Israeli Ambassador Warns of Antisemitism

Israeli Ambassador's Antisemitism Warning Targets Labor's ICC Line

Ambassador Hillel Newman's July 9 op-ed lands two weeks before Labor's national conference votes on aligning Australia with ICJ and ICC rulings against Israel — and reframes that alignment as a driver of hate.

Israel's ambassador to Australia, Hillel Newman, told readers of The Australian on July 9, 2026 that antisemitism in the country is worse than in the two Muslim-majority states where he previously served — an intervention pitched less at Australian hate-crime policy than at the diplomatic price of the Albanese government's post-2024 alignment with the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. Newman's argument recasts the ICJ's July 2024 finding that Israel's occupation is unlawful, and the ICC's November 2024 arrest warrants against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as inputs to antisemitism — a framing designed to raise the political cost of the platform Labor will vote on at its 50th national conference in Adelaide from July 23 to 25.

That is the story. The op-ed reads as communal alarm; the timing reads as leverage.

What Newman actually said, and did not say

In his piece, republished by J-Wire, Newman wrote that "obsessive herds" accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza and of using dogs against Palestinian detainees echo "mediaeval antisemitic tropes" about Jews poisoning wells or using children's blood in ritual. He said the "toleration of the new inflammatory antizionist antisemitism" could seed further violence of the kind seen at Bondi Beach on December 14, 2025, when two gunmen killed 15 people at a Hanukkah gathering — Australia's deadliest terror attack, as confirmed by the interim report of the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.

Newman did not name Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, and did not name the ICJ or the ICC. He did not have to. His predecessor Amir Maimon avoided that register even after the October 7, 2023 attacks; Newman has taken it up within months of arriving in Canberra.

The Bondi attack, and the antisemitism wave that preceded it, are real. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry documented 1,654 anti-Jewish incidents in the year to September 30, 2025, according to reporting by Al Jazeera — down from 2,062 the previous year but still roughly quadruple pre-October 7 levels. The Centre for Independent Studies, in the 2025 Acton Lecture, described "at least a fourfold increase" and cited torched synagogues, doxed community members, and vandalised schools.

The question is not whether antisemitism has surged — it has. The question is what the ambassador wants Canberra to do about it, and what he wants it not to do.

Why the timing points at the platform, not the police

The Australian Labor Party's 50th national conference opens on July 23. According to Martin Kear's April 2026 Ifri memo, Australia's foreign policy on Israel-Palestine now sits at the crossroads of two forces: a "resurgence of liberal internationalism" that produced the September 21, 2025 recognition of Palestine, and diplomatic "lockstep" with the Trump administration's 20-point plan of October 2025. The conference platform will decide which of those two vectors carries more weight for the next parliamentary term.

Draft platform language reported in the Australian press — and referenced by Newman's essay — reportedly hardens Labor's stance against Israel's occupation of Gaza and, critically, commits the party to Australia acting consistently with binding decisions of the ICJ and ICC. That would formalise a position Labor already articulated to Human Rights Watch during the 2025 election, when the party told the group's election questionnaire that "Australia has been a longstanding supporter of the International Criminal Court" and that its approach "will be informed by international law, not politics."

Two rulings sit inside that commitment.

First, the ICJ's advisory opinion of July 19, 2024, which found Israel's presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory unlawful and instructed third states not to "render aid or assistance in maintaining" it, as reported by Al Jazeera. The UK House of Commons Library briefing on ICJ and ICC actions notes the opinion set out obligations on all states to bring the occupation to an end.

Second, the ICC arrest warrants of November 21, 2024, against Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant. Israel's May 9, 2025 filing with the Pre-Trial Chamber sought their withdrawal, but the Chamber's June 27, 2025 decision reaffirmed the Court's territorial jurisdiction over the Gaza Strip and West Bank, treating the underlying question as res judicata. Australia, as a Rome Statute party, would be obliged to arrest Netanyahu on Australian soil.

That is the machinery Newman's op-ed is trying to slow.

The leverage move

The ambassador's argument runs one causal step: rhetoric describing Israel's Gaza campaign as genocide, or as involving specific atrocities, is not political criticism but a modernised blood libel; that rhetoric normalises violence; therefore governments and party platforms that endorse the legal instruments underpinning such rhetoric — ICJ findings on unlawful occupation, ICC warrants for war crimes — are complicit in the atmosphere that produced Bondi.

