Daniel Aghion & Jeremy Leibler
The public hearings of the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion have now ended. Its final report is due in December.
The Australian Jewish community called for this inquiry because the explosion of antisemitism demanded more than another expression of concern.
We needed a serious national process capable of establishing what had happened, understanding why institutions had failed and recommending what needed to change.
That is still the test.
Yet verdicts are already being delivered.
There was an expectation that the Commission would examine every antisemitic incident, expose every wrong and publicly interrogate every person or institution responsible and accountable for the hate and vilification.
Those expectations are understandable but could never be met.
The Commission’s task is larger and ultimately more significant: to use individual events to understand patterns, expose institutional failures, influencers and make key findings and recommend reforms capable of changing them.
It goes without saying that individual accountability is critical. The Commission has subjected people, institutions and ideas to considerable scrutiny.
Its hearings have examined antisemitism in schools, on university campuses, the policing of protests, religious and far-right extremism, radicalisation, online hate and the responses of governments, regulators, technology companies and community institutions.
At times, that scrutiny has revealed more than the examination of any individual bad actor could have done.
Consider for example the evidence of Rita Jabri Markwell, a qualified lawyer and policy adviser to the Australian Muslim Advocacy Network.
Her evidence was an advertisement for a framework designed to protect communities against dehumanising speech which was being commended to institutions grappling with prejudice.
Under questioning, however, she asserted that Zionism (however expressed) is a political ideology and form of violent extremism, and any dehumanising speech directed at that political ideology and its adherents falls outside the framework’s protections.
The exchange was revealing because it exposed the template for contemporary anti-Semitism masquerading in virtue.
This exchange exposed how prejudice is increasingly expressed through the malevolent manipulation of human rights, anti-racism and inclusion, while treating an identity central to the overwhelming majority of Jewish Australians as uniquely illegitimate or morally corrupt.
That is precisely the sort of tension this Commission was established to and did expose.
More than 20,000 submissions have been received, 788 Notices served, 550,000 pages of evidence produced.
More than 250 witnesses have given evidence.
Jewish Australians have described, publicly and in extraordinary detail, what the past several years have been like. University leaders, police, regulators, government officials, religious leaders and technology companies have been required to confront that evidence and explain their responses.
For more than two years, Jewish Australians who described what was happening were regularly told that they were exaggerating, that complaints were subjective, their safety was not at risk or that conduct they experienced as antisemitism was really something else.
Those arguments are much harder to sustain now.
Victoria Police acknowledged deficiencies in the way antisemitic motivation is recorded. Meta was questioned about changes to its hate-speech policies.
Universities have been required to explain how Jewish students and staff were treated. X and Telegram chose not to engage with the Commission at all.
The hearings have created an evidentiary record that governments and institutions will now have to confront and which can never be redefined
They have also taken place while governments and institutions have begun moving. New higher education standards addressing antisemitism will apply from 2027. The Commonwealth has committed to implementing the recommendations of the Commission’s Interim Report. Regulators and institutions have reviewed practices, policies and procedures under the scrutiny the Commission has created.
We should be careful about attributing every reform to the Commission. Some were already unde way and others arose from the work of the Special Envoy and separate processes.
But the pressure of a national inquiry has plainly altered the environment in which institutions are making decisions.
Its findings and recommendations will only achieve their purpose if governments and institutions are prepared to act on them. That requires legitimacy.
Those of us who fought for the Commission should understand the practical consequence of prejudging its work. Everyone is entitled to have legitimate criticisms. It is natural that we have our own.
But if the process itself is discredited before the findings are made and recommendations appear, every government, university, regulator or institution reluctant to implement them is handed an obvious response: the inquiry was flawed, its conclusions contested and its recommendations therefore optional.
Reforms that ought to be straightforward become political. Decisions that should be based on evidence become another front in the culture wars.
A Royal Commission can establish facts, identify failures and recommend laws, policies and institutional reforms. It cannot, by itself, change a culture.
That work will fall to governments, universities, schools, employers, professional bodies, media organisations, technology platforms and community leaders.
It will require institutional reform from above and cultural change from below. Strong findings about the lived experience of Jewish Australians will also have a meaningful impact on culture.
Our political and communal leadership will ultimately be judged not by the Commission’s choice of witnesses, or whether every hearing block unfolded as we would have preferred, but by whether the evidence, findings and recommendations produced by this Commission are converted into meaningful and lasting change.
We should fearlessly scrutinise Commissioner Virginia Bell’s final report after it is written and when it arrives. If it fails to make difficult conclusions, or fails to grapple with major drivers of antisemitism or recommends measures inadequate to the scale of the problem, we should say so clearly. And if it meets or even exceeds reasonable community expectations, we should say so too.
December begins the harder part.
Daniel Aghion KC is president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. Jeremy Leibler is president of the Zionist Federation of Australia. An abridged version of this op-ed appeared in The Herald Sun and Daily Telegraph
