Bart Schteinman gives a rousing speech to Free Palestine Rally

Speech given by Bart Schteinman on the 13th July, 2025 at the Free Palestine Rally Syney

My name is Bart Schteinman, and I'm here today to speak on behalf of the Jewish Council of Australia. We are a coalition of Jewish Australians committed to dignity, equality, and freedom for all, and that includes the liberation of the Palestinian people. I've been asked to speak at this rally in response to the report of Gillian Siegel, a so-called anti-Semitism envoy.

But I have to express some discomfort. This week, the UN has declared that Israel's starvation of Gaza is now worse than ever. But instead of discussing a plan to halt a genocide, our leaders are discussing a plan to halt criticism of a genocide. That is what the Special Envoy's plan to combat antisemitism is. It is an authoritarian document, straight out of Donald Trump's playbook. It calls for state power to be wielded against any university, charity, media outlet, or indeed any individual that runs afoul of the discredited IHRA definition of antisemitism — a definition disowned even by its own lead author for how it has been weaponized against any and all criticism of Israel and Zionism. We, the Jewish Council, reject the Special Envoy's plan.

The Jewish Council rejects the concept of a special envoy itself. Anti-Semitism is real, just as many forms of racism and bigotry are real. And it does no movement any benefit to pretend otherwise. But we reject the exceptionalisation of anti-Semitism as a bigotry separate from all others. We reject it because only by challenging all forms of bigotry in solidarity with each other will we ever address the form that targets Jews.

We reject it because we know, far from mitigating anti-Semitism, Orwellian proposals like the Envoy’s Plan will likely inflame anti-Semitism and encourage the false idea that Jews have some special sinister privileges and protections. We reject it because if any people can be exceptionalised for protection, they can be exceptionalised for oppression. Equality, dignity, and safety for all is the only thing that will protect us or any minority because it’s the only thing in the long run that ever has.

I don't want to humour this plan, because it was never about fighting anti-Semitism. The Envoy is not an expert in fighting extremism, she is an expert in fighting for extremism. She is unapologetically a career lobbyist for Israel. We are expected to be lectured on hatred by someone who called Gazans barbarians, who called for protests like this one to be banned, who opposed even temporary ceasefires in Gaza, and who backs Trump's plan to expel all of its population.

She even has nice things to say about Elon Musk. Are we really supposed to take seriously a plan to make our universities safe from hate from someone who is comfortable with the destruction of every single university in Gaza? A plan to protect our places of worship from someone comfortable with the bombing of Gaza's churches and mosques? A plan to promote Holocaust education from someone who supports a government that is, as we speak, planning a concentration camp in Rafah?

This was never about fighting anti-Semitism. It was never about protecting my community. It was about using my community as a human shield for Israel, of conscripting our identity, our fear, our trauma, our fear as a weapon to be wielded on anyone who resists, including Jews. Zionism has built a hell in Palestine, a hell that is swallowing up Israel and wants to drag every Jew around the world down with it. This Jew joins thousands of other Jews who say no more, who stand in a religious tradition that values the sanctity of human life above almost everything else, that calls for the liberation for all of God’s children, who lives by the words of Marek Edelman, the anti-Zionist leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, who said to be a Jew means to be always with the oppressed and never with the oppressor.

The why is it planned now? It's because the Zionist lobby is losing, and they know it. Be it at the ballot box, or in the courtroom, or in the newsroom, it is failing, it is panicking, it is desperate. Once upon a time, the lobby thought it could make the world love a settler colonial state. No longer. And if they can't protect Israel's reputation, they have to try and destroy all of ours.

So I want to say this to Gillian Siegel and all the other pro-Israel lobbyists: we are not afraid of you. The Jewish Council of Australia is not afraid of you. The Palestine Solidarity Movement is not afraid of you. Nor are The Council for Civil Liberties, MIA, Amnesty International, Labour Friends of Palestine, the Greens, and many others who have rejected the extremism in this plan.

This was never about fighting anti-Semitism because Zionism cannot live without anti-Semitism. It is an ideology that lives through fear — the fear of those it oppresses in Palestine and those it vilifies here — but also the fear it demands and fans in we, the Diaspora Jews, who are told that this isn’t really our home, that our real home is in some walled settlement in the West Bank. They want us to feel afraid of our Muslim and Arab brothers and cousins and sisters, and they afraid of us, because the thing they fear most is what I see before me: Jews, Palestinians, and people of conscience marching together in the name of equality and liberation for all. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!