President Isaac Herzog’s visit to Australia was always going to reopen old fault lines, and it did—quickly—pulling protesters back into the streets to heckle a trip meant, at least in part, to reassure the Jewish community after the Bondi massacre.
The Jewish Council of Australia (JCA) was front and center. Founded in 2024, it presents itself as a Jewish voice while rejecting Zionism, and it draws heavily from academic and activist currents on the radical left.
Early in the visit, the JCA ran full-page advertisements attacking Herzog under the hashtag #JewsSayNo. The list of signatories, critics alleged, included names of deceased people and people who said they never consented to being listed. It was the familiar choreography of modern agitation: sweeping moral claims, maximalist language, and an immediate fight over representation—who was speaking for whom, and who was being pulled into a “Jewish” list.
This isn’t about one ad buy. The JCA operates inside the ecosystem of pro-Palestinian activism and speaks its moral dialect fluently: Israel as villain, Zionism as taint, and Jewish identity as “acceptable” only once it detaches from Jewish sovereignty.
At the policy level, it has opposed recommendations linked to the government-appointed antisemitism envoy, Jillian Segal, and pushed back against the momentum behind the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion—an initiative many Jewish communal leaders see as overdue. That stance puts it in direct conflict with institutions that believe antisemitism has to be confronted openly, and with national backing.
Branding matters, too. “Jewish Council of Australia” sounds broad and institutional—an umbrella body. To the casual observer, it reads as the Jewish communal position, not one faction inside a community.
Once that posture becomes the preferred “Jewish quote,” especially on outlets many Jews already view as reflexively skeptical of Israel, the result is predictable: a fringe line is treated as mainstream, and the public is invited to believe that opposing Israel is simply another ordinary “Jewish viewpoint,” interchangeable with defending Israel.
The deeper trick is moral armor. Anti-Zionist Jewish groups are held up as proof that anti-Zionism cannot be antisemitic because “look—Jews agree.” In practice, it becomes a sorting mechanism: the “bad Jews” are those who support Zionism; the “good Jews” are those willing to renounce the national dimension of Jewish peoplehood.
None of this is uniquely Australian. Jewish Voice for Peace plays a similar role across the US, Canada, and the UK, and plenty of smaller outfits work the same lane with the same rhythm.
In mainstream Jewish communities, the frustration is real—and combustible. Most diaspora Jews, in one form or another, see Zionism as integral to Jewish identity. People who reject that premise are rarely treated as harmless contrarians.
Predictably, ugly labels follow—“self-hating,” “as-a-Jew,” “traitors,” even “kapos.” Some of that language is crude and lazy. The anger driving it isn’t imaginary. It comes from a sense that Jewish identity is being weaponized against Jewish survival.
Jewish sources wrestle with internal conflict from the earliest narratives. In Exodus, after Moses kills an Egyptian overseer who was beating a Hebrew slave, he later encounters two Hebrews fighting; Midrashic tradition identifies them as Dathan and Abiram, figures portrayed as exposing Moses’ act and turning a moral outrage into personal jeopardy.
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History keeps returning to the same bitter theme. The Hasmonean dynasty—celebrated in the Hanukkah story—was later weakened by internal rivalries and shifting alliances with regional powers. Jonathan Apphus was lured into captivity and later executed by the Seleucid leader Tryphon. His brother Simon Thassi was assassinated soon after, and those events deepened instability within the ruling house.
Even the Jewish memory of national catastrophe carries the imprint of betrayal. As the Bar Kokhba revolt collapsed in 135 CE, Jewish tradition holds that informers betrayed the rebel leader’s location to the Romans, hastening his death and the rebellion’s catastrophic end—followed by mass devastation across Judea and the crushing of Jewish political life.
Spain offers another cruel pattern. After the rise of the Spanish Inquisition, many Jews who converted to Christianity lived outwardly as Christians while secretly observing Jewish practices. Known as conversos—and derisively as Marranos—they became targets of inquisitors such as Tomás de Torquemada, widely reported to have come from a converso background. The point isn’t genealogy as gossip; it’s the recurring phenomenon of people with Jewish origins rising inside hostile systems and helping enforce persecution against Jews.
Modern politics didn’t cure the disease. Some Jews participated in the Russian Revolution and later served within the Soviet system, which imposed harsh restrictions on religious life. Figures such as Lazar Kaganovich, a close associate of Joseph Stalin, rose to extraordinary power even as Stalin’s later campaigns turned against Jewish institutions and prominent Jewish figures. His career is often invoked because it sits at the intersection of identity, power, and moral compromise under totalitarianism.
