­ing is that they were on remand from previous attacks, whether it be graffiti or fire-related incidents I think with Newtown Synagogue. Is that correct?

ALEX RYVCHIN:  My under­stand­ing is based very much on what’s in the public domain. I had con­ver­sa­tions with coun­terter­ror­ism in the hours after the attack in con­nec­tion with my own personal safety and the safety of my family. But since that time I’ve had fleeting con­ver­sa­tions with the AFP and State police. It’s really a matter of what’s been reported. I under­stand that two indi­vidu­als, as you say, have been arrested, or were already held, and the police are invest­ig­at­ing the prob­ab­il­ity that it was a larger con­spir­acy involving drug smugglers and low-level criminals and so forth. There seems to be a strong organised crime component to it, is what I under­stand.

The Hon. CHRIS RATH:  I think this is important because I’ve heard some com­ment­ary recently that this is all from criminals and it’s not antisemitic. But when you see red paint that says things like “Eff the Jews” on a home that they assumed was owned by you, how can it be anything other than an antisemitic attack? In all the media com­ment­ary that’s come out over the last few months in par­tic­u­lar, how do you dif­fer­en­ti­ate between criminal-inspired incidents versus antisemitic incidents? I suppose, the con­nec­tion being that these criminal acts are only taking place on Jewish targets, or assumed to be Jewish targets, so they them­selves are antisemitic attacks in nature, aren’t they? How can you dif­fer­en­ti­ate it? 

ALEX RYVCHIN:  I agree with that analysis. I think there have been segments of society and the media and the political class that have sought to deny or minimise antisemitism. I think they had that agenda from the beginning. When the police announced that the Dural incident appeared to be a hoax in the sense that it wasn’t intended to be a live attack to be carried through, I think a lot of people rejoiced at the entire summer of terror that jeop­ard­ised the lives of the Jewish community and targeted very specific Jewish homes, insti­tu­tions and places of worship, with very clear slogans referring to the Jewish community, which were clearly mater­i­ally antisemitic, without question. I think it served the agenda of some to deny that, to obfuscate, or to confuse or divert the dis­cus­sion. But when you have attacks of that sort — fire­bomb­ings of Jewish-owned busi­nesses, a place of worship and the former home of a community leader — it’s very clearly antisemitic. 

The more that was revealed about this organised crime syndicate and the alleged kingpin and his own personal back­ground, views and ideology, the more the view was rein­forced that it was very clearly antisemitic. The critical thing is the outcome rather than even the ideology or motiv­a­tion. One thing I was asked a lot in the aftermath of the police press con­fer­ence was, “Do you feel a relief that this was organised crime rather than more con­ven­tion­al antisemitic actors?” I can tell you that relief was the furthest thing from my mind and the minds of members of the community. When you suddenly have, in addition to more con­ven­tion­al antisemitic actors, people with ready access to guns and explos­ives who were clearly willing to set them on fire— The Hon. CHRIS RATH:  It’s even more dangerous.

ALEX RYVCHIN:  That’s right. It’s another dose of danger and terror that was struck into the community.

The Hon. CHRIS RATH:  In some ways, some of these incidents were not antisemitic by intention, but they were antisemitic by effect or by implic­a­tion. The end result of what is happening is that Jewish busi­nesses, homes and cars are being targeted. Even if the intention was criminal and may not be antisemitic inspired, the effect of what is being under­taken is that it’s only Jewish targets. The community that is bearing the effects of that is the Jewish community. Would you agree that it’s almost unhelpful to downplay the antisemitic nature of some of these incidents, whether they be graffiti, fire­bomb­ings or various other incidents we’ve seen, through­out the summer in par­tic­u­lar? It’s getting a little bit better now, but I think over the summer was the worst of what we saw.

