The following speech was delivered by investigative journalist, filmmaker and author of the global bestseller The Palestine Laboratory, Antony Loewenstein, at the New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties annual dinner on 28 August 2025.
I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land, the Gadigal people, and pay my respects to their elders past and present.
Thank you all for coming and believing in truth-telling in these censorious times.
Thanks to the co-founder of the Jewish Council of Australia, Sarah Schwartz, for your generous words and courage. Thanks to my partner, Ali, for your love, support and partnership.
Thanks to the NSW Council for Civil Liberties for inviting me to deliver this year’s keynote address at a time when many institutions in Australia and globally are shying away from controversial subjects, if not banning them outright, worried about offending the easily offended and pleasing the complicit donors who thrive on maintaining an unsustainable status quo.
Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine if at least 60,000 Jews had been murdered in the last two years. The perpetrator was a self-described democracy with full Western backing. Armed to the teeth by Washington, London and Canberra. And, every day, we’d see the photos and videos of this genocidal state killing, maiming and starving the Jewish population.
It’s almost impossible to conceive of this scenario after the Holocaust, where I lost most of my family in the Nazi concentration camps. Instead, there would be calls for Western military intervention to stop this crazy state from slaughtering innocent Jewish men, women and children. The [United Nations] so-called ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrine would be enacted.
I speak to you as an Australian, German and Jew. I don’t deny or ignore the reality of antisemitism – vile acts against individuals simply because they’re Jewish. And it’s a growing problem in our societies. As is Islamophobia, hatred against First Nations peoples and refugees.
But antisemitism has been dangerously weaponised in the service of the most extreme, Israeli supremacist agenda. And far too many people who should know better have fallen right into this linguistic and political trap set by the most belligerent members of the Jewish establishment and their media and political allies.
I’m looking at you, university bosses, ABC managers, media editors and cultural institutions.
These people don’t care about Jews, not really, but a cartoon version of us – a people who can morph into a convenient political weapon to be wielded against enemies of the day.
Today, that ‘enemy’ is Palestinians and Islam.
As a Jew, I confidently say that Israeli actions, long before October 7 but certainly since, are fuelling hatred against all Jews because we’re tarred with the brush of Israeli fanaticism.
It should be uncontroversial to say this in a public forum.
When we’ve all seen Israeli soldiers proudly destroying Gaza, torturing Palestinians and expressing a desire to literally wipe Gaza off the map, this is fuel on the fire of social disharmony that our deluded political leaders refuse to acknowledge.
A livestreamed genocide will inevitably bring a great deal of anger, not least because Australian politicians largely do little more than issue strong statements of condemnation rather than taking tangible action against Israel, [such as] imposing sanctions [or to] cease trading with Israel or sending parts for the deadly F35 fighter jets deployed by Israel over Gaza.
Prime minister Anthony Albanese and NSW premier Chris Minns need to update their talking points and get real.
This year has seen a massive acceleration of anti-democratic legislation by the Minns government, such as anti-hate speech and protest laws. These were allegedly implemented to tackle antisemitism and reduce vilification on the basis of race. But the NSW Council for Civil Liberties rightly condemned this move as draconian that would do nothing to reduce already out-of-control discrimination against minorities.
It seems that the NSW government is getting its marching orders from a vocal and unrepresentative extremist pro-Israel lobby.
I salute the NSW Council for Civil Liberties for having an enviable record on speaking out in defence of free speech, public assembly and the liberties of those the state or police want to extinguish.
The free speech warriors on the Right, from hacks in the Murdoch cabal to the Liberal/National party to anti-woke culture warriors, fall silent when one outspoken activist or journalist is cancelled. Or cheer when political opponents, often women of colour, are smeared and silenced.
Think Antoinette Lattouf, fired by gutless ABC managers in thrall to a group of pro-Israel zealots who feared being exposed in a Murdoch propaganda outlet. All because she had dared to post truthful information about Israel’s starvation campaign in Gaza.
Or Randa Abdel-Fattah, a Palestinian woman whose mere existence as a proud Palestinian caused a recent meltdown inside La Trobe University because a secretive group of Jewish academics wrote to them demanding that she be removed from the Bendigo Writers Festival for baseless claims of ‘antisemitism’.
