Australia’s silence on Jew-hatred should’ve drawn more attention right after Oct 7, former official says

In the weeks after Oct. 7, the Biden administration led an international effort that produced a statement condemning Jew-hatred that nearly three dozen countries signed.

The U.S. State Department’s office of the special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism asked Australia to sign on, but Canberra declined, according to a former senior State Department official.

“We really should have made a bigger deal out of it at the time,” the former official told JNS. “It was signed by dozens of countries. It was a strong statement, but any major U.S. ally should have signed onto it.”

“We definitely asked the Australians, and they didn’t,” the former official said. “In retrospect, that was actually a much bigger deal than it seemed at the time, I guess.”

The statement on Nov. 6, 2023, called Hamas’s attack “barbaric.” It said that it was “the most lethal assault against the Jewish people since the Holocaust,” which has “an immense impact on Jewish communities worldwide.”

The signatories, many of them envoys on Jew-hatred, added that they “will do everything in our power to see that hatred against Jews is rebuked and that Jewish life flourishes in peace” and that “antisemitism and all forms of hate are incredibly harmful and unacceptable.”

Australia’s decision to sit out was “glaring,” the former senior official told JNS.

“It was a huge sign that even though the United States pushed them to sign onto this statement—it’s not like we are committing them to anything,” the former official said. “They refused. It’s like the top country that should be on there is not on there.”

On Sunday, Tammy Bruce, the State Department spokeswoman, stated in a 51-word readout that Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, spoke with Penny Wong, Australia’s minister of foreign affairs, about “issues in the Indo-Pacific and the Middle East, along with global efforts to combat antisemitism.”

After mentioning that the two discussed Jew-hatred—a highly unusual element in a readout of a secretarial-level call—Bruce said Rubio “also underscored the importance of the U.S.-Australia alliance for upholding a free and open Indo-Pacific.”

The former senior U.S. official told JNS that “a lot goes into these statements.”

“What to mention, what not to mention. Every single word is scrutinized,” the former official said. “They made a strategic decision to phrase it exactly that way.”

“It’s obviously important what they said to each other, but that the United States put out a signal like this and mentioned antisemitism by name means that they are telling the Australians, ‘Hey, of all the things that aren’t classified that we talked about, these are the things we really care about,’” the former senior official told JNS.

“We don’t have to do much analysis of it,” the former official said. “You and I read the statement, and so did Australians, and by the way, so did the opposition leaders in Australia, the local Jewish community. And so, this is a signal that this is what the United States is prioritizing in the U.S.-Australian relationship.”

Read the statement and signatories

‘Deeply disappointing and counterproductive’

Anthony Albanese, the Australian prime minister, and Wong, the minister with whom Rubio spoke the prior day, stated on Monday that Australia intends to recognise a Palestinian state during the U.N. General Assembly in September.

“Australia was the first country to raise its hand at the United Nations in support of Resolution 181 to create the State of Israel—and a Palestinian state,” the duo stated. “More than 77 years later, the world can no longer wait for the implementation of that resolution to be negotiated between the parties.”

David May, research manager and senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, told JNS that “it is no coincidence that a dramatic rise in antisemitism is gripping Australia, while its government is reversing decades of balanced policy on Israel.”

He said that “it is important that Secretary Rubio is centering Australia’s antisemitism epidemic in his conversations with Australia. Australia’s failure to combat antisemitism domestically cannot be separated from its strained position on the Jewish state internationally.”

The American Jewish Committee stated that the announcement by the Australian leaders is “deeply disappointing and counterproductive.”

“Such a unilateral move ignores the complex realities on the ground, particularly that the Palestinian Authority does not control all Palestinian territories it claims, including Gaza, which is governed by Hamas, an internationally recognized terrorist organization committed to the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people,” the AJC said.

“This announcement, along with similar actions by the United Kingdom, France and Canada, empowers and strengthens Hamas as the group continues to refuse to negotiate an agreement for the release of the remaining hostages and a ceasefire,” it added.

According to the U.S. State Department’s 2023 International Religious Freedom Report for Australia, Jewish groups “criticized government officials for failing to punish antisemitic behavior that occurred during pro-Palestinian protests following the Hamas Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel.”

“The Executive Council of Australian Jewry recorded 657 reported antisemitic incidents from Oct. 7, the date of the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, to Nov. 30, more than seven times the number during the same period in 2022,” per the report. “Incidents included death threats, intimidation and vandalism.”

The U.S. government estimated in the report that Jews make up 0.4% of the Australian population.

The Executive Council of Australian Jewry’s 2024 report on Jew-hatred in Australia reported a 316% increase in antisemitic incidents (2,062) between Oct. 1, 2023, and Sept. 30, 2024, compared to the 495 such incidents between Oct. 1, 2022, and Sept. 30, 2023.

