My Submission to the Australian Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion
Mike Lowe, Lead Facilitator, Initiatives of Change Australia
About the submitter
I am the lead facilitator at Initiatives of Change Australia, an organisation with a hundred-year history of building trust across the world’s divides. Our approach begins with individuals taking personal responsibility — looking first at themselves before pointing fingers at others. I submit this as an Australian who is neither Jewish, Muslim, Israeli, Palestinian, nor Arab, but who has a deep commitment to social cohesion in this country and no partisan interest in any particular community.
The evidence from facilitated dialogue
Over the past 18 months I have helped facilitate a number of Palestinian-Jewish dialogues in Melbourne, including a session specifically designed to address the most triggering topics: the meaning of the word “Zionism,” phrases such as “From the River to the Sea” and “Globalise the Intifada,” questions about genocide, and the wearing of symbols such as the Israeli flag or the keffiyeh.
What we demonstrated through careful, trauma-aware facilitation is that not only is it possible to have these conversations — it may be essential to do so.
The process we used asked participants, when triggered by something said, to pause; acknowledge and feel the emotion; and then reflect: “What meaning did I bring to what I heard?” and then to bring curiosity to ask: “What did the speaker mean when they said it?” This process, in the safety of small facilitated group discussions, produced moments of understanding across profound disagreement.
A key finding was that contested phrases carry a wide spectrum of meaning. “Zionism,” for example, ranges from uncritical support for the Israeli state through to the view that every Jew is by default a Zionist because of the centrality of Jerusalem (Zion) throughout Jewish liturgy and practice — including the famous declaration ‘next year in Jerusalem’ at the conclusion of the Passover Seder — with many positions in between, including those who affirm both Israeli and Palestinian self-determination. Similarly, “From the River to the Sea” is used by some to call for the expulsion of non-Palestinians, and by others simply as an expression of hope for Palestinian freedom that is compatible with the existence of an Israeli state. Treating either phrase as having a single, fixed, and malicious meaning misrepresents the reality.
The distinction between antisemitism and criticism of Israeli government action
It is important to recognise that while the majority of Australian residents want peace, there are some whose agenda is to garner partisan support for their side to continue the conflict in the Levant. There are also bad-faith actors who want to advance social division for their own local political ends. All of these bad-faith actors benefit from deliberately conflating legitimate criticism of the actions of the Israeli government and army with anti-Jewish sentiment and/or conflating criticisms of the actions of Hamas or Hezbollah with anti-Palestinian or anti-Arab sentiment.
This conflation has three major harms:
1. It exposes Jewish, Muslim and Palestinian Australians to the accusation that they are collectively responsible for horrors committed far away.
2. It helps brings the conflict to Australia by pressurising Jews, Muslims and Arabs to pick a partisan side.
3. By muddying the definition of anti-semitism it shields genuinely antisemitic conduct from scrutiny.
If we are to meaningfully reduce antisemitism in Australia, we must draw a clear and defensible line between anti-Jewish sentiment and criticism of a state and its government. Policy that blurs this line — by treating political phrases as inherently antisemitic — makes that work harder, not easier.
The lesson of fragile multiculturalism
I recently visited Izmir (formerly Smyrna), which for centuries was one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse cities in the Mediterranean. Its Armenian population was largely spared the wider genocide that swept through the Ottoman Empire. Yet when acute pressure arrived — the Greek invasion of 1919 and the subsequent Turkish military advance — that diversity collapsed rapidly into ethnic cleansing. The multicultural coexistence had been real, but it was shallow. The communities had lived in separate quarters without deep relationship or dialogue between them.
Australia’s multiculturalism faces the same risk. Tolerance without understanding is fragile. When pressure comes — as it has since October 2023, and as it did so tragically at Bondi Beach in December 2025 — only communities with genuine relationships and the practice of dialogue across difference will hold together.
When challenging, even triggering, conversations are shut down by law or policy, communities lose the very mechanism by which misunderstanding and fear are resolved. People retreat further into their own silos. The result is not less hatred — it is hatred that grows unseen, untested, and unchallenged.
Recommendations
- The Commission should recommend against blanket prohibitions on specific phrases or words where a range of meanings exists, including meanings that are not antisemitic. Enforcement of such prohibitions risks suppressing legitimate speech and driving conflict underground rather than resolving it.
- The Commission should recommend investment in facilitated, trauma-aware dialogue programs that bring Jewish, Muslim, Palestinian, Arab and other Australian communities into genuine conversation on difficult topics. Initiatives of Change Australia and many other not-for-profit organisations stand ready to support and deliver such programs.
- Any policy response to antisemitism should explicitly distinguish between anti-Jewish sentiment and criticism of the policies of the State of Israel, and should resist conflation of the two — from whatever direction that conflation comes.
I welcome the work of this Commission and urge it toward recommendations that strengthen the deep fabric of Australian social cohesion, rather than approaches that, however well-intentioned, risk making that fabric more brittle.
Mike Lowe Initiatives of Change Australia