The result was the almost complete collapse of the literary event when principled writers followed Abdel-Fattah in withdrawing after being told to sign a code of conduct that demanded obedience to extremely vague conditions.
The code asked speakers to “avoid language or topics that could be considered inflammatory, divisive or disrespectful”.
Who decides what’s inflammatory? Is talking about the rape of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers in Israeli jails divisive? It’s certainly true, and would undoubtedly upset some people, but that can hardly be the standard on which we create legitimate safe spaces for all views, even those which are deeply upsetting and shocking.
In a time of genocide in Palestine, growing fascism in the US under President Trump and racist border policies across the European Union, now is the time for difficult conversations. Even if that upsets Zionist Jews, or fascists.
As citizens of this country, we have a responsibility to defend those who have no voice or are being abused for daring to express their point of view. And as a Jew with privilege, I’ve long believed that I must play that role. Many in this room should too, whether in your professional or private lives.
Jewish lives are viewed differently to Arab, Palestinian or Muslim lives. More valued. More special. Jews have redder blood. More deserving of sympathy and solidarity.
I utter these words with seething anger and sadness. It shouldn’t be true, but it clearly is. It should be obvious that all lives are equal. But that’s not how many in the mainstream media, political class and major institutions see it.
If at least 60,000 Jews were being obliterated, rest assured we would rightly never hear the end of it from all these apparently civilised people and groups that pride themselves on tolerance and acceptance.
Since October 7 and the horrific Hamas attack on Israel, we’ve all experienced the nothing less than absurd situation where Jewish lives lost that day are prioritised over the infinitely greater loss of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank due to Israel’s policy of mass slaughter.
Israel has murdered at least 240 Palestinian journalists in Gaza, the deadliest conflict for media workers ever recorded. Far too many of my Western journalistic colleagues have responded with silence or apathy at this shocking statistic.
Call this what it is: racism.
And yet the Albanese government, Chris Minns and far too many other craven leaders constantly tell us that ‘social cohesion’ is under threat because people are protesting in the streets against the war in Gaza, daring to call out Israel and demanding Australia stop selling weapons parts to the Jewish state.
In a healthy democracy, peaceful protest is welcomed and supported. Yet in Australia there are growing calls by many in the media, political class and Jewish community to restrict the ability of protestors to legally march for Palestine, or any cause that they don’t like. This must be resisted wholeheartedly.
Our leaders tell us that Jews are offended and paralysed with fear over strident criticisms of Israel, scared of walking down the street, and new laws should be considered to protect them from hurt. The mainstream bodies of the Zionist Jewish community constantly issue statements that dare to suggest that Australia in the last two years is akin to Germany after the Nazi Party took control in 1933.
This is nothing less than gaslighting of the highest order and not based on fact or reason. While the Albanese government now alleges that Iran is behind some of the major attacks against Jews in the last 22 months, it’s worth questioning both this claim – we’re yet to see any hard evidence to back it up – and challenge the presumptions behind it.
There’s been a dangerous and deliberate slippage in the guilty-by-association allegations against those who dare to speak out in support of universal human rights and against the wholesale evisceration of the Palestinian people. Peaceful protestors who have been marching for close to two years are routinely smeared as Hamas supporters, aligned with Tehran and useful idiots for terrorism.
In the UK and US, peaceful opponents of Israeli activities are tarred, arrested, deported and attacked while the perpetrators and enablers of this apocalypse are protected.
Let me be clear: physically attacking Jews, Jewish places of worship or Jewish businesses is unacceptable and illegal. It has no place here. It’s certainly increased since October 7 and must be condemned and fought.
But there’s been a dangerous conflation between legitimate opposition to Israeli policies – even its very existence, as no state has a legal ‘right to exist’ despite what pro-Israel backers want you to believe – and Jewish identity, much of which is not tied to Israel being an occupying nation. Israel maintains the longest occupation in modern times.
The backers of Israel, the state that’s committing the vast bulk of the violence, are treated with concern and respect. They’re given copious airtime across the media, from the ABC to Murdoch, and are rarely seriously challenged on their racism and dehumanisation of Arabs.
I grew up in the Jewish community in Melbourne and it saddens me to share how common the disdain for Arabs and Muslims was and still is.
In contrast, if a Palestinian dares to claim that racism against Palestinians is ubiquitous amongst Israeli Jews – a statement of fact – they’ll be cautioned and likely not get invited back by that media outlet.