ALEX RYVCHIN:  I think it’s abso­lutely impossible to downplay the antisemitic element to all this when you have syn­agogues burned and attempted attacks on other places of worship, Jewish busi­nesses and homes. We all know that the list of targets were all unequi­voc­ally Jewish targets. It would be insane to try to remove an antisemitic component from it. The effect was very clearly antisemitic and very clearly to terrorise the Jewish community — without question. As to the motives and intent, we can’t fully know that until the matter is brought before the courts. But, again, I feel that there are segments of society that are bending over backwards to try to find motives which may not be there, purely because it advances their agenda. It allows them to minimise or distract the eye from what’s happening in our society.

The other point that I’d note is that, while the fire­bomb­ings were the most high profile and ter­ri­fy­ing incidents, my organ­isa­tion has logged, in the year following October 7, over 2,000 incidents of antisemitism. As I mentioned, every one of these incidents affected someone’s state of mind, their quality of life and their ability to do what they love. It made them feel estranged and separated from wider society. It has an impact on our social harmony and how com­munit­ies function and interact with one another. While what we call the summer of terror has thank­fully subsided — and hopefully we’ve seen the end of it — given what’s happening abroad and the incidents in the United States to which I referred, I caution that the end is not upon us yet. The worst might still be to come. Every day Jewish Aus­trali­ans in this State are suffering incidents, whether it be in school­yards, uni­ver­sity campuses or work­places or whether it be through global campaigns on TikTok calling for the destruc­tion and oblit­er­a­tion of Israel and its people. This continues on a daily basis.

The Hon. STEPHEN LAWRENCE:  Thanks so much for coming along to give evidence — it’s appre­ci­ated. I remember around the time that the existence of that criminal con­spir­acy was revealed, The Daily Telegraph had a front page that said it was all a vile hoax. That, to me, seems to under­state the matter. Could you talk to — and you already have to an extent — what sig­ni­fic­ance you attached to this rev­el­a­tion of the criminal con­spir­acy in terms of what had happened to you, and in what ways it didn’t change what had happened to you?

ALEX RYVCHIN:  When something like that happens — and I described in detail how it unfolded and how we exper­i­enced it as a family — all of these analyses and rev­el­a­tions after­wards about a criminal syndicate or whatever the motives were don’t really alter anything, because what happened happened. The incidents that have struck the Jewish community, whether my family or others — they occurred. Multiple media — it wasn’t merely the Telegraph — ran with the lead bulletin that it was all a hoax. Again, I think some of it was self-serving and others were perhaps mis­in­ter­pret­ing exactly what the police were saying. But, again, the effect of that was to quell the con­ver­sa­tion about antisemitism, because prior to that point there was a necessary public exam­in­a­tion of what was happening in our society and the impact it was having on Jewish Aus­trali­ans and wider social cohesion. It was a con­ver­sa­tion that had to be had. I feel like this inac­cur­ate and careless reporting about it all being a hoax kind of killed that con­ver­sa­tion.

The other thing that it did was — social media was for a long time awash with con­spir­acy theories that all of this was concocted by the Jewish community, that it was an inside job or a Mossad plot — all of these nonsense theories that tend to attach them­selves to the Jewish people. You can imagine the storm that that kicked off on social media and in other recesses of society. They felt vin­dic­ated. They felt like, indeed, none of this had actually happened or it had been inflicted on the Jewish community by itself. It was careless and I think it was coun­ter­pro­duct­ive, but it’s important that we reset and recal­ib­rate the con­ver­sa­tion to talk about what actually tran­spired and how we, as a society, can move to actually curing this problem.

The Hon. STEPHEN LAWRENCE:  Having worked in the criminal law for two decades, I’m pretty sceptical about the pro­pos­i­tion that a person who would create this criminal con­spir­acy to achieve this ulterior motive, and would so focus it on the Jewish community, wouldn’t also be antisemitic, even if they had an ulterior motive. It seems to me that the rev­el­a­tion of the con­spir­acy, though, is relevant to what that spree of terrible attacks said about community-wide sentiment. I do remember through­out that time that there was a lot of under­stand­able things said: that this spree of attacks reflected some community-level rise in antisemitism in and of itself. It seems to me that the true relevance of that plot is not that the whole thing was not antisemitic, but rather that it seems to have been the actions of one person. He, of course, used agents, but there’s no sug­ges­tion that they were antisemitic. That’s my under­stand­ing. They seemed to have been people not with an ideo­lo­gic­al motive and people in the criminal milieu. I’m wondering if you would agree with that analysis.