That is a coherent argument. It is also a policy argument disguised as a moral one. Its practical effect, if accepted, is to make it politically costly for a Labor conference delegate to vote for a platform clause endorsing ICJ/ICC rulings — because doing so becomes, by Newman's framing, an endorsement of the "hate" the ambassador names.

The ambassador is not the first to try. The Australia-Israel & Jewish Affairs Council's op-ed on July 8 argued Australia's treatment of Jews is "a warning to the world." Prime Minister's Special Envoy Jillian Segal, in her July 2025 report, recommended defunding universities that tolerate antisemitism and using the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition — a definition Human Rights Watch, in its submission to the Royal Commission, warned could "chill" speech critical of Israel and Zionism. The Jewish Council of Australia has called Segal's plan "a blueprint for silencing dissent."

Newman's escalation is diplomatic, not domestic. He speaks for a government under an active ICC warrant, in a country whose parliament may soon commit to enforcing it.

The historical parallel that matters

The closest precedent is not the previous Netanyahu blow-ups with Canberra, though those matter — his August 2025 letter accusing Albanese of pouring "fuel on this antisemitic fire," reported by the BBC, collapsed relations to what analysts at the Australian National University called their worst state since diplomatic ties were established.

The closer parallel is the U.S.–ICC standoff. In June 2025, the Trump administration sanctioned four ICC judges in retaliation for the Israel warrants, as documented by the BBC. The Bogotá summit of the Hague Group, convened by South Africa and Colombia and reported through official channels by the UN, committed 12 states to concrete measures — arms bans, port denials, universal jurisdiction — with a September 20 deadline to expand.

Australia sat that summit out. But its September 21, 2025 recognition of Palestine — coordinated with Ottawa and London — placed Canberra on the liberal-internationalist side of that dividing line. Foreign Minister Penny Wong noted in her August 5 remarks to the ABC that further sanctions were being considered but would not be "flagged." A conference platform locking Labor to ICJ/ICC compliance would remove that ambiguity — and remove ministerial discretion.

That is precisely what Newman's op-ed is trying to prevent.

The counter-view Newman does not engage

The strongest counter to the ambassador's causal chain is the interim finding of the Royal Commission itself. Former High Court justice Virginia Bell's April 2026 interim report identified no legal gap that would have prevented the Bondi attack, and no agency that reported lacking powers to act. As the Centre for Independent Studies' Karla Pincott summarised in a commentary, "the system did not fail because it lacked power." It failed on social cohesion — a diagnosis that cuts against a framing in which international-law rhetoric is the load-bearing cause.

Human Rights Watch has been more pointed. In its July 31, 2025 letter to Wong, HRW argued that Australian recognition of Palestine without concrete measures — a full ban on trade with settlements per article 278 of the ICJ ruling, suspension of trade deals, and sanctions on Israeli officials — would "perpetuate the impunity that has emboldened decades of serious violations." That is the accountability agenda the draft ALP platform is reportedly drawing from. It is also the agenda the ambassador is defining, in the same breath, as a driver of hate.

Both propositions cannot be right. The conference will choose.

What to watch

• July 23–25, 2026 — ALP National Conference, Adelaide. The decisive vote is on foreign-policy platform language: whether the party commits explicitly to acting consistently with ICJ advisory opinions and ICC arrest warrants, including on Israeli officials. Watch for amendments from the Left faction on sanctions and settlement trade, and from the Right faction to strip binding language.
• September 2026 — UN General Assembly. The 12-month window under UNGA Resolution ES-10/24, adopted on September 18, 2024, closes. States are expected to report on measures taken to implement the ICJ advisory opinion. Australia's response will be the first test of any new platform.
• December 14, 2026 — Royal Commission final report. Bell delivers her final findings on the anniversary of the Bondi attack. Terms of reference exclude Middle East policy; recommendations will focus on domestic law, policing and social cohesion.
• ICC Pre-Trial Chamber II. A ruling on Israel's renewed jurisdictional challenge remains outstanding. A dismissal keeps the Netanyahu warrant live and forces every Rome Statute party — Australia included — to answer the arrest question in public.

The Bottom Line

Newman's op-ed is not primarily a warning about Australian hate crime — it is a pre-emptive strike against a Labor platform that would bind Canberra to the ICJ's 2024 occupation ruling and the ICC's warrants against Netanyahu. By recasting international-legal criticism of Israel as a modern blood libel, the ambassador is trying to make it politically toxic for Albanese to formalise the accountability track Australia entered when it recognised Palestine in September 2025. The July 23 conference vote will show whether that leverage worked.