This essay was written in response to the publication of the Australian Government’s antisemitism handbook, April 2026
There’s a particular cruelty reserved for those whose suffering is weaponised before it has finished being mourned. History knows this pattern well. A wound that should have generated wisdom is instead pressed into service — not to prevent its recurrence, but to insulate power from scrutiny. The wound becomes a warrant. And anyone who questions the warrant is accused of reopening the wound.
This operational strategy is currently being prosecuted in my country of Australia with the full apparatus of the government’s authority.
A category error lies at its core — one so deliberate, so precisely engineered, that its deliberate nature must itself be named. The error is this: the conflation of a people with a state, of an identity with a political project, of prejudice with criticism. These are not the same things. They have never been the same things. Elementary political philosophy distinguishes between opposition to an ideology and hatred of those who may nominally share its name. One may oppose Stalinism without despising Russians. One may oppose theocracy without hating the devout. The distinction is not in the least bit subtle. It is basic. Its erasure is not accidental.
What is being erased, specifically, is the possibility of accountability. Not accountability in the abstract — accountability directed at a particular state, for particular actions, judged by particular institutions whose legitimacy the erasing parties otherwise invoke when convenient. Every major humanitarian body on earth — bodies whose authority is routinely cited in other contexts by the same voices now dismissing them — has arrived at the same finding regarding what is happening in Gaza. The convergence is not a conspiracy. It is the operation of exactly the kind of international legal and human rights architecture that was constructed, in large part, in direct response to the Holocaust itself.
Here the cruelty sharpens to its point. The exact conceptual and institutional inheritance of the worst atrocity in modern Jewish history is being deployed to suppress recognition of atrocities committed in the name of Jewish statehood. The architects of that inheritance — Raphael Lemkin, who gave us the word genocide; the framers of the Geneva Conventions; the drafters of the Universal Declaration — are being retroactively conscripted into the silence they spent their lives trying to make impossible.
This is not the protection of Jewish people. It is the exploitation of their most catastrophic historical suffering to insulate a state from the scrutiny that suffering was meant to make universal and permanent.
It should offend any serious Jewish thinker. Many do find it deeply offensive. The philosophical tradition of Jewish dissent — prophetic, restless, morally exacting — has never been comfortable with the equation of critique and hatred. Brian Klug, Judith Butler, the Israeli organisation B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel: these are not marginal voices. They are working within a tradition that understands, perhaps better than most, what happens when moral categories are weaponised by power. They understand it from the inside.
What is being suppressed, then, is not merely political speech. It is something more fundamental: the integrity of the concepts themselves. Antisemitism is a real phenomenon with a real history of catastrophic consequence. Genocide is a precisely defined legal category with deliberate and carefully argued criteria. Human rights is not a rhetorical convenience but a hard-won framework built on the conviction that certain violations of human dignity are non-negotiable regardless of who commits them. When these concepts are stretched, collapsed into one another, or selectively applied, they do not become more protective. They become less. They begin to mean whatever the most powerful voice in the room needs them to mean at any given moment.
That is not a defence of anything. It’s a civilisational failure. And its effects reach far beyond any single conflict.
When a government apparatus tells its citizens that to oppose a political ideology is to hate a people — that to invoke international law is to echo medieval superstition — it is not combating hatred. It is manufacturing it, by making honest moral reasoning impossible, by driving legitimate grief and legitimate outrage underground where it cannot be examined, refined, or answered. Suppressed speech doesn’t disappear. It festers and transforms. The governments that most loudly claim to be protecting minorities from hatred are, by this mechanism, doing more to generate the conditions for it than the protesters they are trying to silence.
The real victims in all of this — and I am using the word real deliberately — are not those whose discomfort at dinner parties or university seminars is cited as evidence of a crisis requiring emergency powers. The real victims are the dead. The displaced. The children operated on without anaesthetic. The people who will carry their wounds, internal and external, for the remainder of their lives. Their suffering is not regarded as a crisis by those who have appointed themselves the arbiters of what speech is permissible. Their suffering is, in this framework, part of the problem — because speaking of it is what generates the discomfort that must be stopped.
This tells us everything we need to know about whose interests are actually being served.
