The 2025 Australian Mayors Summit Against Antisemitism is currently being held on the Gold Coast, Queensland, 'australia'. As the Jewish Council of Australia states in a media release, the event is being sponsored by US Zionist lobby group Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), which is ‘funded by Republican mega-donors and is well-known for smearing pro-Palestine academics. It has backed Trump’s attacks on UN officials, and is linked to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, complicit in the starvation and murder of Palestinians.’ Posited as an event where mayors from local councils around the colony can ‘gain practical tools, fresh insights, and a renewed commitment to building a more tolerant future together,’ is is rather as the JCA rightly points out, ‘a far-right event aimed at furthering support for Israel at a local government level.’
The Summit is taking place just days after a ‘Rally for Australia’ was held in capital cities across the continent. Despite claims the rally was organised by ‘ordinary Australians’ from all walks of life and ethnicities, in Naarm it was led by the National Socialist Network (NSN) whose proudly racist leader, Thomas Sewell, proceeded to lead his fascist thugs in an attack on Camp Sovereignty, established by the the Black GST (ending genocide, acknowledging sovereignty, and securing treaty) movement on so-called Kings’ Domain, a sacred burial site for the remains of Aboriginal people stolen and taken overseas by colonial invaders. The Camp was originally set up in 2005. During the 2006 Commonwealth Games, the Black GST
issued an invitation to all Indigenous people and supporters to gather and converge in Melbourne in the days leading up to and following the opening ceremony of the ‘Stolen’wealth Games on 15 March 2006. The Queen (Sovereign) will be opening the Games. (The Commonwealth Games run from15-26 March 2006 in Melbourne, Victoria.) In the tradition of the 1982 Commonwealth Games protests in Brisbane and the 1988 Bicentennial marches in Sydney, a national united action has the potential to turn an international spotlight on Australia’s deplorable record in Indigenous rights, as against comparable nations.
During the brutal attack on Camp Sovereignty, Nazis carrying poles and sticks caused injuries to the people gathered who were then left to defend the site. Afterwards Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and other politicians defended ‘good people’ who rallied against immigration, distinguishing between them and ‘neo-Nazis’ who they claimed had hijacked the, otherwise ‘reasonable’, events, in an echo of Donald Trump.
After the weekend, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke signed a $408 million deal to transfer asylum seekers living in Australia to the Pacific island of Nauru where Australia has been holding asylum seekers in a prison camp since 2012 (and previously between 2001 and 2007). We must call out these attempts to separate between protests presented as gathering together ‘ordinary citizens’ worried about immigration in a cost-of-living crisis, black-clad white supremacists beating Indigenous people and their supporters, and the white settler state’s policy of deliberate cruelty to a handful of asylum seekers afforded by a colonial relationship to the Pacific endemic to colonial racial capitalism.
As Krautungalung elder Robbie Thorpe from Camp Sovereignty made clear,
Australia is an institution of racism… It’s the institutions of this country that have allowed this to manifest. They’re running around saying stop immigration; they’re immigrants themselves. They’re carrying a British flag around.
The insistence of political leaders that the Australian state’s punitive borders and migration system has no impact on either ‘ordinary feelings’ about immigration, ideological ties to the far-right, nor state and popular violence against Sovereign people on their own lands is rightly called into question in light of the Summit Against Antisemitism being held just days later. Many have called out the hypocrisy of the government’s seemingly endless commitment to protecting Zionists from ‘antisemitism’ (in other words the discomfort induced among them when witnessing public protest against Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza). Just a few days before the weekend’s rallies, the Home Affairs Minister expelled the Iranian Ambassador to Australia, blaming Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for attacks on a synagogue and a kosher restaurant in an unprecedented and clearly desperate attempt to deflect from the Australian state’s complicity with the ongoing genocide.
This comes on the back of the release by the government’s appointed Antisemitism Envoy, arch Zionist Jillian Segal, of a ‘plan to combat antisemitism’ which, as I wrote in July,
conflates antisemitism with anti-Zionism, grossly inflates the number and severity of antisemitic incidents, and effectively criminalises and outlaws both anti-genocide protest and the very existence of Palestinians themselves as well as any expression of Palestinian culture, knowledge and politics within Australian public life. It seeks to have total control over what institutions such as universities and cultural bodies can do and say in relation to Palestine.
