The Metamorphosis of Antisemitism

On 14 December 2025, Australia’s Jewish community, gathering at Bondi Beach for the annual Hanukkah by the Sea event, was targeted.  To date, it has been the deadliest terror attack on Australian soil.  Although initially resisted by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, the Australian Government established the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion on 9 January 2026.  Although the final report is not due to be released until 14 December 2026, an interim report was issued on 30 April 2026.   

Although the interim report makes fourteen recommendations, four of those recommendations have been excluded from the public report.  The visible recommendations focus on increased security for Jewish events, strengthening counterterrorism operations and a more robust gun buyback scheme.  What the interim report does not address in specific detail are recommendations as to how to proactively combat antisemitism.  It is expected that those recommendations will be included in the final report given that the Royal Commission was specifically instructed to address the following:-

• the nature and prevalence of antisemitism in institutions and society, and examining its key drivers in Australia, including religious and ideologically motivated extremism and radicalisation, including in the lead up to the antisemitic Bondi terrorist attack on 14 December 2025; and

• making recommendations to counteract and prevent manifestations of antisemitism.

While ever we support the need to address the stain of antisemitism in Australia, the Commission’s goal of determining the necessary recommendations to remove the threat of antisemitism will likely fall short for one very good reason—they will likely ignore God’s Word. 

A central pillar of Nazi ideology was that Jews were unnatural creatures.  Unfortunately, this same ideology has not only carried into the modern age where it concerns individual Jews but this is also how many choose to view the creation of the modern State of Israel—as an affront to the natural order.  Historian Arnold Toynbee once referred to the Jews as an extinct society which only survives as a fossil.  However, what did these “fossils” do?  They took on flesh and blood in May 1948 when the modern State of Israel was born.  Fossils coming to life is against the natural order.  Or, as Abba Eban paraphrased it, the fossils are not supposed to “revolt against [their] own petrified status.”  So, many welcomed the rebirth of Israel with the same amount of enthusiasm as one would if the dead rose out of their graves and asserted themselves amongst the living. 

In the late 1800s, early Zionist thinker Leon Pinsker argued that because Jews existed among nations as a stateless, nationless people, they were perceived by others as "living dead" or "ghosts".  Noting that mankind has an innate fear of the malevolent supernatural world, he went on to write: “And if the fear of ghosts is something inborn, and has a certain justification in the psychic life of mankind, why be surprised at the effect produced by this dead but still living nation.”  It was, he argued, because these “ghosts” were not disembodied but consisted of flesh and blood, that they “endure pain inflicted by the fearful mob who imagines itself endangered.”  So, although antisemites brand the Jews as an aberration, the true aberration exists in the mind of those who cling to their antisemitic tropes.

To Pinsker, there was only one radical solution to this seemingly incurable aberration: the establishment of a Jewish national home.  If the Jew was perceived as “the dead walking among the living” then in Pinsker’s mind, only by becoming a living nation could Jews dispel the perception of being ghosts.  Because Pinsker died in 1891, he did not live to see the establishment of the Jewish homeland he believed would cure the incurable.  No doubt he would have been alarmed to see that becoming a “living nation” did not in fact cure the world’s oldest hatred.  As political commentator Eylon Aslan-Levy wrote: “Yet, unlike the anti-Semites of old, today’s anti-Zionists do not necessarily want to annihilate the Jews. They just want the Jews to return to being stateless minorities, as they have always known them. In short, anti-Zionists want their Jewish ghosts back.”  You see, what Pinsker did not anticipate was that the actions he believed were necessary to negate the threats against the Jewish people only caused those threats to metamorphose from antisemitism to anti-Zionism.   

Though antisemites have chosen to view the Jewish people as fossils which should be consigned to the civilisational dustbin, Ezekiel 37 tells a different story—the dry bones will live.  In Ezekiel 37:11 we read: Then He said to me, “Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel.  They indeed say, ‘Our bones are dry, our hope is lost, and we ourselves are cut off!’  Therefore prophesy and say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD: “Behold, O My people, I will open your graves and cause you to come up from your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel.”

Antisemites continue to view Jewish self-determination in their ancestral homeland as an aberration of the natural order.  They are confused over the rise and restoration of Israel because dry bones which develop sinew, flesh and skin is not something which occurs through natural processes—quite the opposite actually!  Yet, as we see in Ezekiel 37:14, God has declared it to be: I will put My Spirit in you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land.  Then you shall know that I, the LORD, have spoken it and performed it, says the LORD.

The people of Israel live because God is still at work, bringing ancient prophecies to fulfilment, like those found in the Book of Ezekiel.  So, it matters not whether principalities, powers, popes, princes, prime ministers, presidents or paupers desire Jews to return to fossils.  Nothing will stop God’s Word being fulfilled.  We rejoice that God is bringing life to His chosen people which will reach its ultimate conclusion when He pours out His Spirit upon His people at Messiah’s Second Coming.