Statement - Australian Special Envoy's Proposed Plan to Combat Antisemitism
Official Statement on the Australian Special Envoy’s Proposed Plan to Combat Antisemitism
On 10 July 2025, Special Envoy Jillian Segal AO submitted her Plan to Combat Antisemitism for the Australian government’s consideration. A broad spectrum of stakeholders across Australian society have raised concerns that the proposed measures risk undermining fundamental democratic rights and freedoms, including freedom of speech, for political purposes.
The General Delegation of Palestine in Canberra reaffirms its firm opposition to all forms of racism, discrimination, hatred, violence, or intimidation directed at any person or group based on their ethnicity, race, or religion – including anti-Palestinian racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and racism against First Nations people.
The Plan’s call for widespread adoption of the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism is deeply concerning. The IHRA definition has been widely criticized and discredited for conflating antisemitism with legitimate criticism of Israel and Zionism. This dangerous false conflation distorts and trivializes the real and grave threat of antisemitism in order to shield Israel from being held accountable to global standards of human rights and international law. The IHRA definition’s lead drafter, antisemitism expert Kenneth Stern, has himself warned it is being “weaponized” to suppress political speech.
Palestinians must be able to speak freely about their own history, narrative, and lived experiences. All people of conscience must have the right to openly and legitimately criticize injustices and violations committed by any state, including Israel’s ongoing policies and practices of settler-colonial expansionism, apartheid, racial persecution, ethnic cleansing, enforced starvation, and genocidal war against the Palestinian people – without fear of being silenced or mischaracterized.
This has never been more urgent than it is today, when the very existence of the Palestinian people in their own homeland is at stake as Israel, the unlawful occupying power, escalates its settler colonial project of displacement and replacement which has systematically suffocated the Palestinian people as a group for over seven decades in order to deny them their inalienable right to self-determination. Speaking out against these violations is not an act of antisemitism; it is a duty and a moral obligation.
The true fight against antisemitism is inherently tied to all other struggles against racism and oppression around the world, including the Palestinian cause. That is why countless Jewish individuals and organizations – here in Australia, in Israel, and around the world – continue working to oppose both antisemitism and Israel’s violations of international law and the rights of the Palestinian people.
The General Delegation of Palestine urges the Australian government to reject the adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism as a tool for public policy, and to seriously consider anti-racism frameworks that oppose all forms of racism equally and holistically, with clarity, fairness, and integrity. The National Anti-Racism Framework developed by the Australian Human Rights Commission is one example in this regard.
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