'Antisemitism Summit' is a Zionist lobby bid to sway local councils

The Summit is part of a wider effort to silence pro-Palestine solidarity at local level

Izabella Antoniou is a Greens councillor on Sydney’s Inner West Council. Opinions expressed are those of the author alone.

“Local councils should focus on three things: roads, rates and rubbish.”

This was the line endlessly thrown at me and other Greens colleagues as part of a coordinated attack from Better Councils, a Zionist-aligned lobby group who made their debut at the 2024 NSW local government elections.

Better Councils ran this line in Sydney’s inner west and eastern suburbs to drive down the vote for pro-Palestine candidates, delegitimise local Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) activism, and smear councils that take strong stances in support of Palestine as wasting their time and overstepping by dealing in foreign affairs.

The adage is reductive and incorrect. All politics is local. Depending on where you live, your local council provides core services that support people’s everyday wellbeing like childcare, disaster responses, housing, libraries, culture, art and community services.

Ironically, the Zionist lobby’s latest effort to squash pro-Palestine activism in councils shows they understand the power of local politics all too well.

The Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) – a multi-millionaire backed, US-founded pro-Israel organisation with explicit ties to Israeli intelligence agencies and institutions – is flying local representatives from across the country to the Gold Coast for the 2025 Australian Mayors Summit Against Antisemitism, which begins today.

In August, Michael West Media revealed that the summit’s sponsors and speakers include a range of individuals and organisations that have profited off or publicly supported the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

CAM agitates for local councils to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which has been widely criticised for its conflation of Zionism and Judaism, and its ability to silence – and potentially criminalise – critiques of the Israeli state.

In 2024, CAM claimed that South Africa’s filing a case against Israel in the International Court of Justice on the charge of genocide was “like accusing the Allies in the Second World War of perpetrating genocide against the Nazis”.

Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Jillian Segal, Human Rights Commissioner Lorraine Finlay and former Labor Senator Nova Peris are slated to speak at the conference, while prominent local government figures like Inner West Council mayor Darcy Byrne, City of Sydney deputy mayor Zann Maxwell and City of Melbourne deputy lord mayor Roshena Campbell are among the summit’s attendees.

Like Better Councils, CAM and its affiliates recognise and understand the power and legitimising force local councils can have. CAM’s Municipal Action Plan seeks to entwine the lobby group’s rhetoric and policies into local government and provide councils with frameworks to silence accountability and criticism of a rogue state using the language of “social cohesion”.

Councils are a target for the Zionist lobby because people trust their local governments. According to the 2024 OECD Trust Survey, Australians rate councils as their most trusted level of government.

People understand that councils do much of the on-the-ground resilience work for communities. Councils provide and coordinate frontline community services and disaster recovery, and are able to quickly respond to needs and issues as they arise. This means councillors have huge amounts of power, and the ability to shape local rhetoric from the ground up.

Councillors and mayors appearing at the summit give credence to CAM, providing cultural capital and cover that distracts from the more dangerous elements and dog-whistles the event has employed, such as speakers who have spouted Islamophobic, alt-right and homophobic rhetoric.

There lies the twofold potential for groups like CAM. They’re able to exploit the trust people have in local governments for their own cause while eroding the existing trust people have with local governments more broadly, leaving communities increasingly polarised, vulnerable and isolated. Isolated groups are harder to mobilise, less able to hold power structures to account and less likely to fight back against dangerous rhetoric and policy.

At the Inner West Council, I and other non-Labor colleagues have been warning about Council’s need to respond to the rise in alt-right and white supremacist behaviour – the actual threat to diverse communities. We’ve been met with repeated insistence from Mayor Byrne – who is slated to present at the CAM summit – that foreign affairs are not the remit of local councils.

All politics is local. Labor’s attempts to shut down community BDS advocacy and crack down on protests against the genocide in Gaza show that they understand this perfectly well – as does the Zionist lobby.

Ultimately, the CAM summit is about winning a battle of rhetoric – not by winning hearts and minds, but by deciding the parameters of our social and political debate.

But if local government is the most accessible level of government, that means everyday people can play a valuable role in rejecting CAM’s Municipal Action Plan and the infiltration of local government by Zionist lobbying. You can ring, email, write to or DM your local councillors. Most of them don’t have staff and deal with all their correspondence themselves.

If you’re a council worker, join and lobby within your union – the ASU and USU – to push against the implementation of harmful policy that stifles dissent.

Pro-Israel groups have made it clear that what happens at local council beyond “roads, rates and rubbish” matters. It is our moral duty as elected representatives to stand up for human rights in the face of a livestreamed genocide and protect our communities by rejecting dog-whistles and attempts to silence protest at all levels of government.

Anything less is a disgrace.