ALEX RYVCHIN:  I do. Again, it’s based on con­jec­ture and theories because until we have these people in custody and brought before the courts and we see the evidence, it’s difficult to draw any definite con­clu­sions.

But for a criminal mas­ter­mind to concoct a scheme of this com­plex­ity involving so many moving parts and indi­vidu­als, and to identify indi­vidu­al Jewish targets, source addresses, poten­tially, of Jewish communal leaders—

The Hon. STEPHEN LAWRENCE:  From Turkey.

ALEX RYVCHIN:  That’s right. To do all of these things and have no ill feeling towards the Jewish community, I don’t buy it. I think it’s highly implaus­ible. You mention the Telegraph. The Telegraph broke a story that iden­ti­fied this indi­vidu­al and [The Aus­trali­an] looked through his social media history. He’s got a long record of posting viciously antisemitic state­ments glor­i­fy­ing Nazism, calling for the death of Jews and so forth, so I think the case became more complex at that point in time. No-one was surprised by those rev­el­a­tions. But, again, I think we’re in the realm of theory and con­jec­ture here. I think what happened is what’s critical here. What the Jewish community exper­i­enced was no hoax. The flames, the abuse, the har­ass­ment, the exclusion — it was very real.

The Hon. STEPHEN LAWRENCE:  An issue before the inquiry, which I’m sure you’re aware of, is the con­fla­tion of criticism of Israel with antisemitism. It seems to be one of those issues where to work out what antisemitism is and the extent of it, we perhaps need to also work out what it is not. You’ve been, I think it’s fair to say, a vigorous advocate in the public sphere for the state of affairs as you see it, and you’re probably someone on a par­tic­u­lar end of the spectrum in terms of how you analyse certain cri­ti­cisms of Israel and what you see as antisemitic that other people might see as legit­im­ate criticism. 

ALEX RYVCHIN:  I’m not sure I — if you could elaborate on what you mean by the spectrum and—

The Hon. STEPHEN LAWRENCE:  I don’t mean to put words in your mouth. I think the question I’ll finish with is going to give you the chance to explain this. What do you see as the line between legit­im­ate criticism of Israel, par­tic­u­larly from a Palestini­an Arab per­spect­ive, and antisemitism?

ALEX RYVCHIN:  To me, it’s very clear. I don’t think there’s a genuine con­fla­tion. People can very clearly dis­tin­guish between critiques of policy and politi­cians — which is utterly fair game in this country — and about Israel, within Israel and outside as well, and a deep contempt and hatred for the Jewish people. There’s a very clear dis­tinc­tion between them. If we talk about, for example, Itamar Ben-Gvir or Bezalel Smotrich — a couple of firebrand far-right politi­cians in that country — you can criticise them freely. I have. We cri­ti­cised them when they were brought into the oppos­i­tion. No element of that would be con­sidered antisemitic or anti-Zionist. It is a criticism of indi­vidu­als, their rhetoric and their policies.