There’s a word that doesn’t yet exist in political discourse, or not with sufficient precision, for what is being described here. The closest available formulations are instrumentalisation — the use of identity and suffering as a political instrument — and conceptual capture, the colonisation of language itself so that words mean what power needs them to mean. Both are at work. Both deserve calling out. Because until we can specify precisely what’s happening, we cannot resist it — and the inability to resist it is not an accident either. It’s the point.
Definitions matter. They matter not just as semantic conveniences but as the load-bearing architecture of moral and legal reasoning. A definition that cannot withstand scrutiny doesn’t simply fail — it corrupts everything built upon it. Courts know this. Philosophers know this. Scientists know this. It’s only in the domain of political expedience that a definition can be declared authoritative while remaining, on examination, incoherent.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism — now formally endorsed by the Australian government and treated as the operative framework for determining what speech is permissible — is precisely such a definition. Its incoherence is not incidental. It is structural.
The definition describes antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” Note the epistemic evasion in that formulation. A certain perception. May be expressed. This is not a definition. It is a placeholder for one — deliberately hollowed at its core so that its application can be determined not by logical criteria but by the authority of those invoking it.
The illustrative examples appended to it then do the real work, which is to extend the definition’s reach far beyond its stated subject — hatred of Jews as Jews — into the domain of political opinion about a state.
Among those examples: it is antisemitic to claim that Israel is a racist endeavour. It is antisemitic to apply double standards to Israel that are not applied to other states — a criterion whose application is itself entirely subject to the judgment of those invoking it, since any selective criticism of any state can in principle be described as a double standard. It is antisemitic to draw comparisons between Israeli policies and those of Nazi Germany.
Consider what this last example requires us to believe. It requires us to believe that a comparison — a logical operation, a form of reasoning — is in itself an act of hatred. Not that the comparison may be wrong, or poorly evidenced, or historically imprecise. Not that it may be deployed in bad faith. But that the comparison, as a category, is not permissible. This is not a moral position. It’s an epistemological prohibition. It removes a class of reasoning from the available tools of public discourse and labels its use an expression of hatred toward a people.
The implications extend well beyond Israel and Palestine. If a form of reasoning can be categorised as hatred, then intellectual freedom is not simply curtailed at the edges — it is compromised at the source. The question is no longer whether your argument is sound, but whether the type of argument you are making has been pre-emptively ruled inadmissible. This is the logic of heresy, not of liberal democracy. It is the logic of the Inquisition — not its cruelty, but its structure: certain thoughts are not wrong, they are forbidden, and their expression is itself the offence.
Those who drafted the IHRA definition were not naive. They knew what they were doing. The Nexus Document, produced by a group of international law scholars in 2020 partly in response to the IHRA definition’s spread, put it with characteristic precision: a definition of antisemitism that renders illegitimate the application of established principles of international law to a particular state is not a definition of antisemitism. It is a definition of impunity. The two are not the same. Treating them as the same does not make Jews safer. It makes accountability impossible — which is a different project entirely.
It’s worth pausing on what the IHRA definition does not define as antisemitic. It does not define as antisemitic the displacement of an indigenous population. It does not define as antisemitic the demolition of homes, the restriction of movement, the denial of citizenship, the bombing of hospitals, the starvation of civilians. It does not define as antisemitic any action, however extreme, taken by the state it has placed beyond criticism. Its asymmetry is absolute and revealing: the speech of critics is regulated with precision; the conduct of the state is left entirely unaddressed.
This is not an oversight. A definition that protected Jews as people — all Jews, everywhere, including those who dissent from Zionism, including the significant proportion of diaspora Jews who have said publicly that the conflation of their identity with Israeli state policy does not protect them but endangers them — would look entirely different. It would focus on acts of hatred directed at individuals because of their Jewishness. It would distinguish between religious, ethnic and cultural identity on the one hand, and political allegiance to a particular state on the other. It would recognise that these are not the same, have never been the same, and that treating them as the same is itself a form of essentialism — the same essentialist logic that has historically been the precondition of antisemitism.
Instead, the definition does the opposite. It makes Jewish identity and Israeli statehood coextensive. It says, in effect: to be a Jew is to be a Zionist; to criticise Zionism is to attack Jews. This is not a definition crafted to protect a people. It’s a definition crafted to protect a state by borrowing the moral authority that rightly belongs to that people’s history of suffering.