The Nazi case remains the most infamous laboratory of coercion and corruption. The regime exploited Jewish intermediaries, from kapos in the camps to Judenräte in the ghettos, forcing people into roles under terror and impossible pressure.
Yet the system also cultivated outright informers. The most notorious was Stella Goldschlag (later Stella Kübler), a Jewish woman in Berlin who, after her arrest, worked for the Gestapo as a “catcher” (Greiferin), helping locate Jews in hiding; she was later prosecuted in Germany. Her story still stings because it captures the regime’s method: turn victims into instruments, then reward them for betrayal.
Australia has had its own versions of ideological capture, too. In postwar Melbourne in the 1950s and 1960s, an organization called Jews Against Fascism reportedly operated in the orbit of communist sympathizers who defended Soviet policies during the Cold War, including Stalin-era excesses. Labels change, but the posture is familiar: Jews aligning themselves with systems that were, at best, indifferent to Jewish survival and, at worst, openly hostile to it.
So what moral lens should today’s anti-Zionist activism be viewed through? That depends on whether you treat it as ordinary political disagreement—or as an ideological project that aims to strip Jews of the one form of collective security history taught them to need.
The intellectual infrastructure has been built for decades. Ilan Pappé, Noam Chomsky, and Norman Finkelstein have spent years at the forefront of efforts to delegitimize Israel, and they’ve been rewarded with celebrity inside spaces eager to platform them.
Their orbit now includes newer faces and louder amplifiers, including Peter Beinart, UK actress Miriam Margolyes, and Professor Sarah Schwartz of the JCA. The pattern is consistent: the more aggressively one rejects Zionism, the more warmly certain circles embrace the speaker as the “good Jew.”
None of this requires pretending criticism of Israel is illegitimate. Many Jews detest Benjamin Netanyahu. Many Jewish-backed organizations have sharply criticized Israel’s conduct in Judea and Samaria and the war in Gaza. Peace Now, the New Israel Fund, and B’Tselem sit inside that argument, provoking debate and anger without necessarily crossing into a call to erase Israel.
That distinction matters. The Jewish tent is wide enough to tolerate disagreement, including harsh disagreement. But once the demand becomes “renounce Zionism to be a morally acceptable Jew,” the argument stops being political and becomes a fight over Jewish identity itself.
Look at how this dynamic is normalized inside Australian Jewish discourse. A Facebook group called Pomegranate Place—previously known as Galus Australis—has been described by many observers as shifting from communal discussion into a space where hostility to Israel is routine and sympathy for the JCA is common.
In that environment, maximal accusations against Israel circulate as settled fact, boycotts are treated as virtue, and anti-Israel demonstrations are framed as moral necessity. When the fallout from October 7 entered the conversation, the tone in some corners appeared less about moral clarity than about minimizing what happened or litigating what should not need litigation.
During Herzog’s visit, discussion also circulated about attempts to pursue legal action targeting the Israeli president, linking the JCA to outside advocacy groups such as the Hind Rajab Foundation and to Muslim community bodies such as the Australian National Imams Council. Even without a clean, reader-friendly evidentiary record laid out in public, the impulse is visible: treat a visiting Israeli head of state not as a political figure you oppose, but as a criminal to be symbolically prosecuted.
That’s activism as spectacle, dressed up as justice. It doesn’t persuade; it intimidates. It doesn’t clarify; it smears. It’s designed less to win an argument than to stigmatize an identity.
What drives this posture isn’t mysterious. Part of it is the fashionable oppressor-versus-oppressed framework that has swallowed much of Western progressive culture. Part of it is social access: in some circles, only “good Jews” gain entry, and “good” increasingly means anti-Zionist.
From a Jewish historical perspective, this isn’t new. It’s a recurring pattern of fringe Jews detaching from the community and weaponizing Jewish identity against Jewish interests.
The difference today is the setting. This is unfolding in free, democratic societies, while Israelis are fighting—again—over the basic question Jewish history keeps asking: whether Jews are allowed to defend themselves like everyone else.
Plenty of communal condemnation of the JCA has already appeared. Predictably, parts of the media will treat the group according to their own instincts and biases—sometimes with skepticism, sometimes with eagerness, often without the care a subject like this demands.
The strategic risk isn’t a few loud activists in the street. It’s younger, impressionable Jews—already immersed in progressive causes—being taught that Jewish belonging comes with a condition: abandon Zionism, or be branded morally unclean.
If the community wants to keep losing that argument, it can keep pretending this is a public relations problem. If it wants to win it, it needs education, backbone, and clarity—before the next generation learns to hear “Jewish” and “anti-Israel” as synonyms.