“The Hamas massacre in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, acted as a signal, a green light, for many Islamists and left-wing extremists that it was open season on Jews as evidenced by the overt hatred and the surge in the number of incidents,” per the report. “Oct. 7 emboldened many to act on their hatred of Jews.”

‘Like an obvious thing’

The former senior U.S. official told JNS that Australia was surprisingly bereft of Jew-hatred before Oct. 7. But after the Hamas attacks, there has been a “tsunami” of antisemitism in Australia, per the former official.

The former senior U.S. official told JNS that when Aaron Keyak, who was then the deputy special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism at the State Department, visited Australia in May 2024, it was the first time that someone from the 20-year-old office had travelled Down Under.

On that trip, Keyak pushed Australia to name a special envoy to combat Jew-hatred, but the country refused, according to the former senior U.S. official.

“We stepped up our engagement with the Australian government. We were pushing them to appoint a special envoy on antisemitism,” the former official said. “If you look at our allies—the UK, Canada, Germany—they all have special envoys on antisemitism. It’s just sort of like an obvious thing.”

“They refused to do it,” the former official said. (JNS sought comment from Keyak.)

The State Department website notes that after Keyak visited Australia in May 2024, during which “he advocated with Australian lawmakers to appoint a special envoy to counter antisemitism,” Australia “appointed a special envoy in early July.”

“It was a much bigger diplomatic effort than it should have been with such a close ally,” the former U.S. official told JNS.

‘It’s going to be glaring’

The Australian ethic of “social cohesion” meant in this case that the government saw the fight against antisemitism as irrevocably bound to fighting Islamophobia.

“When they would say that to us, we would say, ‘Listen. We’re not here to talk about Islamophobia. You do what you need to do there,’” the former senior official told JNS. “‘But we insist that you appoint a special envoy and take this issue seriously. Your own citizens are scared, and they’re not feeling supported by the government.’ Which they weren’t.”

It took a “monumental effort” to get Australia to appoint the special envoy, Jillian Segal, according to the former U.S. official. Segal was on the short list for a long time, but “what held up her appointment was the fact that they couldn’t get the Muslim Australian community to coalesce around one candidate, because of this overriding value of social cohesion,” the former official said. (JNS sought comment from Segal.)

“When they would speak to us about it, they would say, ‘We can’t find a special envoy on Islamophobia,’ as if that fully explained why they didn’t appoint a special envoy on antisemitism,” the former senior U.S. official said.

The 30th anniversary of the AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2024 brought the issue of Australia’s lack of a special envoy to a head.

Deborah Lipstadt, then the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, travelled to Buenos Aires in July 2024, and she and some 30 counterparts signed onto “global guidelines” to fight Jew-hatred.

The United States and Argentina convened the other special envoys for the gathering, according to the former senior official. “We were all diplomatic about it, but we told Australia, essentially, ‘it’s going to be glaring.’ We didn’t want to repeat the situation where one of our closest allies didn’t stand up to one of the top foreign-policy priorities when it comes to human rights that the United States is pushing internationally,” the former official said.

“So we told them that they could only attend if the delegation was led by a special envoy,” the former U.S. official told JNS. “So they ended up appointing her weeks before that. She got into office, which is good. Appointing the special envoy is like the first step. You have to staff them, resource them, give them diplomatic heft, the support of the government.”

“She’s not the least supported special envoy of all the countries, but she’s not given the proper staffing and resources for a country that’s facing such an antisemitism crisis,” the former official said.

Simon Twisk, the Australian ambassador to Argentina, was listed as a signatory on the 2024 global guidelines.

According to the former senior State Department official, the current Foggy Bottom senior staff are “almost certainly” aware of the department’s prior history with Australia on antisemitism, since 20 staffers, who aren’t political appointees, work in the “autonomous” office, and some of them worked with Australia.

Prior to a call like Rubio’s and Wong’s, a State Department “tasker” communications would have gone out, and it would have been an “all hands on deck” situation to research what the secretary of state needed to know. More than 100 people from various bureaus at the department and the U.S. embassies in Australia would have been involved, according to the former senior U.S. official.

Fewer people would have signed off on the “matter of fact” readout, but the White House, National Security Council and the Pentagon may have been involved, the former official told JNS.

That Jew-hatred was mentioned so prominently in the readout is significant, given that many issues are important to the U.S.-Australian relationship, including China, the South China Sea and North Korea.

“They didn’t have to call out ‘antisemitism,’” the former senior U.S. official told JNS. “They could have said ‘human rights.’ They could have said ‘hate.’ Or they could have just said ‘Gaza’ or the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict.’”

The office of the special envoy, similar to other offices at the State Department, fights to get their issues mentioned during meetings and in readouts after the meetings, according to the former official. “It adds diplomatic heft to your office when it’s brought up at the highest levels,” the former official said. “Even just mentioning the word is a sign to the government, and this sounds like more than that.”

“It’s huge,” the former senior official said.

JNS