David Slucki

But I also think, you know, if you're saying anti-Semitism involves double standard of criticizing Israel and not other countries in equal measure, that's a kind of difficult thing to measure.

You know, how, say on a university campus, how are you going to enforce that?

the fact that students aren't protesting China or Iran to the same extent as Israel.

It's the kind of thing that, you know, it's really difficult to do and it doesn't invalidate necessarily people's criticism of Israel.

And so we need to be really clear about what is criticism and what is harassment, abuse of people as well.

Not yet.

I don't think.

I haven't heard much that suggests it yet.

But I do expect once we move past...

the kinds of focus that we're hearing now, which is really around this question of lived experience and the way people experience it on a day-to-day basis, I think we will still end up getting there.

And I will say that one of my concerns about the Royal Commission, as well as it becoming this proxy for debates over Israel and Palestine,

What I've seen since Bondi, and particularly since the announcement of the Royal Commission, has been an absolute explosion online in antisemitism, and in ways that I hadn't seen before Bondi.

And so, you know, as valuable as I hope the Royal Commission will be, and I think even just listening to all the stories we're hearing that is, the ways in which that sparks a backlash against the Jewish community has been...

pretty shocking to me as someone who is writing about and working on antisemitism every day and is usually pretty desensitized to a lot of things I see.

But that's been really striking, the rise in antisemitism since Bondi.

Yeah, I mean, it will.

And I know that the commissioner talked about giving leave to the Jewish Council of Australia to appear.

I think it is very important.

You know, we're 117,000 roughly, according to the 2021 census.

We're mainly concentrated in Melbourne and Sydney with a small but substantial community in Perth and then smaller communities dotted around the country.