But rather than point out the hypocrisy in play - hypocrisy being the point of all racism - it is necessary to dwell on what knits all of this together. There is an overwhelming tendency, growing as the genocide in Gaza intensifies, the Israeli Genocide Forces encroaching on Gaza City and plans afoot to forcibly empty the Strip of its residents, to see states such as Australia as entirely beholden to the whims of Israel and its local lobbyists. However, it is more helpful to think of what Australia reveals about itself through its participation in the counterinsurgent ‘war on antisemitism’. What is made permissible by an antiracist posturing around antisemitism for securing the grounds for the settler colonial racial state? In other words, rather than asking what Australia does for Zionism, we might do better to turn the question around and ask what Zionism grants Australia (and inter alia other states in the imperial core).
The most obvious dimension of Australia’s full-throttled participation in the ‘war on antisemitism’ is something I argued in my last book, Why Race Still Matters, reiterated in this paper, and extend here.
The fight against antisemitism acts as a proxy for a real opposition to racism with even right-wing actors able to portray themselves as the ‘real antiracists’ because of their performative opposition to antisemitism. In this vision of things, opposition to Muslims and Islamism – the two often being interchanged – and support for repressive laws and policies against them, is presented as antiracist because it is said to protect Jews. Whether or not Jews participate in such calls for repressive measures, and many do, is immaterial to the fact that official opposition to antisemitism acts to whitewash state racism.
In other words, by being seen to address antisemitism – construed in dominant accounts, as I have argued, as the sine qua non of racism – the Australian state is able to minimise its enactment of systemic racism, targeting Indigenous people, Muslims, migrants and asylum seekers, first and foremost. It is also able to whitewash its complicity with Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians by calling the racism faced by these groups into question due to what is portrayed as their ‘antisemitic’ objection to Israel and Zionism.
In a dominant view of racism as a set of attitudes and beliefs rather than of social relations and institutional practices, negatively racialised groups are reified as endemically antisemitic, negating their correct analysis of the threat posed by Zionism for human security, not just in Palestine but for the whole of the globe. This view serves the state in its role of racial management vis-a-vis occupied and exploited non-white populations because it legitimates the state’s practices of control and punishment via the proxy of the ‘war on antisemitism’. This argument bears relation to Anna Younes’ claim that
settler coloniality’s features of capturing, conquering, surveilling, and securing land and people that brings home to roost the very techniques developed by Europeans to control populations in the colonies. Hence, it is not colonialism but settler colonialism that comes home to roost as fascism, to paraphrase and think with Aime Césaire. Settler coloniality includes the dynamic to rhetorically invert structural power binaries to define white (settler) society as a victim under threat: such inversions turn the native into an “illegal” intruder and turn the terrorizing structures of settler colonialism into structures of peace. Finally, settler coloniality is a transnational form to organize and manage societies socially, culturally, extra-/legally, and politically, informed by the transfer of technologies of power (e.g. AI, weapons, agribusiness) to control land and people in the service of white supremacist political-economic structures.
Younes’ point with regard to Europe where settler colonialism comes home to roost is writ large in the settler colonial context of Australia. The Australian colonial-racial state requires genocide to reproduce itself because, under the conditions of the global capitalist economy as Ali Kadri makes clear, it ‘fuels death and weakens international labor.’ Locally, turning itself to the disciplining of groups who resist genocide and occupation in Palestine reaps dividends for the state because it makes permissible the localised mechanisms necessary to reign in the defence against settler colonial domination and exploitation and attendant practices of state racism.
We have seen both carrot and stick in play.
The carrot: As I discuss in Chapter 4 of my new book, The New Racial Regime: Recalibrations of White Supremacy, the white Australian state’s championing of a co-called Indigenous Voice to Parliament followed in the footsteps of the longterm efforts by the state and capital alike to stamp out the movement for Aboriginal sovereignty and land rights by subverting it into shopfronts of recognition and representation in a racially neoliberal vein. Once this was defeated at Referendum in October 2023 due to the success of the racist campaign against it, the Labor government (originators of all of the state’s most racist policy architecture since federation in 1901) reverted to form. The genocide in Gaza, dovetailing with the defeat of the Voice one week after the heroic Tufan al-Aqsa, provided the opportunity for the return of the stick, as can be seen in the repression of anti-Zionism and the concomitant elevation of antisemitism as a primary concern for the state, at least rhetorically.