Can you imagine how a white, pro-apartheid South African would have been viewed in 1984, ten years before the end of that vile regime? In sane circles, they would be treated with the contempt that they deserved.
All peoples deserve to be recognised and there are sound reasons – if managed well by the media – for even the far-right and Nazis to be heard and necessarily challenged.
But in Australia and across the Western media since October 7, Jewish feelings are now given special treatment and indulged. Too rarely are we asked which Jews are allegedly feeling hurt and why. Is the hurt because Israel is accused of genocide and deliberately starving Palestinians?
This may upset some Jews to hear, but being offended doesn’t necessarily mean a crime has been committed against you. Hurt feelings can be managed with a therapist. It’s certainly not antisemitic and nor does it need writers’ festivals, art galleries, universities and the national broadcaster to censor in the name of protecting these fragile Jewish feelings. Or pursuing the belief that by avoiding these difficult conversations, Jews will be protected.
Nonetheless, it's undeniable that some Jews, especially after the October 7 Hamas attacks, continue to suffer fear, pain and intergenerational trauma, only a relatively short time after the Nazi Holocaust. These are unsurprising emotions and can’t be ignored or dismissed.
None of this means, however, that these anxieties should drive government policy alone.
Where is the institutional concern for Muslim feelings when in the last decades, since September 11, literally millions of them have been slaughtered in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Gaza and elsewhere?
To maintain the illusion that Jews are uniquely vulnerable in the West due to the undeniably dark history of genocidal antisemitism requires an ability to ignore present-day realities and create an almost entirely imagined victimhood that very few journalists, politicians and institutions are willing to interrogate.
Far too many non-Jews don’t understand the difference between Judaism and Zionism and presume that all Jews are both. The reality is far more nuanced; a growing number of Jews, especially between the ages of 18 and 35, are shunning Zionism because it’s an inherently discriminatory ideology that dehumanises and ethnically cleanses Palestinians to survive and thrive.
Zionist Messianism is now the rule of the land in Israel and it’s likely turning the Jewish state into a full-blown theocracy in the coming decades.
I’ve been close enough to any number of controversies around the Zionist lobby since I started writing about them in 2003. As a journalist who’s been reporting on Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, as well as across the Arab and Muslim world including Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, I’ve been attacked for years for daring to articulate a more humane, less militarised Judaism and show the Islamic world in all its complexities.
The Israel lobby has tried to get my books literally pulped, have me silenced, and attacked me obsessively. And yet it hasn’t worked. In fact, the opposite has occurred – my voice is now louder than ever. It’s why I have a moral responsibility to support others who don’t enjoy this benefit.
Deploying the full force of the state in the act of censorship and intimidation begs the question: in whose service? Israel? Or Jews? And then it’s vital to ask: which Jews? Because a growing number of Jews don’t want a censorious state or media to protect the public from robust reporting and debate on Israel, Palestine, Islam and immigration.
Netanyahu and his backers, along with enforcers of Israeli policies in the West, are fanning antisemitism and have no interest in reducing it. As the Israeli writer Caroline Landsmann wrote recently in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz:
Antisemitism will imprison the liberal minority into the nuclear ghetto that Netanyahu is creating for us here. It will ensure that money stays in Israel and continues to flow into it; that French and Australian Jews will buy apartments in Israel for a rainy day, a pied-a-terre with a safe room; that Israel’s economy remains stable no matter what the country turns into and that Jewish immigration to Israel rises. He wants Israel as a tax shelter. Israel as a nuclear shelter.
These are the debates that must be discussed here, in parliament, the media, universities, writers’ festivals and public spaces. Curtailing honest conversation does nothing to protect Jews and only inflames frustrations. Frank dialogue is desperately needed in a country that prides itself on frankness but which, in the last two years, seems content to rehash tired platitudes that please the powerful at the expense of those feeling the brunt of the censoring.
Do we want Australia to be a country that understands uncomfortable conversations are essential to process the traumas of our world, or a neutered state that withers at the first sight of controversy?
Thank you.
Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist, filmmaker and author of The Palestine Laboratory, winner of the 2023 Walkley Best Book Award which is now available in 16 global editions.
Thank you Antony. This article is extremely helpful and informative. I’m very grateful.
Your voice of reason is refreshing. Thankyou.