The distinction deserves to be stated plainly, because it will be resisted: there’s a profound difference between defending Jews and defending Israel. Governments, institutions and individuals who have adopted the IHRA definition have, in many cases, done so believing these to be the same act. They are not. Conflating them does not honour Jewish history. It conscripts it.
And conscription, whatever uniform it wears, is never in the interests of those being conscripted.
There’s a cost to all of this that has not yet been fully reckoned with, and it’s not the cost most loudly proclaimed by those engineering these definitions. The proclaimed cost is Jewish safety. The actual cost is something broader, and in the long run far more dangerous to everyone — including the Jewish communities whose protection is invoked at every turn.
The cost is the corruption of the very concepts on which any civilised moral order depends.
Concepts are not inert. They are not simply labels attached to fixed realities. They are instruments of navigation — the means by which human communities orient themselves in relation to what’s permissible and what is not, what constitutes harm and what does not, who bears responsibility and who does not. When a concept is corrupted — stretched beyond its load-bearing capacity, collapsed into another concept it doesn’t resemble, or selectively applied so that it shields some from scrutiny while exposing others — it doesn’t simply become less useful. It becomes actively harmful. It begins to function as a weapon in the hands of whoever controls its application, and a wall against those it was designed to protect.
This is what is happening, simultaneously, to three of the most consequential moral concepts of the modern era.
Antisemitism is real. Its history is long, its consequences have been catastrophic beyond any adequate description, and its contemporary manifestations — actual hatred directed at actual Jewish people because they are Jewish — deserve to be proclaimed, confronted and stopped without equivocation. But a concept that has been expanded to include the criticism of a state’s conduct, the application of international legal frameworks, the drawing of historical comparisons, and the expression of solidarity with a people under military assault is no longer a concept with determinate meaning. It’s a rhetorical instrument. And a rhetorical instrument calibrated to suppress legitimate moral reasoning will, inevitably, generate the very hostility it claims to be preventing. Why? Because people who are told that their entirely reasonable moral responses constitute hatred do not conclude that they were wrong. On the contrary, they conclude that the concept of hatred has been weaponised against them. They are correct. And that conclusion, repeated across enough people over time, produces exactly the conditions in which actual antisemitism flourishes. Not because those people are antisemitic, but because the cry of wolf has been sounded so many times, with such evident strategic purpose, that the wolf becomes harder to see when it arrives.
Genocide is precise. It was made precise deliberately, by people who understood that without precision the word would become either too elastic to mean anything or too contested to use. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term and spent his life fighting for its recognition, understood that naming a thing correctly was itself a form of resistance — that the failure to name it was complicity by other means. The word genocide describes explicit acts committed with explicit intent: the destruction, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Every major institution whose mandate is the assessment of such acts has now applied this word to what’s happening in Gaza. To declare this assessment antisemitic — to say that invoking the legal and moral category that Lemkin built from the ruins of the century’s worst atrocities is an act of hatred toward Jews — is not simply wrong. It is a desecration of exactly the inheritance it claims to be protecting. It turns Lemkin’s instrument of accountability into its opposite: a guarantee of impunity for those who would repeat what he devoted his life to preventing.
Human rights is universal or it is nothing. This is not a philosophical nicety. It’s the foundational premise of the entire post-war international order, constructed with full awareness that the alternative — rights contingent on nationality, religion, political alignment or the sympathies of powerful states — had just produced industrialised mass murder. The universality of human rights means precisely that it applies without exception, without favour, without the asterisks of geopolitical convenience. A framework of human rights that exempts any state from its application is not a human rights framework. It’s a hierarchy of human worth dressed in the language of rights — which is to say, it is the very thing human rights was designed to replace.
When these three concepts are simultaneously corrupted — when antisemitism is expanded to prohibit the invocation of the other two, when genocide is declared unspeakable in the one case where its institutional application is most thoroughly documented, when human rights is selectively enforced to the point of inversion — what is lost is not merely clarity about a particular conflict. What is lost is the conceptual infrastructure of a moral civilisation itself. The tools by which human communities have, imperfectly and with enormous struggle, tried to place limits on what power may do to people.
