It's time for the Jewish Council to admit it was wrong on 'hate crimes'

In February I wrote about a joint statement put out on January 22 2025 by the Jewish Council of Australia (JCA), Human Rights Watch, the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, Australian National Imams Council, Human Rights Law Centre and Amnesty International ‘on recent hate crimes in Australia’. I addressed my concerns to the JCA because it purports to represent Jews who ‘reject the assertion that Jews and the State of Israel are one and the same, or that all Jewish people support, without criticism, the actions of the Israeli government and military’.

I am an anti-Zionist Jewish person living in australia who signed the JCA’s core principles. It should be said that, unlike many online representations of it, the JCA does not explicitly call itself an anti-Zionist organisation. I nevertheless felt that I could support its principles. However, since reading its position on ‘hate crimes’ and following a number of media interventions made by its spokespeople on the widespread reports of a massive uptick in antisemitic attacks in australia, I have become increasingly uncomfortable with that decision. I set the reasons for this out in a SubStack post on 7 February.

I was alarmed that the joint statement co-signed by the JCA called for more ‘comprehensive data on hate crimes’ because it ‘helps inform governments of the need to protect people faced with discrimination.’ The statement also said that hate crimes ‘underscore the need for Australian governments to support anti-racism community initiatives, as well as education and community dialogue to combat prejudice and promote understanding.’

As I wrote,

The statement’s naming of racist violence as ‘hate crimes’ mirrors the state’s language and framing. Equating racism with hate crimes implies that it can be parcelled into discrete events. It also suggests that the state and its criminal punishment institutions can be the arbiters of what constitutes racism and how it should be dealt with. It, unintentionally to be sure, isolates racism in the actions of outlier individuals, while the state is allowed to remain neutral, disconnected from the historical development and continual deployment of race as a technology of domination, exploitation, discrimination and violence. This in turn legitimises popular racist violence.

Referring to Dylan Rodríguez’s critiques of the notion of ‘hate crimes’ as criminological, I also argued that

Support for government action on ‘hate crimes’ will do little to enhance solidarity between Jews and other groups because it could justifiably be seen by Indigenous people, Muslims, and Black people as opening the door to more policing and punishment.

Indigenous and Muslim people in this continent, who continue to bear the brunt of the racial-colonial state’s violence and repression, should be especially concerned by a group that proclaims itself an ally rushing to accept statist narratives about the dangers of ‘hate’.

I tried to have this article published by a radical magazine based in australia. While the editors expressed an appreciation for it, they felt my critique was too harsh given attacks by the right-wing media on the JCA’s director following her appearance at an antiracist conference that has become the subject of racist retaliation. It should go without saying that my critiques are not in any way personal; they are political. Unconscionable attacks for rightly speaking out against the manipulation of anti-antisemitism for fascist ends must be vociferously defended against. However, this has no incidence on the JCA’s participation in building a narrative that paves the way for the introduction of extremely repressive legislation against hate crimes that cites untold increases in attacks on Jews as their justification, the Criminal Code Amendment (Hate Crimes) Bill 2024, passed on 6 February 2025.

Fast-forward to mid-March 2025. It has been publicly admitted that up to 14 incidents of ‘hate crimes’ targeting Jewish institutions and individuals, including what was described as a ‘terrorist threat’ – a caravan of explosives parked in the semi-rural suburb of Dural in Sydney - were faked. Specifically, according to New South Wales police minister, Yasmin Catley, the so-called ‘caravan plot’ was

a “con job” that was not ideologically motivated and was orchestrated by organised crime figures to distract police and influence prosecutions.

Further, as reported in The Guardian, ‘14 other incidents in recent months – which included an attempted arson attack on one synagogue and the graffiti of another – were also believed to be coordinated by “a very small group” or “potentially one individual”, and those who had been arrested so far had no ideologically motivations.’

(My role here is not to comment on the origins of these attacks, and whether the police narrative that they were faked to conceal operations of the ‘criminal gig economy’, for reasons that would be obvious to other abolitionists).

In addition to the national hate crimes legislation passed, the New South Wales government responded to these trumped-up incidents by passing ‘laws to crack down on hate speech and protests with the threat of hefty fines and jail time.’ The laws were described as ‘draconian’ even by members of NSW premier Chris Minns’ own Labor Party. According to an Instagram post from the New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties on 13 March, Minns has told the Australian newspaper that he won’t repeal the hate speech laws.

Greens politicians Jenny Leong and Mehreen Faruqi, in response to the news that these antisemitic ‘hate crimes’ incidents were faked, claimed to have been told this as early as January by the New South Wales police itself.

It is and has always been clear that the state’s interest in passing draconian hate crimes legislation has nothing to do with protecting any racialised group from racial violence. As I concluded in my earlier post, ‘fighting antisemitism means fighting racism, and fighting racism means fighting antisemitism. Fighting racism means resisting state logics, not appealing to or unwittingly colluding with state power’. In other words, the state never has nor will it ever have the interests of those whom it manages and disciplines on racial grounds at heart. Any performed care for Jews has less to do with pressure applied by any ‘lobby’ than it has to do with how, today in the context of the genocide in Palestine for which all western imperially-aligned states are responsible, antisemitism serves to secure white supremacy (an argument I elaborate upon in Chapter 5 of my new book The New Racial Regime).

This returns me to the role of the Jewish Council in all of this. On March 10, it published a statement reprimanding ‘those who have used these attacks to spread Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism [who] should be ashamed of themselves for exploiting the Jewish community to push bigotry and hatred, and attempt to silence legitimate criticism of Israel.’ However, nowhere is there a mention of its own role in providing a progressive cover for the introduction of hate crimes legislation, at both national and state level.

I do not believe it is too late to rectify this. But to (re)gain the trust of those who bear the brunt of racist state violence, the JCA and its co-signatories of the Joint Statement ‘on recent hate crimes in Australia’ should publicly admit that it spoke too soon, putting people at potential risk and further endangering anyone who acts and speaks against Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians.