“This report was designed to produce conclusions rather than find them.” A response to the interim findings of the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion by Andrew Brown.
As an ordinary Australian who has read this interim report, I am left with one overriding feeling. Something essential is being sidestepped. Not accidentally. Deliberately.
I say that as the godson of two Hungarian Holocaust survivors. I know what antisemitism looks like. I know what it costs. I know where it leads when good people stay silent. That history lives in my family, and it is not abstract to me.
That is precisely why I will not allow the word to be weaponised. Antisemitism is too loaded with real historical horror to be deployed as a conversation stopper every time someone raises the death toll in Gaza. When that happens, it does not protect Jewish people. It uses their suffering as a shield for a government committing atrocities. That is its own kind of desecration.
Antisemitism is real and must be confronted without equivocation. That is not what this is about. This is about a commission that had the opportunity to honestly examine the social fractures in this country and chose, from the very beginning, to look away from half the picture.
A predetermined exercise
The Royal Commission was announced less than four weeks after the Bondi massacre, stood up under acute political pressure, with terms of reference drafted in trauma and shaped by the loudest voices in the room. The result was an inquiry whose outcome was visible from the day the Letters Patent were issued.
The terms cover four areas. Antisemitism. Law enforcement recommendations. The Bondi attack. Broader social cohesion. That is the entire scope.
There is no mention of Israeli government conduct.
No mention of Gaza.
No mandate to examine Islamophobia. No instruction to ask why social tensions rose so sharply or what role political decision-making played.
When it was suggested the Commission also examine discrimination against Muslims and Indigenous Australians, Commissioner Bell made clear the focus would remain on antisemitism.
A commission into social cohesion that cannot examine what broke it is not an inquiry.
It is a performance.
The conclusion preceded the evidence. The Commission was built around it.
What Australians have been watching
This commission speaks about social tensions as though they formed in the abstract. They did not. They formed in the palm of every Australian’s hand.
For two years, social media feeds have carried footage no broadcaster would air unedited. Hind Rajab, a six-year-old girl trapped in a car in Gaza, surrounded by her family’s bodies, calling for help on a phone. Then the two paramedics sent to rescue her. All of them killed.
Children pulled from rubble. Doctors dragged from wards. Journalists killed in targeted strikes, cameras still rolling. More than twenty thousand children dead. Australians have not read that number.
They have seen those children’s faces.
They watched Zomi Frankcom, an Australian aid worker delivering food in Gaza, killed when Israeli drones struck her clearly marked World Central Kitchen convoy in three sequential strikes. The IDF had her coordinates. Israel withheld drone audio from Australian investigators. Two officers were dismissed. Nobody was prosecuted.
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The government accepted that and moved on. Most Australians did not.
That accumulation does not leave you. It builds. And then those same Australians were told by their political class that the primary concern is the feelings of the perpetrating state’s supporters. A Royal Commission is underway. Its terms of reference do not contain the word Gaza. Do not contain the word Palestine. That is not governance.
That is gaslighting at a national scale.
Whose voices this commission chose
Organisations like the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council and the Zionist Federation of Australia have spent two years defending Israeli conduct without qualification while saying nothing meaningful about Palestinian civilian deaths.
This commission has amplified those voices as though they represent all Australian Jews. They do not.
A significant number of Jewish Australians have marched, spoken out, and refused the script.
Their voices carry particular moral weight. They have been systematically drowned out by the loudest and most politically connected faction, one that deploys the language of antisemitism against anyone who pushes back. This commission should have made space for the full spectrum.
That it did not tells you everything about whose interests it was built to serve.
The indefensible conflation
Any attempt to connect pro-Palestinian protest with the Bondi massacre is not analysis. It is a smear. The attack was carried out by ISIS-radicalised individuals. The hundreds of thousands who marched were exercising democratic expression.
Conflating them insults the Bondi victims and criminalises a community of conscience.
And while the Commission examines the ideological conditions that produced the Bondi attack, it has shown no appetite for examining the structural ones.
The father allegedly owned six firearms, all legally held under the old rules. Under the new NSW regime, that likely would not stand as the new maximum is four. So the question is unavoidable:
Did gaps in licensing and limits help create the conditions for this attack?
A credible inquiry should be examining that directly.
The political will summoned to stand up this Royal Commission at speed was apparently unavailable for the harder conversation about legally acquired weapons in suburban Sydney.
A UN Commission of Inquiry found in March 2025 that Israel’s use of sexual violence against Palestinian detainees was systemic, committed under explicit orders or with the encouragement of Israel’s military and civilian leadership. B’Tselem called the prison system a network of torture camps.
Australian media buried it.
This commission has proceeded as though it never happened.
This commission must state plainly that opposition to Israeli government policy is not terrorism. That grief for Palestinian civilians is not radicalisation. That the people who marched are not the people who killed. Anything less is not a finding. It is a cover.
This report was designed to produce conclusions rather than find them.
Australians who came to this process in good faith deserved better. They are watching. And they are not going away.
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Andrew Brown is a Sydney businessman in the health products sector, former Deputy Mayor of Mosman and Palestine peace activist