In Australia, the pro-Israel lobby is suing two University of Sydney scholars under racial discrimination laws. If they succeed, anti-Zionism will be legally classified as hate speech and essentially banned.
By Nick Riemer
September 28, 2025
John Keane (left) and Nick Riemer
In a few weeks’ time, Australia’s Federal Court will hold the first sessions of what promises to be a protracted hate speech trial against my colleague John Keane and me. John and I are academics at the University of Sydney and long-term supporters of Palestine. Our opponents allege that our advocacy against the genocide and for justice for Palestinians is motivated by antisemitism and so constitutes hate speech under Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act. The case is important because it will be the first to explicitly test whether Zionism should count as a protected identity under Australian law. The court’s finding against us would establish a precedent that anti-Zionism intrinsically constitutes racial hatred. This would effectively enshrine a key aspect of the IHRA antisemitism definition in Australian law and expose anti-Zionists everywhere in the country to the risk of lengthy and potentially ruinous legal action.
The statements for which John and I are being sued are no different from thousands of others made by Palestine advocates everywhere before and after October 7, 2023. The broad basis of the case against John is that, in open letters and various posts and essays, and in his widely-publicised resignation as Distinguished Professor from the WZB Social Science Centre in Berlin after 25 years, he supported ‘terrorism’; and that he brought ‘insult’, ‘humiliation’, ‘offence’ and other such harms to pro-Israel colleagues at the University of Sydney, whom he criticised in the context of a public condemnation of the genocide.
The case against me rests on numerous statements that I have made since October 7 on social media, in published articles, and in speeches at public demonstrations, in which I identify Zionism as the ideology driving Israeli apartheid and the current genocide. I particularly infuriated Israel-supporters by writing on X on October 8, 2023, that no progressive should publicly ‘condemn’ the Hamas attacks. This position, which became entirely orthodox in the Palestine solidarity movement, was wilfully misinterpreted as an endorsement of terrorism. In a clear indication of the fact that Palestine supporters in general are being targeted through the case against us, some of the complaint against me concerns my shares of other advocates’ social media posts. For our opponents, our criticisms of Israel and Zionism can only be motivated by hatred of Jews. This is a demonstrably false and highly offensive slur that, as convinced antiracists, John and I reject categorically.
The two of us have a long record of opposition to violence and support for Palestine and other antiracist causes. John is a distinguished political thinker, scholar of democracy, and public intellectual who has regularly spoken against Israel’s permanent war against Palestinians. I have been involved in the Palestine solidarity movement for many years, and have spent considerable energy promoting the academic boycott of Israel, including through my 2023 book on academic BDS, Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine. It was under my presidency that the University of Sydney branch of the National Tertiary Education Union passed the first academic boycott resolution in a university branch in Australia, a move that was soon replicated around the country and then at the union’s highest, national level.
Israel-advocates in Australian universities organise through the ‘Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism’ (5A) network, which coordinates vexatious claims of antisemitism against pro-Palestinian staff and students. 5A has scores of members at the University of Sydney. The complaint against us is brought by a small number of colleagues and one former colleague, several of whom hold official positions within pro-Israel organisations, including a delegacy role in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Absurdly, they are also suing the University of Sydney, our employer, alleging that it has ‘vicarious liability’ for our statements, even though the vast majority of these were not made in the context of our work.
Our opponents’ allegation that University of Sydney management might be complicit with us in our support for Palestine brought a bitter smile to John and my lips: like the majority of the global managerial class, Sydney University managers have firmly closed ranks behind Israel since October 7, doing everything in their power to make the campus a safe space for supporters of genocide. They have repeatedly obstructed Palestine solidarity at the university by instituting widespread crackdowns on political expression, refusing calls to divest, end weapons research, and endorse the academic boycott of Israel, while also appeasing the Israel lobby, whether through hosting an IDF propaganda event in the university’s main administration building, or conferring an honorary doctorate on a major Israel lobbyist.
John and I are not the only opponents of the genocide currently defending ourselves against lawfare in Australia: the well-known journalist Mary Kostakidis is also facing her own case. John and I present several advantages as targets. Neither of us is Jewish or Palestinian, a fact which removes a number of problems that the lobby would encounter if we did bear those identities. We also work at a rich and reputation-conscious university, which also happens to have the deepest and longest-standing tradition of Palestine solidarity in Australia. In 2014, our colleague Jake Lynch successfully fought a racial discrimination case brought by Shurat HaDin, an Israeli lawfare centre, based on his decision to boycott an official exchange program between the University of Sydney and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A 2017 conference at the university was the first academic conference in Australia specifically on the BDS movement. The 2024 Gaza solidarity encampment was one of the very first internationally outside the United States. Despite his clear opposition to Palestine advocates, the university’s Vice-Chancellor, Mark Scott, made a pragmatic decision not to disband it by force – a refusal which enraged Israel lobbyists, who rewarded Scott by mounting a ferocious but unsuccessful campaign for his dismissal.
