Pro-Palestine Jews ‘terrified of speaking out’

(Michaela Whitbourn, SMH)

Earlier on Thursday, human rights lawyer Sarah Schwartz, co-founder of the Jewish Council of Australia, told the royal commission she faced a wave of abuse from pro-Israel advocates for opposing its actions in Palestine.

Schwartz said she knew of other members of the Jewish community who were “terrified of speaking out” against Israel because of the risk of vilification.

They had been made to feel that it was a condition of their Jewish identity to support Israel, Schwartz told the hearing. It had a “chilling effect on Jewish people and means that they can’t speak their political views”.

Schwartz said the Jewish Council of Australia, a registered charity, was set up in 2024 to provide a voice to members of the Jewish community who regarded Israel’s current conduct in Gaza as involving the commission of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Schwartz said it provided Jewish people with “a home outside of support for Israel” and was the largest progressive Jewish organisation in the country.

Almost immediately after the group was set up, Schwartz said she “started being personally targeted by what I believed to be either neo-Nazi or far-right actors” via phone calls, texts and emails.

‘I receive a lot of messages from pro-Israel accounts … or I see memes that have been circulated about me ... From the pro-Israel side these are messages that refer to me as self-hating, as a traitor.’

She described it as a co-ordinated campaign, and said she had to take work and personal leave.

But Schwartz said that pro-Israel advocates had also attacked her via her personal social media account.

“I receive a lot of messages from pro-Israel accounts … or I see memes that have been circulated about me. The comments are voluminous,” she said.

“From the pro-Israel side these are messages that refer to me as self-hating, as a traitor.”

She had seen online memes portraying her as a rat. She had been called “Hitler’s Jew” and a “Kapo”, a historical name for Jews who co-operated with the Nazis.

It was alarming to have images of Jewish persecution used against her as a Jewish person, she said, and it sent a chilling message to other Jewish people about the consequences of speaking out.

It suggested Jewish identity was inherently tied to Israel and being critical of Israel’s conduct meant you were “not really Jewish” and “a traitor to your own people”.

She said online campaigns against her accelerated at times, “and those are often periods of intensified News Corp coverage that involves me”.

“During those periods … I have held some concerns for my safety because of the threats and messages that I’ve received online,” she said.

Schwartz told the royal commission she grew up in a close-knit Jewish family in Sydney and went to a Jewish high school.

She said she had always had a very close connection with her Jewish identity and grew up hearing stories about Holocaust survivors, including visiting concentration camps. Those early experiences had a profound impact on her and inspired her to engage in anti-racism work, she said.

After the massacre at Bondi Beach in December last year she was “really in a state of shock and fear”.

She said she immediately started receiving messages of support from Palestinian and Muslim colleagues and “clear condemnation of antisemitism”.

She said it was “incredibly dangerous” for policing of antisemitism to focus on events such as pro-Palestine protests or chants.

Government responses that located the source of antisemitism in the Palestine solidarity movement suggested Jewish people who did not support the actions of Israel were not really Jewish, she said.

“We are not made any safer, I think, by the fact that Israel conducts its actions in the name of Jewish people,” Schwartz said.

“I think that’s something that enables people to conflate in their mind Jewish identity and Israel and suggest that all Jewish people are behind Israel.”