Something happens when we talk about Israel that is peculiar to Israel that seems to happen with no other country. We can talk about Iran, China, Russia or whatever democracy or autocracy in the world. The con­ver­sa­tion never then becomes about denying the right of that people to be a people or the right of that people to have a State. We never transfer classic antisemitic or racist views about a par­tic­u­lar people to the country, impute motives to those people and say, “You do what you do because this is how Jews behave and have always behaved.” We can talk about set­tle­ments, the war, how it’s been conducted and cease­fires. None of that is ille­git­im­ate. I know some people will use more trenchant, aggress­ive forms of criticism, which doesn’t in itself con­sti­tute antisemitism. It could be wrong, it could be ignorant or it could be hateful, but it’s not neces­sar­ily antisemitic. To me, it’s very clear. The greater con­fla­tion occurs not with antisemitism and anti-Zionism but between anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel. You can criticise Israel, its policies, actions and politi­cians and not talk about the right of the State to exist, which, again, occurs with no other country.

The Hon. STEPHEN LAWRENCE:  It seems to me, though, that there are a number of aspects to the issue that are almost unique. I’ll give you an example. It’s often said that it would be antisemitic to deny the right of Israel to exist. There’s obviously this contested issue of the right of return. It’s often said that if the right of return was granted, it would be the end of Israel. For some people, to say that Israel has the right to exist neces­sar­ily, for them, involves the denial of the right of return, because the right of return, on that analysis, is incon­sist­ent with the existence of Israel going forward. How do we unpick the view of a Palestini­an expelled in 1948 or 1967 who thinks that Israel is a thor­oughly racist endeavour and would like the right of return and, therefore, might be taken to be ques­tion­ing the right of the Jewish State to exist? How do we analyse their state­ments and their opinions in light of this line between antisemitism and criticism of Israel that sometimes, as a threshold issue, is said to involve accept­ance of the right to exist?

ALEX RYVCHIN:  You’ve chosen a very specific example to do with the right of return. I’m not sug­gest­ing that any Arab Palestini­an who bears a grievance from 1948 and the pop­u­la­tion transfers of Jews and Arabs that occurred as a result of that needless war waged by seven Arab States on a nascent Jewish State — things happen in war. Pop­u­la­tions shift. People suffer, without question. I wouldn’t deny anyone’s suffering. The question you’re asking is if a Palestini­an says that their great-grand­fath­er lived in Haifa or Acre prior to 1948, they were displaced — and people were displaced for all sorts of reasons, including fleeing a war zone because they were caught up in the battle lines—

The Hon. STEPHEN LAWRENCE:  And including ethnic cleansing.

ALEX RYVCHIN:  I would deny that there was ethnic cleansing. There was no program of ethnic cleansing. There was no policy of ethnic cleansing.

The Hon. STEPHEN LAWRENCE:  But you wouldn’t dispute that it occurred.

ALEX RYVCHIN:  I firmly would dispute that it occurred. When we talk about ethnic cleansing, we talk about the forceable—

The Hon. STEPHEN LAWRENCE:  Expulsion.

ALEX RYVCHIN:  —expulsion of a par­tic­u­lar ethnicity or race of people from a territory. That did not occur as a program. If that did occur, then you wouldn’t have 20 per cent of Israel’s pop­u­la­tion being Arab. You wouldn’t have had the Mayor of Haifa going on broadcast to the people and saying, “Do not leave. This is your city as well.”

The Hon. STEPHEN LAWRENCE:  You say, “Not as a program”, but you don’t deny that in par­tic­u­lar instances it had occurred.

ALEX RYVCHIN:  I resent and I reject the use of the term “ethnic cleansing”. I will say that, certainly, people who lived in certain places prior to 1948 ceased to live there. As I said, that occurred for a number of reasons, including the natural human com­pul­sion to flee a war zone and including the leaders of the Arabs saying, “Depart this war zone and then return once we’ve driven the Jews into the sea.” There were a myriad of reasons, and one of those reasons was that there were Arab towns and villages caught up in the war and the fighting, because Israel was invaded from many fronts, but also from within.

Certain villages were removed of their pop­u­la­tions because they were caught up in the battle zone, and they were behind the lines of the Israeli fighters, so it was necessary from a military point of view. Horrible things happen in war. People are displaced. I think the lesson from that is don’t start wars, and don’t start wars that you lose. We also saw about 800,000 Jews living through­out the Arab world forcibly removed, plundered and expelled from their countries. To me, that far greater con­sti­tutes ethnic cleansing than a defensive, legit­im­ate war and what happened as a con­sequence of that war.

Dr AMANDA COHN:  Just following up on this line of ques­tion­ing, I’ve been reading the ECAJ report on antisemitism for 2024, which you’ve quoted. First of all, I’ll just say that some of the examples in this are really chilling, for anyone who’s going to accuse me of trying to minimise antisemitism. But one of the examples in that report in the section on graffiti was an example of graffiti that simply said, “Free Gaza”, and that was given as an example of antisemitism in your report. Can you explain in what way you and your organ­isa­tion view that statement as antisemitic?

ALEX RYVCHIN:  Sure. I don’t have that specific incident in front of me. I don’t know to what exactly it refers. But if you’re asking me the question about whether graffiti saying, “Free Gaza”, of itself, is antisemitic, I would say no. But context is critical, and every single incident that’s in that report is there because of context. For example, if one were to daub that on a synagogue or proximate to a Jewish site in a way that implies that Jews are col­lect­ively respons­ible for the situation in Gaza, that would be antisemitic. But if someone walks down the street at a rally and waves a banner saying, “Free Gaza”, I wouldn’t consider that antisemitic, and the report certainly wouldn’t either. 

Dr AMANDA COHN:  I think part of the challenge that I’m facing and that certainly the Committee is facing in trying to establish the problem that we’re trying to address — the report says, based on the defin­i­tion of antisemitism you’ve used or the way that these incidents have been compiled, that there was an increase of 316 per cent in antisemitic incidents following 30 September 2023. It’s a deeply con­cern­ing statistic, but what I’m trying to under­stand is how many of those incidents are in the order of the really dis­tress­ing, clearly antisemitic physical assault examples that are described in this report, versus political messages where it may be contested even within the Jewish community whether they’re antisemitic or not. Is it possible to provide a further breakdown of that data to help us under­stand the nature of the antisemitic incidents that you’re counting?

ALEX RYVCHIN:  The report does break things down in terms of general discourse incidents, whether it’s physical assault, whether it’s graffiti, whether it’s vandalism. It’s broken down by category of incidents. Some of them are naturally more extreme than others. An attack on an indi­vidu­al is going to be more dis­tress­ing than graffiti, certainly, but they’re all incidents. They’re all incidents of antisemitism. Now, political slogans in and of them­selves are not counted in this report as being antisemitic incidents. Again, if the context in which it occurred leads one to conclude that it was an act of antisemitism because of the way that it targeted Jewish indi­vidu­als, if a Jewish student — again, I’m just raising examples here, but this occurs fre­quently. If a visibly Jewish student is walking through a uni­ver­sity campus and someone starts taunting them with “Free Gaza; free Palestine”, merely because they are visibly Jewish, that is the har­ass­ment of a Jewish person because they are Jewish. That’s all that is.

Dr AMANDA COHN:  Yes, under­stood.

ALEX RYVCHIN:  The slogan itself—

Dr AMANDA COHN:  You have provided the breakdown in the report, and I’ve got it in front of me. You’ve got 33 per cent of the incidents being posters, 19 per cent graffiti, 14 per cent messages. I’m focusing on those ones because they are much more difficult to under­stand than the 3 per cent assault, which are well described in the report. It’s a sig­ni­fic­ant pro­por­tion of the incidents that you’re reporting that are in this category of posters. Surely it’s difficult to work out whether a political poster is being targeted at somebody because of their ethnic back­ground. Surely a poster is not targeted at a person, by defin­i­tion.

