Australia’s campus antisemitism hearings put identity and speech at the center of university culture

A public hearing in Australia’s Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion has turned the country’s university debate from policy language into a blunt question of daily campus life: whether Jewish students and academics can participate in classrooms, protests and social spaces without being treated as stand-ins for a foreign government or targets for abuse.

The commission heard Monday that an academic at the University of New South Wales was subjected to Nazi salutes by students in a business class for international students in 2024. The witness, a tutor and PhD candidate identified by the pseudonym ACJ, told the inquiry that four students performed the salutes toward him. He said his grandparents had survived the Holocaust and that Nazis “murdered a huge proportion” of his family, according to reporting from The Guardian. “When someone does a Nazi salute at me it feels like they want to kill me,” he told the commission.

The allegation was one part of a broader day of testimony in Melbourne, where the commission’s fourth block of hearings is examining the lived experiences of Jewish students and academics and how universities have responded to antisemitism. Several witnesses gave evidence under pseudonyms. The commission also heard from student, civil-rights and university-community figures, including Yasmine Johnson, a co-convener of Students for Palestine and education officer in the National Union of Students; Hugh de Kretser, president of the Australian Human Rights Commission; and Josh Keller of the Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism.

The hearing matters beyond Australia because it captures a campus culture problem now visible across several democracies: universities are trying to preserve robust debate over Israel, Gaza and Palestinian rights while also confronting the ways political speech can become identity-based hostility. The issue is not whether criticism of Israel is permissible. Witnesses and counsel at the hearing acknowledged that debate over the Middle East is legitimate and important. The more difficult question is where institutions draw the line when students or staff say political language, gestures or assumptions make them unsafe or mark them as personally responsible for a war.

Royal Commissioner Virginia Bell AC SC opened the week’s evidence against a charged backdrop. Bell noted that Jewish witnesses had been subjected to “ugly antisemitic attacks” after giving evidence about antisemitism in earlier hearings, according to The Guardian. Those attacks had led to an Australian Federal Police referral and charges. That detail gave the day’s campus evidence an additional layer: the witnesses were not only recounting fear inside university settings, but doing so after previous witnesses faced abuse for speaking publicly.

The royal commission was established in January after the Bondi terrorist attack of Dec. 14, 2025, when 15 people were killed during a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach. The Australian government asked former High Court justice Virginia Bell to lead the inquiry. The commission’s terms include examining the nature and prevalence of antisemitism in Australian institutions and society, the key drivers of that antisemitism, the circumstances surrounding the Bondi attack, and recommendations to strengthen social cohesion and counter ideologically or religiously motivated extremism.

An interim report released in April made 14 recommendations focused largely on counterterrorism coordination and firearms policy. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that the commission found no legal or regulatory gaps that stopped authorities from preventing or responding to the Bondi attack, while still calling for improvements in counterterrorism capability, information sharing and firearms data. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said recommendations relevant to the Commonwealth would be adopted.

Monday’s campus testimony moved the inquiry from emergency response to the everyday social climate in Australian universities. ACJ told the commission that he was not certain the students knew he was Jewish, but said the behavior appeared clearly directed at him. He told supervisors the gesture was a crime and said he intended to go to police. The Guardian reported that the students were initially issued a formal warning and later suspended after New South Wales police carried out an investigation.

Another witness, identified as Liat, said she moved to Canberra in 2022 to study at the Australian National University and described herself as proudly Zionist, with both of her parents born in Israel. After the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel, she said she lost most of her non-Jewish friends. At one university event, she said, someone told her, “we’re not friends any more, you’re a Zionist.”

Liat told the commission she was called a “baby killer” and “genocide supporter” by students connected to ANU’s pro-Palestine encampment, according to The Guardian. She said criticism of Israel can be made without being antisemitic, but argued that she had not seen many examples in her university setting that avoided antisemitic tropes. She also described what she called a “pattern of deflection” in ANU’s response to reports from Jewish students, saying that when she and others reported antisemitism, including Nazi gestures, the university “either did nothing or responded so late … it corrected nothing.”

A third witness, identified as ACL, a postgraduate Jewish and Israeli student at a Melbourne university, told the commission that after Oct. 7 she felt she had to hide her identity on campus. She said she decided not to wear her Magen David necklace for the first time in her life. “I just felt like I couldn’t be Jewish on campus,” she said, according to The Guardian. “Every time I went to class, I would quite literally strip myself of my Jewish identity.”

