Australia saw antisemitic incidents quadruple after Oct. 7, Jewish group reports

(JTA) — Jews in Australia experienced a record number of 2,062 antisemitic incidents over the year following Oct. 7, 2023, according to an umbrella group of Jewish organizations.

A new report from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry found that the number quadrupled from the previous 12-month period, when it tracked 495 incidents. The group detailed a rise across all categories of antisemitic incidents: assault, vandalism, verbal abuse and harassment, messages, graffiti, and posters and other public speech.

One of the most notable increases showed up in physical assaults — 65 Australian Jews were assaulted, up from 11 people the year before.

The report described a surge of high-profile incidents during the last months of 2023, in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. Those attacks and Israel’s ensuing war in Gaza have sowed division and turmoil in Australian society, rattling many members of the country’s Jewish community, who number about 120,000.

In one viral event two days after the Hamas attacks, a group of pro-Palestinian marchers shouted “F— the Jews” outside Sydney’s famed opera house. Witnesses also claimed to have heard “Gas the Jews,” but a police investigation reported the chant they heard was “Where’s the Jews?” — a finding that did little to comfort Jews in Australia.

Over the following weeks, several Jews were attacked in public, including a man in Sydney who was beaten by a group that demanded to know if he supported Israel; a boy in Perth who was slapped and called a “dirty Jew”; and a man in Melbourne who was called a “dirty rotten Jewish c—” by an attacker who threatened to kill him.

Another flashpoint came on Nov. 10, 2023, when police evacuated a Melbourne synagogue while a pro-Palestinian protest occurred nearby. Hours later, violence broke out between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel factions.

ECAJ made a distinction between anti-Israel and antisemitic events. They said the report only included anti-Israel expressions in the context of a “clear and specific anti-Jewish element,” such as anti-Israel graffiti placed on a synagogue or the phrase “Free Palestine” shouted at someone only because they appeared to be Jewish.

The group’s deputy president, Robert Goot, was one of hundreds of Jewish creatives in a WhatsApp group that was doxxed in February, in a painful episode for Australian Jews that led to harassment and threats including against a 5-year-old Jewish child. Activists said they exposed the group, along with its members’ names, photos and personal information, because some participants lobbied for firing pro-Palestinian figures.

Goot was part of a conversation in the WhatsApp group about Antoinette Lattouf, a short-term radio presenter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Members of the WhatApp group organized a letter-writing campaign against Lattouf for her pro-Palestinian views. Goot wrote that he received information the ABC would fire Lattouf because of her “stance on Israel” and encouraged other members to “keep writing” letters about her.

Lattouf was sacked on the same day as Goot’s messages and is suing the ABC for unfair dismissal. According to her claim, the stated reason for dismissal was a social media post sharing a Human Rights Watch report that said Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war.

The Australian antisemitism data follows a slew of tallies in other locations, many documenting a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents in the months immediately after the Oct. 7 attack. The Anti-Defamation League, the prominent antisemitism watchdog, found three times as many antisemitic incidents in the United States in the year after the attack as in the same 12-month period before — an unprecedented rise that was smaller proportionally than Australia’s.