No sooner had our opponents’ lawyers notified us that the complaint had been lodged with the Australian Human Rights Commission – a necessary first step before going to the Federal Court – than the story was on the front page of the Murdoch flagship Australian newspaper. For the lobby, a major benefit of lawfare is the opportunity to smear Palestine advocates in the media.
Israel-supporters have every reason to want to discredit us in this way. The Palestine solidarity movement in Australia is large and vigorous. October 7, 2023 triggered an exponential increase in organising. Capital cities are theatres of regular pro-Palestinian demonstrations and other events, including port blockades. In August, up to 300,000 people walked across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the pro-Palestinian March for Humanity: not just the largest pro-Palestinian, but the largest antiracist demonstration Australia has ever seen. Attendance was massively boosted by publicity flowing from a police attempt to ban the march, and relentless opposition to the Palestine movement from the premier of New South Wales (NSW), Chris Minns, a politician whose stultifying Zionism has earned him the alternative title of ‘Minister for Israel’.
The extent of the popular mobilisation for Gaza has extracted a series of timid pro-Palestinian half-measures from the Australian Labor Party (ALP), the party currently in government federally and in many states, including NSW. The ALP certainly has pro-Palestinian members, including the former Foreign Minister, Bob Carr, but it has proven itself to be completely incapable of the decisive action that Israel’s crimes demand. Its limited concessions include recognition of Palestinian statehood – criticized as meaningless and counterproductive by many in the Palestine solidarity movement – and partial sanctions on several Israeli politicians. But it has refused to end arms sales to Israel, sanction Israel in general, or abandon the liberticidal restrictions on protest introduced in several states. Nevertheless, even the inadequate measures it has taken have been a step too far for the Israel lobby, which has redoubled its efforts to quash the opposition to the genocide in civil society to which the ALP has been responding.
Israel-supporters are unable to muster anything remotely approaching the numbers that the Palestine solidarity movement can bring onto the streets. Instead, they rely on their influence within Australia’s often backward and conformist political and managerial class. Not just in universities, but in the media, health care, the arts world, or education, managers have indulged the Israel lobby at every turn in a chilling spectacle of lack of scruple and complicity with genocide. Their gratification of Israeli barbarism must never be forgotten.
With the cooperation of institutional leaders, Israel-supporters have been responsible for hundreds of attacks on advocates for Palestine in a huge variety of organisations. These do not just proceed via formal lawfare like the case against John and me, but through censorship, exclusion, and, very frequently, vexatious abuse of organisations’ codes of conduct and complaints procedures. These moves are one manifestation of the strengthening of reactionary political energies in many parts of the global north, Australia included.
From the outset, many Palestine advocates, myself included, have identified opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza as the front line of antifascist and antiracist struggles in society. Several developments in the last few months have confirmed this analysis strikingly. First, the federal government-appointed ‘special envoy to combat antisemitism’, senior Israel-lobbyist Jillian Segal, was recently revealed to have been involved in substantial donations to the far-right, anti-immigrant lobby group ‘Advance’ via her family’s trust, thereby funding political forces that are themselves responsible for antisemitism and other forms of racism in society.
Second, the strength of Sydney’s Harbour Bridge march and other pro-Palestine demonstrations provoked major far-right mobilisations across the country in the form of the ‘March for Australia’ movement, in which neo-Nazis have played a leading role. Opposition to Palestine, that is, has become a lightning-rod for the far-right, and is spearheading a reactionary turn in domestic politics of concerning proportions.
The case against John and me will be an important battle in the lobby’s attempts in Australia to muzzle opposition to the genocide. For them, the stakes are high: if they succeed, they will have cemented a legal identification of anti-Zionists as antisemites, and placed a major obstacle in the way of pro-Palestinian politics in Australia and any other jurisdiction that may look to Australian law. But if, as is far more likely, they lose, they will have seriously undermined their wider project of insulating their anti-Palestinianism from the determined opposition it is encountering all over the world.
