Jillian’s big mistake

As reported here some time ago, Jillian Segal was appointed Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism by the Albanese Labor government in 2024, and the main aim of her report seems to have been to conflate criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza with antisemitism. This was stated to be untenable by Justice Angus Stewart in a recent Federal Court case against Islamic preacher Wissam Haddad, whose posts it was ruled were antisemitic because he had conflated Zionism and Judaism. This is just what Jillian Segal had tried to do in her dodgy report. Stewart found that:

1. “Political criticism of Israel, however inflammatory or adversarial, is not by its nature criticism of Jews in general or based on Jewish racial or ethnic identity.”

2. “Disparagement of Zionism constitutes disparagement of a philosophy or ideology and not a race or ethnic group”¹.

It was something I read on Substack from ‘Duplicity’ which made me aware of another way of looking at the proposal by Jillian Segal conflating criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and anti-Semitism².

I suggest that the problem that Segal maintains is all antisemitism is bogus. I have only bumped into antisemitism a few times in my life. Perhaps the first was in high school, when anti-Jewish jokes occasionally popped up. In my children’s time at school, these were largely replaced by anti-Arab jokes, which were equally appalling. The second time was when my parents told me of an encounter they had at a nightclub they used to visit occasionally (I would stay at my grandmother’s house). My parents were in the rag trade and manufacturers’ agents would occasionally visit the shop to advertise what was available for them to buy, and sell in their shop. One of these was a bloke called Harry Dean, who I found out later was Jewish. He was a lovely bloke and was always very nice to me. We saw him so often, he almost became a family friend. A couple of close family friends were Ede (Ted) and his wife . He was born in Serbia, and she was born in Austria. Ted had fought in the German army as a teenager near the end of the Second World War and had been captured by the American Army, and eventually came out to Australia. They were such close family friends that I used to call them uncle and aunt, despite having 18 real aunts and uncles. It was Uncle Ted who got me into coin collecting when I was in my early teens.

At one of the visits to the nightclub, my parents were sitting having a drink between dances with Ted and his wife, when Harry Dean came over to their table to say hello. My father told me that Ted and his wife simply got up and left the table. Why they did so, I don’t know. Whether Harry started talking shop and they decided to remove themselves, or go get a drink or have a dance, or whether it was embarrassment at having fought for the Nazis in the war, or whether it was simple antisemitism, I can only guess. I would like to think it was not the last of these options, but my father seemed to think it was.

The third time I encountered antisemitism was when we had a visit from a young Russian scientist on an exchange agreement, which occurred just as the USSR was collapsing. While I cannot remember the gist of many of the non-science conversations we had, there is one sentence he used which I have not forgotten. He said something along the lines of: ‘Russia would be a great country if it wasn’t for the Jews’. To say I was astonished is an understatement. I only found out the depth of the antisemitism in Russia when I later visited the country on an exchange. One of the people I visited was in St Petersburg. He was a Russian-born scientist employed at an institute in the city, and was a respected scientist in his field. However, because he was Jewish, he had to be signed in daily by a non-Jew, and escorted to his own office!

All bigotry is repugnant, whether it be antisemitism, islamophobia or racism. As I have said here before, when venting my disgust at Frydenberg’s politicisation of the Bondi massacre; he was part of a government who used the dog-whistle at every opportunity if they thought it could garner votes from the racist halfwit part of society. As I said then, if you use bigotry for political ends, you licence all bigotry. The fact that some of it is antisemitic is on you³.

While I will never understand the motivations of the two gunmen at Bondi, I suspect it has nothing to do with the common ‘garden variety’ antisemitism I experienced in my younger days. None of those people I knew would have contemplated raising a rifle to shoot a 10-year-old Jewish girl and others at a celebration in a park. I suspect the Bondi gunmen’s motivation comes from a seething hatred of Israel and what it has done to Palestinians for several generations in the Middle East. It is the same sort of hatred that so many of Netanyahu’s cabal of psychopaths have for Palestinians, such that they have no compunction about murdering them in their thousands of men, women and children.

