Bayside City Council (BCC) voted unanimously on September 16 to adopt a discredited definition of antisemitism that serves to silence criticism of Israel.
The council meeting was also marred by people abusing Jewish protesters who disagreed with council adopting the controversial definition and who questioned the procedure council took.
BCC adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism to deal with what it said is “a disturbing pattern of antisemitic behaviour that threatens the safety and wellbeing of Jewish residents and erodes trust in our community”.
This claim comes despite the Jewish Community Council of Victoria reporting a decrease in antisemitic incidents in Bayside, with three reports in 2024, down from eight in 2023.
Protesters opposed to BCC adopting the IHRA definition, including Jews, were subjected to abuse outside the council meeting. One said that she was subjected “to the most vile antisemitism I have experienced in my life” and that she and other protesters were “hissed [at] that we are ‘the worst type of Jews’, that we ‘hate Jews’, that we ‘are not Jewish’, that we ‘are inbred vermin’ and that we ‘are kapos’”.
“Kapos” refers to the people Nazis forced to help run concentration camps during the Holocaust, some of whom were Jews.
One protester said the behaviour of some members of the public shows that only “Jews who pledge allegiance to the state of Israel, which includes its government, army, Zionist ideology and its Palestinian Holocaust, are eligible for an antisemitism victim card”.
Another protester, a ratepayer, said the council called police, falsely claiming that there were “threatening and dangerous Palestinians” outside the council building.
A third protester, also a local ratepayer, questioned whether the council followed due process on the IHRA definition item. She claimed that she was locked out of the council chamber and when she was allowed in, it was already full of people who supported council adopting the IHRA definition.
The ratepayers who protested said their requests to speak were denied. They wanted to air concerns about the impacts of the definition on civil liberties and free speech.
Council received eight questions from the public about the vote that were not read out nor answered.
The vote comes one week after Bayside councillor Robert Irlicht attended the 2025 Australian Mayors Summit Against Antisemitism on the Gold Coast. It was bankrolled by the United States-based Combat Antisemitism Movement, which reportedly offered all expenses paid trips for mayors and councillors to attend. It is not clear whether Irlicht accepted free hospitality to take part.
The summit launched its Local Government Antisemitism Action Plan, which urges councils to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism as part of a “best practice” approach to take “meaningful action against antisemitism and other forms of hatred”.
Likewise, the federal Labor’s antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal stated in her recent Plan to Combat Antisemitism that she will “require the IHRA working definition of antisemitism to be used across all levels of government and public institutions to inform their practical understanding of antisemitism”.
The IHRA definition of antisemitism has been widely criticised, because it includes 11 examples of what it defines as antisemitism, seven of which relate to criticism of the state of Israel.
US lawyer Kenneth Stern, who authored the definition, has repeatedly raised concerns about the ways the definition is used to silence political critique of Israel and its actions.
Stern recently said: “Once the door is opened to using a tool like IHRA via law to suppress speech, partisans stretch and bend and use it in any way they can to achieve their political goals, knowing even if they don’t win a particular case, the threat is enough to chill speech through law.”
Other definitions of antisemitism, such as the Jerusalem Declaration, aim to “strengthen the fight against antisemitism by clarifying what it is and how it manifests”, while protecting “a space for an open debate about the vexed question of the future of Israel/Palestine”.
BCC was contacted for questioning but did not respond.
[Lanie Stockman is a part of the newly formed Anti-Zionism Naarm.]