In either case, Israel supporters will have succeeded in dragging us into a legal morass. They hope, no doubt, that this will distract and gag us, and that we will be forced to suspend our ordinary advocacy for justice. They are sorely mistaken. Repression of opposition to the genocide, including through lawfare against advocates like us, has done nothing other than galvanize the Palestine solidarity movement. A crowdfunding appeal for our case raised over half of the initial AU$250,000 target in its first three weeks of operation, with more donations continuing to flow in. And on the Sydney University campus where we work, Palestinian flags increasingly fly from office windows, despite the university’s attempt to ban them. Whether it is John and me who are attacked or others, it is clear that Israel-supporters’ efforts to stifle Palestine
In a few weeks’ time, Australia’s Federal Court will hold the first sessions of what promises to be a protracted hate speech trial against my colleague John Keane and me. John and I are academics at the University of Sydney and long-term supporters of Palestine. Our opponents allege that our advocacy against the genocide and for justice for Palestinians is motivated by antisemitism and so constitutes hate speech under Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act. The case is important because it will be the first to explicitly test whether Zionism should count as a protected identity under Australian law. The court’s finding against us would establish a precedent that anti-Zionism intrinsically constitutes racial hatred. This would effectively enshrine a key aspect of the IHRA antisemitism definition in Australian law and expose anti-Zionists everywhere in the country to the risk of lengthy and potentially ruinous legal action.
The statements for which John and I are being sued are no different from thousands of others made by Palestine advocates everywhere before and after October 7, 2023. The broad basis of the case against John is that, in open letters and various posts and essays, and in his widely-publicised resignation as Distinguished Professor from the WZB Social Science Centre in Berlin after 25 years, he supported ‘terrorism’; and that he brought ‘insult’, ‘humiliation’, ‘offence’ and other such harms to pro-Israel colleagues at the University of Sydney, whom he criticised in the context of a public condemnation of the genocide.
The case against me rests on numerous statements that I have made since October 7 on social media, in published articles, and in speeches at public demonstrations, in which I identify Zionism as the ideology driving Israeli apartheid and the current genocide. I particularly infuriated Israel-supporters by writing on X on October 8, 2023, that no progressive should publicly ‘condemn’ the Hamas attacks. This position, which became entirely orthodox in the Palestine solidarity movement, was wilfully misinterpreted as an endorsement of terrorism. In a clear indication of the fact that Palestine supporters in general are being targeted through the case against us, some of the complaint against me concerns my shares of other advocates’ social media posts. For our opponents, our criticisms of Israel and Zionism can only be motivated by hatred of Jews. This is a demonstrably false and highly offensive slur that, as convinced antiracists, John and I reject categorically.
The two of us have a long record of opposition to violence and support for Palestine and other antiracist causes. John is a distinguished political thinker, scholar of democracy, and public intellectual who has regularly spoken against Israel’s permanent war against Palestinians. I have been involved in the Palestine solidarity movement for many years, and have spent considerable energy promoting the academic boycott of Israel, including through my 2023 book on academic BDS, Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine. It was under my presidency that the University of Sydney branch of the National Tertiary Education Union passed the first academic boycott resolution in a university branch in Australia, a move that was soon replicated around the country and then at the union’s highest, national level.
Israel-advocates in Australian universities organise through the ‘Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism’ (5A) network, which coordinates vexatious claims of antisemitism against pro-Palestinian staff and students. 5A has scores of members at the University of Sydney. The complaint against us is brought by a small number of colleagues and one former colleague, several of whom hold official positions within pro-Israel organisations, including a delegacy role in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Absurdly, they are also suing the University of Sydney, our employer, alleging that it has ‘vicarious liability’ for our statements, even though the vast majority of these were not made in the context of our work.
Our opponents’ allegation that University of Sydney management might be complicit with us in our support for Palestine brought a bitter smile to John and my lips: like the majority of the global managerial class, Sydney University managers have firmly closed ranks behind Israel since October 7, doing everything in their power to make the campus a safe space for supporters of genocide. They have repeatedly obstructed Palestine solidarity at the university by instituting widespread crackdowns on political expression, refusing calls to divest, end weapons research, and endorse the academic boycott of Israel, while also appeasing the Israel lobby, whether through hosting an IDF propaganda event in the university’s main administration building, or conferring an honorary doctorate on a major Israel lobbyist.
John and I are not the only opponents of the genocide currently defending ourselves against lawfare in Australia: the well-known journalist Mary Kostakidis is also facing her own case. John and I present several advantages as targets. Neither of us is Jewish or Palestinian, a fact which removes a number of problems that the lobby would encounter if we did bear those identities. We also work at a rich and reputation-conscious university, which also happens to have the deepest and longest-standing tradition of Palestine solidarity in Australia. In 2014, our colleague Jake Lynch successfully fought a racial discrimination case brought by Shurat HaDin, an Israeli lawfare centre, based on his decision to boycott an official exchange program between the University of Sydney and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A 2017 conference at the university was the first academic conference in Australia specifically on the BDS movement. The 2024 Gaza solidarity encampment was one of the very first internationally outside the United States. Despite his clear opposition to Palestine advocates, the university’s Vice-Chancellor, Mark Scott, made a pragmatic decision not to disband it by force – a refusal which enraged Israel lobbyists, who rewarded Scott by mounting a ferocious but unsuccessful campaign for his dismissal.
