Human rights lawyer Sarah Schwartz has told Australia's royal commission on antisemitism and social cohesion that she faces attacks from both her own Jewish community and neo-Nazis for publicly supporting Palestinian freedom. In her testimony, Schwartz described being called a “Kapo” and “Judenrat” online — terms invoking Nazi-era Jewish councils — and depicted as a rat with a yellow star being sent to concentration camps. She said such language is part of a political framework that collapses Jewish identity into support for Israel and turns Holocaust memory into a test of political loyalty.
Holocaust memory and political obligations
Schwartz, executive director of the Jewish Council of Australia, said her teenage visit to Nazi concentration camps in Poland shaped her commitment to resist racism and dehumanisation. “That history has shaped not only my Jewish identity, but a commitment to political struggle,” she wrote in a Guardian Australia opinion piece. “It taught me that memory carries not only grief, but obligations: to resist racism, dehumanisation and the silence that permits the erasure of a people.” The royal commission was established after the murder of 15 people at a Hanukah celebration at Bondi Beach.
Dual targeting: from communal institutions to neo-Nazis
Schwartz said that while Israel's defenders use Holocaust imagery against her, actual neo-Nazis target her for being Jewish and standing with Muslims, migrants and anti-racists. “They are indifferent to my views on Israel,” she wrote. “They target me because I am publicly Jewish, and because I stand with those they imagine to be the enemies of a white Christian nation.” She noted that neo-Nazis recycle conspiracies such as the “Great Replacement”, portraying Jews as the hidden force behind multiculturalism.
UN findings on Gaza and the silencing of dissent
Schwartz referenced a recent UN commission of inquiry that concluded Israel has committed genocide through deliberate targeting of Palestinian children in Gaza, including shooting at vital organs and using high-payload munitions. She said Israeli officials dismissed the report as “parroting blood libels”, invoking an ancient antisemitic myth. “The allegations themselves became the persecution,” she wrote. “The question ceased to be what had happened in Gaza, but whether those describing it were the latest antisemites.”
Impact on Jewish communal life
Schwartz said countless Jewish people have told her they feel unable to express political convictions without risking public exposure, family rupture or exclusion. After she was called an “anti-Jew” on ABC, one Jewish person wrote: “Growing numbers of Jews are feeling excluded and betrayed by communal institutions because of their political convictions.” Schwartz urged governments not to reinforce the “fiction that Jews and Israel are interchangeable”, and warned against using the Holocaust to police Jewish identity or silence witnesses to atrocity.