ALEX RYVCHIN:  No, that’s right. If that’s the case, it doesn’t make it into the report. We have a very stringent threshold as to what goes in there. If it’s a poster about, let’s say, genocide — which is a very extreme, ignorant accus­a­tion, but people make it — I wouldn’t consider that to be, of itself, antisemitic. If that is plastered somewhere on a public street, I think it is pretty dis­grace­ful and inflam­mat­ory and devoid of truth, but I don’t consider it to be antisemitic. Again, if it’s done proximate delib­er­ately to a Jewish site or at a Jewish facility, then that’s a different situation. Again, as with Mr Lawrence’s example with the right of return, I think we are identi­fy­ing very specific examples and perhaps outlying examples.

When you talk about messages and slogans, the vast majority of them are unequi­voc­ally, viciously antisemitic and very clearly targeting the Jewish community, including wishing death upon members of the Jewish community. Sometimes they use euphem­isms like Zionist, but fre­quently they don’t. There are those examples that we would consider to be on the lower spectrum of things and some might be a little bit debatable, and we can have that con­ver­sa­tion. But we’re talking about over 2,000 incidents. We’re talking about an exper­i­ence that the Jewish community has lived through for a long period of time. We know what hatred against us looks like. The things that go on that report are antisemitic incidents; they are not political discourse.

The CHAIR:  Have your or your family’s rela­tion­ship with and belief in Australia changed at all?

ALEX RYVCHIN:  That’s a very fine question. I consider this, as I said in my remarks, to be the greatest and freest country in the world. I came to this country as a refugee from the Soviet Union. Having seen the altern­at­ive — despotism, socialism, communism, autocracy, and the denial of human dignity and human rights— I cherish these things in this country. Of course, in the past 20 months I have seen things which have shocked me and which have saddened me deeply. The house that I spoke about was — I don’t want to digress too much. When we first migrated to the country, I would drive up and down that street with my grand­fath­er, who drove a van taking Holocaust survivors to a Jewish community centre.

He was so taken with that road because it looked out onto the ocean. To him that road sym­bol­ised the greatest of Australia — the freedom and beauty of this country. And then to have a house on that road, which I had purchased, defiled in that way hurt me on a very deep and personal level. But it has made me more determ­ined to fight for this country and fight for the goodness of this country, and to banish the hateful elements from it, because it is not Australia. I have encountered racism and antisemitism through­out my life, in limited instances, but this is not a racist country and this is not an antisemitic country. We have a duty to drive those horrific elements from our sight; otherwise this country will change in its character. But I remain a great lover of and a great patriot of this country.

The CHAIR:  You talk about coming from what is now Ukraine. My ancestors were expelled from eastern Poland by the Soviet Union just as World War II was beginning. I have relatives that now live in what is the current Poland in the east. They certainly talk about what was going on in those days. I have a little bit of sympathy — a lot of sympathy, actually — for what you are talking about. Do you believe that we could go back to the old ways, before all this got started? Could we ever get to that level again — that per­fec­tion you are talking about?

ALEX RYVCHIN:  I am an eternal optimist, which might sound para­dox­ic­al with being a Jewish person and the things that we have exper­i­enced. But I do think the best of human nature, and certainly of this society. But I do know that what has been allowed to move into the public sphere and into main­stream discourse and con­ver­sa­tion will be very hard to push back. There were always elements of this society that were antisemitic, and people held certain ste­reo­types and beliefs and pre­ju­dices, but we didn’t have what one would call active antisemitism.

People maybe latently harboured certain views about Jews, but they weren’t compelled to or they didn’t feel the right or the freedom to act upon that. That is the real thing that has changed. People feel that they can voice this antisemitism. And then there is what’s happening with social media — the dis­in­form­a­tion, the recruit­ment, the rad­ic­al­isa­tion. It’s the sort of tool that Henry Ford or Martin Luther, and certainly the Soviets and the Nazis, could have only dreamed of having to advance their agenda. It is going to be extremely chal­len­ging, and it will require a wider approach than merely gov­ern­ment and merely community. But I believe fun­da­ment­ally in the goodness of this country. I think we need to arrest this problem before our character is forever changed.

The CHAIR:  Thank you very much for coming today.