This loss does not fall equally. It falls first and hardest on those with the least power — which is always the way, which is precisely why the infrastructure was built. But it doesn’t fall only on them. A world in which these concepts have been successfully captured by the interests of the powerful is a world in which no community, however historically protected, can rely on them when its own moment of vulnerability arrives. History is not short of examples. The communities that supported the erosion of moral concepts when that erosion served their immediate interests have not, in the long run, been well served by their support.
There’s a term I used earlier, that deserves to be reiterated here: precision. Not new words. Not a new vocabulary invented to evade the weaponised definitions. Precision in the use of the words we already have — words that were built, at great cost, to mean something specific and to hold that meaning against the pressure of power. The answer to conceptual capture is not a retreat into vagueness or the construction of elaborately euphemistic substitutes. It’s the insistence — patient, rigorous, and unflinching — on using words as they were designed to be used, with their full definitional integrity intact, and on naming clearly and without apology what happens when that integrity is attacked.
To call antisemitism by its actual name — hatred of Jews as Jews — and to refuse to extend that name to the criticism of a state is not to minimise antisemitism. It is to protect it from the dilution that makes it meaningless precisely when it is most needed.
To call genocide by its actual name — as defined by Lemkin, as codified in international law, as applied by the institutions whose entire purpose is its identification — is not to weaponise the Holocaust. It is to honour it, by insisting that the lesson it was meant to teach applies universally or not at all.
To call human rights by its actual name — universal, non-negotiable, applicable without exception — is not naivety. It’s the only position from which any of us, of any identity, in any community, can claim its protection in our own moment of need.
None of this is antisemitic. The claim that it is tells us nothing about antisemitism. It tells us everything about power and its corruption.
None of what has been argued here diminishes, by a single degree, the obligation to protect Jewish people from hatred. That obligation is real, it is serious, and it requires no qualification. What it requires is precision — the same precision demanded of every other moral claim made in a civilised society. Jews deserve protection from hatred because they are human beings, and human beings deserve protection from hatred. That is the complete argument. It requires no additional architecture, no special apparatus, no expansion of the concept of hatred beyond its actual meaning. It requires only the consistent application of a principle that is either universal or worthless.
The same is true for Palestinians. For Lebanese civilians. For the Uyghurs. For the Rohingya. For the Congolese, whose decades of extraction-driven slaughter have never found a name capacious enough to compel a response. For the indigenous communities of the Amazon, whose disappearance — physical and cultural — proceeds in plain sight beneath the language of development and resource sovereignty. For every community whose suffering has at some point been judged insufficiently legible by those who control the instruments of international awareness. The measure of a moral framework is not how it treats the suffering that is politically convenient to acknowledge. It’s how it treats the suffering that is not. By that measure, the framework currently being institutionalised in Australia — and in many other liberal democracies simultaneously — fails. Not because it attends to Jewish safety, but because it does so at the explicit expense of the conceptual tools needed to attend to anyone else’s.
This is not a competition between victims. The insistence that it is — that to speak of Palestinian deaths is to minimise Jewish suffering, that to invoke international law is to echo medieval hatred — is itself the mechanism of the failure. Human suffering does not operate as a zero-sum economy. The murdered child in Gaza does not diminish the murdered child in the Warsaw Ghetto. The destroyed hospital does not retroactively justify the destroyed synagogue. These are not comparable in the sense of being equivalent — history, context, power and scale always differ — but they are comparable in the sense that matters most: they are all occasions on which human beings were failed by the structures that should have protected them, and on which the rest of us are obliged to respond with clarity rather than calculation.
What is being asked of us, ultimately, is not complicated. It is simply this: that we refuse to outsource our moral vocabulary to those with an interest in its corruption. That we use words as they were designed to be used. That we extend to every human community, without exception and without asterisk, the same quality of attention, the same willingness to name what is happening, the same insistence that those responsible be held to account. Not because this is idealism. Because it is the only arrangement under which any of us — of any ethnicity, any faith, any community, anywhere — can reasonably expect that the concepts will still be intact and functional when we need them ourselves.
That is not a political position. It is a precondition for having one.