Antisemitism did not spring up here as suddenly and as localised as a field of mushrooms. It is, above all, a by-product of Israel’s endless onslaught on the people of Gaza which one and all can watch as a daily horror show.

On 20 May, Stuart Rees published an essay in Pearls and Irritations with the heading Inaccessible, indifferent, out of touch? which outlined his attempt to establish some communication with the vice-chancellor of the ANU, Professor Genevieve Bell, in relation to a meeting that had been held at the university three weeks earlier which had addressed the question Vote for humanity, Why Genocide is a Key Election Issue? He wished to discuss significant questions in relation to the meeting, including the campaign of Jewish organisations, amplified in The Australian, which asserted that the eminent speakers at the meeting were driven by rampant antisemitism. A reasonable request we might have thought, but the lack of response by Professor Bell suggested that rather than welcoming a meeting to discuss one of the great moral issues of the moment, she wished discussion about the fate of the Palestinians would just go away.

This re-awakened my interest in the Statement on Racism issued by Universities Australia on 27 February which included the highly contested definition of antisemitism developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Having spent my whole career teaching Australian politics and history and researching across the wide field of racial thought and politics, I found many reasons to wonder what had happened to the leadership of the nation’s........

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