Nasser Mashni on how Segal’s antisemitism plan controls language

I can’t believe you’re asking a question on Epstein at a time like this, where we’re having
some of the greatest success and also tragedy with what happened in Texas — it just seems
like a desecration.

Which is it? I wondered, after watching this latest rant by Donald Trump. Should journalists be holding their tongues in elation at all the winning going on, or out of sombre respect for the children who drowned at a Texas campsite? Are both of these things, or only one, profaned by questions about a man who died in custody before he could be tried, leaving a trail of sexual abuse behind him?

Or is the truth simpler: that the president of the United States wants to decide what we talk about, and when, and is willing to vilify those who don’t fall into line?

The timing and content of speech was on the agenda in Australia last week, too, with many deciding that an act of arson at a Melbourne synagogue and attacks on an Israeli-owned restaurant and a weapons manufacturer, all on the same Friday night, meant mass protests against Israel’s slaughter and starvation in Gaza should not go ahead.

In its editorial on the subject, Melbourne’s The Age newspaper insisted it “makes no argument against the right to protest … Protest is a pillar of democracy”, before declaring that these incidents fell outside the definition of protest. Going further, it insisted that in light of these events, holding a march on the following Sunday was “a glaring example of tone-deaf intransigence. The word “desecration” wasn’t used, but it was clear that the long-established ritual of the Gaza protests was expected to make way for a higher set of values.

This had happened before. In the lead-up to the first anniversary of the Hamas attacks on southern Israel in October, we had been told a Sunday march on October 6 was inappropriate. There may be other parts of the calendar still to be discovered when those who wish to speak of Gaza and the tens of thousands of dead Palestinians — 60,000, or 100,000, or thrice that number, no one can say for certain — should stand mute because others might be upset or intimidated. It would seem that a hierarchy of human worth is at work.

It should be noted that despite the best rhetorical efforts of some writers, no factual connection has been established between the Sunday protests and any act of violence or vandalism against Jewish or Israeli institutions. It is a fact that the Sunday protests have explicitly and repeatedly disavowed violence and antisemitism, and that Jewish people participate in them visibly and are welcomed as such.

While the Sunday protests’ organisers make every effort to distinguish Israeli actions from Jewish identity, on the other side of the world, the Israeli prime minister — wanted by the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges — insists on conflating the two. Confronted by the testimony of Israeli soldiers in an Israeli newspaper about the shooting of unarmed Palestinians, Benjamin Netanyahu declared the entire matter a “blood libel”, the term used to describe Christian Europe’s demonisation of Jews in the Middle Ages.

In a rational society, the ability to distinguish between prejudice against Jewish people on the one hand, and specific allegations regarding the conduct of a state that defines itself by law as Jewish on the other, might be prized. Instead, protesters on campuses across the United States have been confronted with definitions of antisemitism that usher Israel and its champions away from scrutiny, backed by a White House prepared to use financial extortion to bring universities into line with its teachings, as well as riding roughshod over students’ human rights in order to combat “desecration”.

As Israel’s defence minister talked up the establishment of what has already been called a concentration camp on the ruins of the Palestinian city of Rafah, the question of definitions and of reeducation on campuses and in schools was being revived in Australia, courtesy of Jillian Segal, the federal government’s special envoy to combat antisemitism.

Segal has already publicly expressed the view that pro-Palestine protests should be banned from city centres altogether. Last week, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese standing by her side, she unfurled plans to punitively sanction cultural, educational and media organisations should they fall foul of standards that she clearly aims to see the federal government adopt. Instead of talking about desecration, as Trump had, we would punish the wrong kinds of protest and the wrong types of performance, teaching and reporting.

In May of last year, the ABC’s Q+A program found itself debating whether the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and the Arabic word “intifada” could be deemed antisemitic. Ukrainian journalist Alisa Sopova, while admitting she did not know “the Australian context”, expressed nervousness over government attempts to regulate speech.

She was followed by Maher Mughrabi, a British-Palestinian journalist working at The Agewho asked if the plan was to make Jewish and Israeli people’s perceptions of the word “intifada” and its associations the metric in legislation, and where that would leave us. The British-Tanzanian Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah said that characterising the “river to the sea” slogan as antisemitic was “a kind of nonsense that then makes those kinds of laws authoritarian”.

Mughrabi then pointed out that the website of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum used the word intifada to mean “uprising” on its Arabic-language page discussing the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. “If you outlaw the word intifada and say it’s hate speech, they’re gonna have to fix their website,” he declared.

During Zohran Mamdani’s recent successful run for the Democratic nomination in New York City’s mayoral elections, this last point resurfaced when Mamdani refused to condemn the pro-Palestine protest slogan “globalise the intifada”, citing the word’s use on the museum’s website.

Bizarrely, however, it turned out that some time between May and July of 2024, the website had indeed been “fixed”. Now the word used for “uprising” on the Arabic-language version of the site was muqawama, which means “resistance” in Arabic.

If the associations of a word are to be taken into account, it is unclear how this change solves the problem identified by those who reject the word intifada. Muqawama is the M in the acronym Hamas (short for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, or the Islamic Resistance Movement), and Iran and its allies in the Middle East have long described themselves as “the Axis of Resistance”.

As we ponder “the Australian context” this week, the question that arises is less of one phrase or another, but of whether certain perspectives on Zionism and events in Palestine or Israel, and actions of protest based on those perspectives, can be ruled out by our nation’s institutions to defend Israel.

One is reminded of the exchange between Alice and Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass, where the latter proclaims, “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less”, before declaring, “The question is which is to be master — that’s all.’

Despite what the Dural caravan case taught us about labelling events as proof of antisemitism and the need for legislation on speech, and what Antoinette Lattouf’s case against the ABC taught us about the way media can be harassed into firing someone based on the smear of antisemitism, it would seem the federal government is prepared to make Segal the Humpty Dumpty of antisemitism in this country.