Below is anti-Zionist Jew Janet Parker’s submission to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.]

I am an anti-Zionist Jew and speak as someone who has experienced antisemitism only from other Jews.

My worldview is very much formed by my Jewish mother, born Dorothy Berghiner, in Bessarabia (modern day Moldova and Ukraine) in 1929. Her parents lived through the Kishinev pogrom and other forms of antisemitism typical of Tsarist Russia.

My mother’s parents took her to live in Italy in 1932 where they felt antisemitism would be less prevalent. However, by 1938 Mussolini had allied with Nazi Germany and introduced “race laws”.  She was expelled from her school because she was Jewish and stripped of her Italian citizenship.

Her parents did not wait for things to get worse, moving to Thailand, and later to Singapore, in search of a better life.

Within two years they were on the move again because of the Japanese advance on Singapore. My grandparents put my mother (then 12) on a ship to Western Australia to live with Jewish friends in the Wheatbelt town of Corrigin. They were later evacuated to Colombo. My mother did not see her parents again until she was 17.

While my mother and her parents were among the “lucky ones”, relatively speaking, her early life was one of dislocationand separation, and these experiencesshaped her world view.

Throughout her adult life, she was a fierce campaigner for social justice and equality for all. In particular, she campaigned against the racism experienced by Australia’s First Nations people and as an anthropologist, taught Aboriginal studies at the University of Western Australia.

Having come to Australia as a refugee herself, she was vehemently opposed to Australia’s gradual abandonment of its obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention.

My mother had a complicated relationship with the Zionist project that is the modern state of Israel. She could never support the violent dispossession of the Palestinians. However, because of her experience and those of her forebears, she felt there was some justification for the establishment of Israel as a supposed safe haven for Jews. While my own political outlook and activism were undoubtedly shaped by my mother’s life and world view, this was perhaps the one area where we differed for a time.

It was not until her later years, after comprehending the scale of Israel’s ongoing and accelerating destruction of Palestinian life, that she changed her views. Important to this shift was attending various public meetings with Jewish Israeli supporters of Palestinian human rights, including the renowned writer and activist Miko Peled.

My mother was an atheist, and while she shared some Jewish cultural traditions, as a child I did not particularly consider myself to be Jewish. As an adult I have wrestled with what it means to be a secular Jew.

I have identified more as a Jew in the context of the genocide in Gaza precisely because, for the first time, I have felt driven to assert my Jewish heritage to........

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