While Jillian Segal aims to give Israel carte blanche to keep murdering men women and children in Gaza to the extent of preventing Australian citizens protesting against it, she would be wise to read what one of Australia’s greatest jurists said many decades ago. That jurist was Sir Isaac Isaacs (1855-1948), the first Australian born governor general, and the first Jewish governor general, who served in that position from 1931 to 1936. He served as a justice of the High Court from 1906 to 1931, the last 10 months as Chief Justice⁴. 

In 1946, Isaacs published a 63 page booklet entitled ‘Palestine Peace and Prosperity or war and destruction? Political Zionism: Undemocratic, Unjust Dangerous’^5,6. In this pamphlet Isaacs differentiated political Zionism from religious and cultural Zionism. He was “irrevocably opposed” to political Zionism and said it should be “sharply distinguished from religious and cultural Zionism” to which he was “strongly attached”. He said that political Zionism at the time was about making all of Palestine a “Jewish state”, while religious and cultural Zionism was the only Zionism implied by the Balfour Declaration of 1917 for the establishment of a home for the Jewish people.

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 did not call for a “Jewish state”. Indeed, it fell short of the expectations of the British zionists, who had asked for the reconstitution of Palestine as “the” Jewish national home. The declaration specifically stipulated that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”⁷.

As Isaacs said, the Balfour Declaration was interpreted by the British government as he explains, and was assented to by the World Zionist Organisation.

Isaacs continued: “Political Zionism is utterly inconsistent with the assurances given to the Arabs in 1918 by the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann and then accepted by them”. It is also contrary to the assurance given later to the world by Weizmann and by Balfour personally, and “is definitely inconsistent with the present Mandate, with the Compact between the British Government and the Zionist Organisation in 1922” and with the repeated statements of the relevant British Minister over 23 years as well as with the conclusions of two Commissions^5,6. 

“Nevertheless, the Zionist movement as a whole, places its own unwarranted interpretation on the Balfour Declaration, and makes demands that are arousing the antagonism of the Muslim world of nearly 400 millions. Apart from their inherent injustice to others, these demands will seriously and detrimentally affect the general position of Jews throughout the world [i.e. anti-semitism]”. Indeed, Isaacs said that this ‘incorrect’ interpretation of the Balfour Declaration was likely to stiffen Arab resistance to any extensive Jewish immigration into Palestine^5,6.

In summarising his objections, Isaacs stated that the demands of political Zionism were

1. A negation of Democracy, and an attempt to revert to the Church-State of bygone ages.
2. Provocative of anti-semitism.
3. Unjust to other Palestinians politically and to other religions.
4. As regards unrestricted immigration, a discriminatory and an undemocratic camouflage for a Jewish State.
5. A repudiation of the consent of the Arabs to the peaceful and prosperous settlement in Palestine of hundreds of thousands of suffering Jews who were the victims of Nazi atrocities.
6. Inconsistent with Jewish domination in Palestine, while at the same time claiming complete Jewish equality elsewhere in the world^5,6.

The appalling behaviour of the Israeli government of Netanyahu and the murderous Israeli Defence Force can never be excused. I expect many people who have any understanding of history, particularly that around the rise of the Nazis and their programme of extermination of European Jews, will have heard of the extermination camps or death camps. These were Belzec, Chełmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau, and were built by the Nazis in occupied Poland⁸. In these camps, several million Jews were murdered. These camps represent the worst inhumanity imaginable. Now, to them we can add the appalling inhumanity being inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza by Israel. It seems inexplicable that Israel could do this when some residents of Israel are probably the descendants of the few survivors of the death camps listed above.

Another aspect which confuses me is how someone who is an Australian Citizen, as presumably is Jillian Segal, can be an agent of influence for another nation (Israel) to the detriment of the standing of Australia in the eyes of much of the world.

Sources

1. https://blotreport.com/2025/07/16/bogus-report/
2. https://substack.com/@harpervalleypta/note/c-198184159
3. https://blotreport.com/2025/12/18/little-sir-echo/
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Isaacs
5. https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-760983744/view?partId=nla.obj-760990749
6. https://sleekitscotsman.substack.com/p/unannotated-palestine-peace-and-prosperity
7. https://www.britannica.com/event/Balfour-Declaration
8. https://hmd.org.uk/learn-about-the-holocaust-and-genocides/the-holocaust/the-camps/extermination-camps/