The US Israel Lobby Pressured Albanese to Appoint This Nation’s Antisemitism Envoy
The Australian envoy is now part of an exclusive global club of envoys combating antisemitism
A 13 January 2025 clip featuring Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Jillian Segal being interviewed by US network C-SPAN has been doing the rounds of social media, as it has the nonelected official charged with stamping out Jewish prejudice in a manner that has been the subject of much scrutiny, explaining that overseas Israel lobby pressure led to her appointment.
Segal outlines that the US Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism – yes, there are more of them – Deborah Lipstadt and her deputy envoy for the same type of prejudice, Aaron Keyak, had been out in this neck of the woods to put a bit of pressure on PM Anthony Albanese and his Labor ministers in respect of toeing the Israel lobby line or face the consequences.
The PM sprung the antisemitism envoy on the nation on 9 July 2024. This was around the time that Australian officials were raising concerns about a spike in antisemitic incidents, but this was prior to the spate of supposedly antisemitic property damage crimes that swept across Gadigal and Dharug land in Greater Sydney last summer, as well as some related incidents in Naarm-Melbourne.
Since her appointment, the unelected official has produced the Plan to Combat Antisemitism. Delivered on 10 July 2025, the plan, if adopted, would serve to insert the IHRA definition of antisemitism into the foundations of Australian institutions, which it serves to block criticism of Israel’s atrocities, deeming such critiques as hatred towards Jews. This plan is evidently being considered by Labor.
Indeed, a key reason why Segal’s appointment as envoy has been so controversial is that while there has been an outpouring of anti-Israel sentiment locally in response to the industrial scale genocide it’s been perpetrating on the Palestinians of Gaza, there had been no major outpouring of antisemitism at time of the announcement, so the need for the envoy appeared concocted.
Delusions of grandeur
“That is not to say that the current government is not doing things,” said Segal, during the C-SPAN interview regarding Labor government efforts to deal with a suggested spike in antisemitism. “So, the first thing they did was actually establish my office. I think I have to thank ambassador Lipstadt and Aaron for actually travelling to Australia and asking the government to do something.”
“It was only six months ago, just before the gathering in Buenos Aires that my office was established,” said the immediate past president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), which is a local Zionist organisation. “So, Australia was definitely a laggard,” she added.
Albanese said during a 9 July 2024 doorstop on Gadigal land in Sydney that the nation had seen a “significant rise” in antisemitism since 7 October 2023 and that was why the decision had been made to install an envoy to engage with him and the immigration minister on antisemitism. The PM said he was shocked by the dearth in expertise on antisemitism and that it was lucky Segal agreed to the role.
But quite frankly she would have been a fool not to, as The Klaxon recently revealed, the envoy is a $1,000-a-day position, with dual offices in Sydney and Naarm-Melbourne and six staffers to assist in ratting out antisemitism in the public sphere. Journalist Anthony Klan also uncovered that the Segal family trust is the second biggest donor to far-right antiimmigration lobbying group Advance.
The envoy’s combat antisemitism plan is far reaching and multipronged. The main recommendation is that a definition that serves to deflect criticism of Israel be adopted by all local institutions, as well as that Segal monitor the media for antisemitism and censor it, while she should also review universities’ educational content for such bias and revoke funding if found to be offending.
Segal further told C-SPAN that the reason Australia did not have an envoy prior to her own rising to the call was that this country was obviously deluded and basking “in the vision of a happy multicultural country far away from the conflicts in Europe, and it didn’t need such a position, but all of a sudden, as we see these things happen slowly but then suddenly, there was a huge uptick”.
Combating antisemitism is trending
During the July 2024 envoy announcement, Segal told reporters that she was about to fly to Argentina the following week to take part in the Special Envoys and Coordinators Combating Antisemitism (SECCA) conference. SECCA was established in 2019, with other participating entities being Canada, the European Union, Greece, Israel, Romania and the United Kingdom.
Segal said she would be catching up with US special envoy Deborah Lipstadt and her deputy at the Argentinian meet, which was serving to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, but was also more broadly a conversation about what each country was doing to combat antisemitism, along with discussion of strategising ideas.
“I look forward to meeting them all, learning from them and bringing back thoughts and ideas, Australianising them as I think we need to”, and talking with the Australian PM and immigration minister, Segal further told reporters in mid-2024. The envoy added that there had been a 700 percent spike in antisemitic incidents immediately following 7 October 2023.
The US Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism was established in 2004, and it appears to be why Segal considers us a laggard. But for much of civil society, her appointment had been beyond them because there was no crisis in antisemitism. Indeed, by last July the major incident comprised of former treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s May 2024 documentary Never Again.
A series of so-called antisemitic arson and graffiti attacks on Jewish-owned property did occur from October 2024 to February 2025 in Sydney, which heightened the moral panic around antisemitism. Yet, the Australian federal police and the NSW police confirmed in March that these crimes were staged by organised criminals to convey a crisis, so they had a bargaining chip with police.
Anti-Zionism does not equal antisemitism
The key recommendation that Segal’s plan to combat antisemitism seeks to progress is that “state and federal governments… require the IHRA working definition of antisemitism to be used across all levels of government and public institutions to inform their practical understanding of antisemitism”.
The IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) working definition of antisemitism is problematic as it defines antisemitism as consisting of “hatred towards Jews”, but then it produces eleven accompanying examples of antisemitism, seven of which comprise of criticism of Israel. The Israel lobby has been campaigning for governments to adopt this definition since early last decade.
The conflation of political criticism of Israel with prejudice towards Jews rests on Israel being a Jewish state. However, it does not logically follow that criticism of Israel, for example, over its perpetration of a recognised genocide in the Gaza Strip, then constitutes acts of antisemitism. Indeed, critiques of the Gaza genocide and apartheid Israel are political and have nothing to do with religion.
The Israel lobby is often referred to as the Zionist lobby, as it basically blocks criticism of Israel as it progresses the late 1880s-established doctrine of Zionism, which seeks to establish a Jewish state in historical Palestine, and today that is the state of Israel. So, not all Jews espouse Zionism and are neither concerned with deflecting criticism of Israel under the charge of prejudice towards them.
Segal’s suggestion that all public institutions adopt the IHRA working definition on antisemitism is not aimed at preventing hatred towards Jewish people at all, but it is rather focused on deflecting political criticism of Israel, and the reason our nation now has an envoy officially trying to see this actioned is because of the need to silence significant public outcry over the mass bloodshed in Gaza.
This reasoning lends itself to the fact that after prominent mobilisations of neo-Nazis on Gadigal land in Sydney and in Naarm-Melbourne at the end of August, the envoy did not speak out about the rise in those espousing Nazism, which is the doctrine that led to the genociding of over 6 million European Jews during World War II, even though the presence of Nazis conveys anti-Jewish prejudice.
Rather, the Australian antisemitism envoy appears to be more interested in weaponising the IHRA definition to silence all criticism of Israel and its human rights abuses, just as one of the original drafters of the IHRA definition, author Kenneth Stern, warned in a 2019 article that “right-wing Jews”, or Zionists, have been wielding the definition in this manner globally since 2010.