ACL also described a classroom moment in which a lecturer allegedly referred to a scholar as a “good Jew” because the scholar “wasn’t a Zionist.” She said she did not object to criticism of Israel but opposed sweeping statements about Jews and the Middle East. The distinction is central to the commission’s campus focus: students and staff can hold sharply different positions on Israel’s government, Zionism, Palestinian rights and the war in Gaza, but universities are now being pressed on whether they can protect that debate from collapsing into ethnic or religious stereotyping.

Counsel assisting the commission, Zelie Heger SC, framed the issue in those terms. Heger said a recurring theme in the evidence was Jewish staff and students being assumed to hold a particular position on the Middle East despite diverse views within Jewish communities. “Many Jews are opposed to the actions of the government of Israel,” she said, according to The Guardian. “No one doubts the importance of being able to debate the conflict in the Middle East. But I anticipate the evidence will show that there have been instances where protest on these issues has crossed the line.”

That line is culturally volatile because campus politics often work through symbols, slogans and group belonging. Protest encampments, student-union motions, classroom debates and social-media posts do not only communicate policy demands. They tell students who is recognized as vulnerable, who is treated as suspect and whose grief is legible to peers. For Jewish students, testimony before the commission suggests the period since Oct. 7 has involved not only political disagreement but social sorting: friendship loss, pressure to conceal symbols, fear of being identified and frustration with institutional responses.

For Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students, universities face a parallel duty to protect speech and safety, particularly amid reports of Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism in many countries since the war began. That context is why any campus standard that addresses antisemitism alone risks being seen as selective, while any response that treats all conflicts as equivalent can fail to recognize specific threats against Jewish communities. The Australian government’s planned higher-education standard, as described in reporting on the hearing, is expected to require universities from next year to adopt definitions of antisemitism, Islamophobia and racism toward Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

The definition question is one of the hardest parts of the university response. Definitions can help administrators identify abuse and respond consistently. They can also become flashpoints if students or faculty believe the rules chill legitimate political expression. The challenge for universities is to make the standard specific enough to address Nazi gestures, slurs, threats and identity-based harassment, while clear enough that criticism of governments, military action, occupation, terrorism, nationalism or political ideology is not treated automatically as bigotry.

Monday’s testimony suggests that delay and ambiguity may be as damaging to trust as the original incidents. When witnesses describe universities responding late, issuing warnings that later escalate only after police involvement, or treating reports as ordinary conflict, the cultural message can be that the institution wants the controversy to pass more than it wants students to feel protected. In campus life, process is not invisible. Students watch how complaints are handled and draw conclusions about whose vulnerability counts.

The commission’s work also raises a media-effects problem: public hearings can create accountability, but they can also expose witnesses to fresh harassment. Bell’s reference to attacks on earlier witnesses shows how testimony can become content for the same hostile networks the inquiry is examining. That does not argue against public evidence. It does mean the commission, universities and news organizations have to handle identity-based testimony with precision: name only what needs naming, distinguish allegation from finding, and avoid turning individuals into symbols for audiences already primed to fight.

For Shadowfetch readers, the cultural significance is that the story is not only about Australian higher education. It is about the rules of pluralism inside institutions that still present themselves as training grounds for democratic argument. A university cannot promise a conflict-free environment. It can, however, be judged by whether students can disagree intensely without dehumanizing one another, and by whether staff and students can carry visible religious, ethnic or political identities without being reduced to them.

The commission has not finished its work. Its final report is expected before the first anniversary of the Bondi attack, and Bell can make recommendations before then if evidence warrants it. The campus hearings are likely to feed into a broader national argument over law enforcement, institutional responsibility, speech norms and social cohesion. What Monday’s testimony already makes clear is that the cultural stakes are immediate: for the witnesses, the debate over antisemitism is not an abstract fight over definitions. It is about whether walking into class means entering a shared civic space or bracing for a signal that you do not fully belong.

Sources

• The Guardian: “UNSW academic subjected to Nazi salutes in class, antisemitism commission hears,” July 13, 2026.
• Prime Minister of Australia: “Establishment of Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion,” Jan. 8, 2026.
• ABC News: “Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion interim report delivers 14 recommendations,” April 30, 2026.
• Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion public information on scope and hearings.