Just as the ‘war on antisemitism’ serves as a proxy for state antiracism, denying antisemitism’s origins in the West and minimising its reliance on racialism for its own reproduction, using the stick against anti-Zionist activists permits state violence - material and rhetorical - against Indigenous people, who are the equivalents to the Palestinians at home. In fact, the two become indistinguishable in that they represent the undeniable threat to the legitimacy of colonial sovereignty by their mere existence and survival. Repressing anti-Zionism, by this token, unleashes and generalises the use of the colonial stick against Indigenous people whose stance against colonialism here, but also crucially in Palestine, cannot pass.
In The New Racial Regime I build on Cedric Robinson’s idea of the racial regime, a structure of representational mythology, to show how the idea of race is sown in chaos and confusion. One of the most confusing aspects of the counterinsurgent ‘war on antisemitism’ as it plays out in Australia is the use of Indigeneity for the laundering of Zionism. Just as the Indigenous Voice to Parliament campaign saw the inclusion of key Zionist figures, most prominently the Melbourne tax lawyer and Zionist leader, Mark Leibler, the Gold Coast Antisemitism summit sees the participation of Indigenous representatives.
For many this is perversely jarring given the fact that, not only is the Summit, as outlined, a tool to further propel the punishment of Palestinians and the Palestine movement in Australia, it also directly involves far-right figures, such as Stan Roth who chairs the event. As reported by the JCA, the Roth family was found to have donated $50,000 to the far-right lobby group, Advance. Roth is the Antisemitism Envoy’s brother-in-law. Her husband, John Roth was party to the donation. It is therefore unsurprising that Segal in her role as anti-antisemite in chief failed to speak against the far-right rallies of August 31 or to utter a word in support of those attacked at Camp Sovereignty. Indigeneity in service of Zionism launders mythological Jewish claims to the land, building affinities with conservative Indigenous leaders, upholding them as more legitimate spokespersons over and above the vast majority of Indigenous peoples who stand with Palestine and against colonial genocide in all its forms. It was the latter who held strong at Camp Sovereignty. They are of no use to Segal or the state which appointed her even as they were beaten with sticks and poles by the actual antisemites of the NSN.
The CAM Summit crystallises a war on Indigenous people that unites realities across all colonially occupied lands. As Yaakov Aharon and Wendy Bacon report, the summit is attended by ‘real estate, property development, defence and finance industries.’ The event’s main sponsor is Southern Steel, ‘one of Australia’s largest privately owned companies.’ All such companies operating on stolen land have a stake in deepening their understanding of how the ‘war on antisemitism’ can serve as a blueprint, dovetailing with other tried and tested methods of colonial laundering in Australia, for aiding the further entrenching of racial capitalism. Intrinsic to these processes are what Ali Kadri calls ‘accumulation by waste’ and the commodification of ‘premature death’. In order for capital to accumulate it needs not only to create material waste - the quickest way to which is war and genocide - but also the premature death of surplus populations, which in both Palestine and ‘australia’ means that of Indigenous people. The ‘war on antisemitism’ provides the legitimating architecture for the state to remove irritants in society who mount sustained resistance to the onward march of accumulation. Sadly, few of the largely symbolic actions undertaken by the mainstream Palestine movement have done much to put a dent in these machines given that they have routinely prioritised visibility, awareness raising and representation, often of exceptionalised individuals, over actual resistance.
To consider that the genocide of another people - my people, not to get overly emotive, but merely to state the facts - is being used to launder the acute phase of colonial genocide currently being meted out to Palestinians, but also the longer and slower one in which I am complicit on these lands, fills me with rage. There is no appeasing the fascism that is being carried out in plain view; no liberal appeal to the conscience of elites will overcome the fact that state, finance and sectors of civil society are in lockstep, and that their aim is none other than the destruction of the People and the earth.
Zionism does not just uphold settler-colonial ideology; the Global North actively reproduces it as a way of life. Settler-colonial entities cannot be dismantled solely through internal dissent—just as the Zionist entity will not be undone unless the balance of power shifts against it.
How to shift that balance is the screamingly urgent question of our time.
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