No sooner had our opponents’ lawyers notified us that the complaint had been lodged with the Australian Human Rights Commission – a necessary first step before going to the Federal Court – than the story was on the front page of the Murdoch flagship Australian newspaper. For the lobby, a major benefit of lawfare is the opportunity to smear Palestine advocates in the media.
Israel-supporters have every reason to want to discredit us in this way. The Palestine solidarity movement in Australia is large and vigorous. October 7, 2023 triggered an exponential increase in organising. Capital cities are theatres of regular pro-Palestinian demonstrations and other events, including port blockades. In August, up to 300,000 people walked across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the pro-Palestinian March for Humanity: not just the largest pro-Palestinian, but the largest antiracist demonstration Australia has ever seen. Attendance was massively boosted by publicity flowing from a police attempt to ban the march, and relentless opposition to the Palestine movement from the premier of New South Wales (NSW), Chris Minns, a politician whose stultifying Zionism has earned him the alternative title of ‘Minister for Israel’.
The extent of the popular mobilisation for Gaza has extracted a series of timid pro-Palestinian half-measures from the Australian Labor Party (ALP), the party currently in government federally and in many states, including NSW. The ALP certainly has pro-Palestinian members, including the former Foreign Minister, Bob Carr, but it has proven itself to be completely incapable of the decisive action that Israel’s crimes demand. Its limited concessions include recognition of Palestinian statehood – criticized as meaningless and counterproductive by many in the Palestine solidarity movement – and partial sanctions on several Israeli politicians. But it has refused to end arms sales to Israel, sanction Israel in general, or abandon the liberticidal restrictions on protest introduced in several states. Nevertheless, even the inadequate measures it has taken have been a step too far for the Israel lobby, which has redoubled its efforts to quash the opposition to the genocide in civil society to which the ALP has been responding.
Israel-supporters are unable to muster anything remotely approaching the numbers that the Palestine solidarity movement can bring onto the streets. Instead, they rely on their influence within Australia’s often backward and conformist political and managerial class. Not just in universities, but in the media, health care, the arts world, or education, managers have indulged the Israel lobby at every turn in a chilling spectacle of lack of scruple and complicity with genocide. Their gratification of Israeli barbarism must never be forgotten.
With the cooperation of institutional leaders, Israel-supporters have been responsible for hundreds of attacks on advocates for Palestine in a huge variety of organisations. These do not just proceed via formal lawfare like the case against John and me, but through censorship, exclusion, and, very frequently, vexatious abuse of organisations’ codes of conduct and complaints procedures. These moves are one manifestation of the strengthening of reactionary political energies in many parts of the global north, Australia included.
From the outset, many Palestine advocates, myself included, have identified opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza as the front line of antifascist and antiracist struggles in society. Several developments in the last few months have confirmed this analysis strikingly. First, the federal government-appointed ‘special envoy to combat antisemitism’, senior Israel-lobbyist Jillian Segal, was recently revealed to have been involved in substantial donations to the far-right, anti-immigrant lobby group ‘Advance’ via her family’s trust, thereby funding political forces that are themselves responsible for antisemitism and other forms of racism in society.
Second, the strength of Sydney’s Harbour Bridge march and other pro-Palestine demonstrations provoked major far-right mobilisations across the country in the form of the ‘March for Australia’ movement, in which neo-Nazis have played a leading role. Opposition to Palestine, that is, has become a lightning-rod for the far-right, and is spearheading a reactionary turn in domestic politics of concerning proportions.
The case against John and me will be an important battle in the lobby’s attempts in Australia to muzzle opposition to the genocide. For them, the stakes are high: if they succeed, they will have cemented a legal identification of anti-Zionists as antisemites, and placed a major obstacle in the way of pro-Palestinian politics in Australia and any other jurisdiction that may look to Australian law. But if, as is far more likely, they lose, they will have seriously undermined their wider project of insulating their anti-Palestinianism from the determined opposition it is encountering all over the world.
In either case, Israel supporters will have succeeded in dragging us into a legal morass. They hope, no doubt, that this will distract and gag us, and that we will be forced to suspend our ordinary advocacy for justice. They are sorely mistaken. Repression of opposition to the genocide, including through lawfare against advocates like us, has done nothing other than galvanize the Palestine solidarity movement. A crowdfunding appeal for our case raised over half of the initial AU$250,000 target in its first three weeks of operation, with more donations continuing to flow in. And on the Sydney University campus where we work, Palestinian flags increasingly fly from office windows, despite the university’s attempt to ban them. Whether it is John and me who are attacked or others, it is clear that Israel-supporters’ efforts to stifle Palestine
No comments:
Post a Comment