Wendy Bacon investigates the Israel lobbyists, PR people and astroturfers behind the Combat Antisemitism Movement targeting local councils and the Royal Commission.
The Commonwealth and NSW governments are supporting a national local government conference organised by the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), whose Israel-based CEO was head of the IDF’s social media unit.
The IDF is widely accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide by international bodies such as the United Nations, human rights organisations, and legal investigators.
The key goal of CAM, which operates in 40 countries, is to enforce the IHRA definition of antisemitism across all fields and levels of government;
a definition which restricts criticism of Israel.
CAM’s global headquarters are in Kansas, with CEO Sacha Roytman running the show from Tel Aviv. Chairman of its Board of Advisors, Natan Sharansky, was Deputy Prime Minister of Israel.
In a submission to the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, Roytman accused this publication of attacks on the CAM Summit and its organisers, among other unsubstantiated claims and imputations of antisemitism.
Source: Royal Commission submission
The submission went on to claim that “the publications that attacked the event” did not contact CAM beforehand.
Source: Royal Commission submission
This is false. In line with standard journalistic procedure, MWM tried to contact CAM on multiple occasions and sent questions prior to publication of the story to its chief executive Sacha Roytman which received no response. Here are the questions:
Questions sent by Wendy Bacon to Sacha Roytman prior to publication
MWM also tried to contact CAM organiser Justine Williams by LinkedIn and another organiser by phone on more than one occasion.
Further, we also endeavoured to contact chairman of the board of advisers David Gonski who is co-chairing this year’s conference. Having been directed to UNSW Media for a response, we sent questions to UNSW Media and UNSW Media did not respond.
David Gonski and Jillian Segal lead Israel lobby heavies at Gold Coast antisemitism summit
The CAM submission to the Royal Commission is authored by Sacha Roytman – a Belgian communications expert who made Aliyah to Israel in 2004 – and another Israeli Yigal Nissel who is CAM’s executive director in Australia.
The second lead author of the submission to the Royal Commission is Israeli Yigal Nissel who arrived in Australia in 2015 and is an ’emissary’ for the Jewish National Fund (JNF Australia)
Planning for the last Australian CAM conference became public in January 2025 when the then Deputy CEO of CAM, Yigal Nissel, published a story, “From Paradise to Peril,” in the Jerusalem Post, stating,
“Thousands of [Australian] extremists, spanning the radical left, the far right, and parts of the Muslim community, seized on the conflict in the Middle East as a pretext to unleash their latent antisemitism.”
As reported here last year, Nissel, who was based in Israel, announced that a CAM conference of hundreds of Mayors would address the problem. Previously, Nissel was the Israeli ‘emissary’ to the Australian branch of the Jewish National Fund (JNF).
Envoy Jillian Segal to cohost
The conference will kick off with messages of support from the Commonwealth and NSW governments. The first speaker is Alex Ryvchin, Co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australia Jewry (ECAJ) who labelled thousands of Australians who marched for Palestine last weekend as “obsessive, extreme and hateful”.
The conference follows the initial CAM Local Mayors’ Summit held on the Gold Coast last September. This year’s event will be held in Sydney on November 26 and 27 at a location that has not been publicised.
It will be co-hosted by the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Jillian Segal and delivered in partnership with Waverley Council.
This week Segal addressed a meeting of the global network of Special Envoys supported by the World Jewish Congress calling for the enforcement of her National Plan at an international legal. CAM is a “trusted US State Department partner” within the Special Envoy network.
Pro-Israel conference sponsors include ECAJ, the Dor Foundation and the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, which last week received a grant of $100,000 from the NSW government to contribute to the conference.
Where’s the money? Government and Israel lobby coy on big grants
Sheina Gutnick, whose father died in the Bondi massacre, was appointed CAM’s public affairs officer in March and since then has been the public face of CAM. She told the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion that she has been the victim of many antisemitic attacks since then.
Labor backing council campaign
Recently, she has been collecting supportive videos from Councillors and MPs, including the federal Minister for Local Government Kirsty McBain who urged CAM to “take back Bondi”. McBain is not attending the conference.
Two Labor Mayors, the Inner West’s Darcy Byrne and Bayside’s Christina Curry are speaking at the conference. Lord Mayor Clover Moore will not attend, which is scarcely surprising given that CAM organised a rally at which Moore was attacked as a terrorist sympathiser because she joined last year’s March for Humanity.
The City of Sydney told MWM that the Labor Deputy Mayor Ollie Arkins will attend. While it presents a bipartisan image, CAM is being driven, both internationally and in Australia, by some influential conservative Zionists with a right wing agenda.
The players behind CAM
CAM Australia claims that its activities are funded by its Australian partners but MWM has been unable to find any business name, company or charity which accounts for its finances. There is a Board of CAM Australia which is chaired by the hugely influential businessman David Gonski.
We sent questions to CAM including asking which entity the Board governed but got no acknowledgement or reply.
Gonski is close to Jillian Segal and heads the Special Envoy’s Education task-force. He was recruited to CAM by Yigal Nissel who was moved to CAM from his job at the Israeli Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Antisemitism and sent to Australia to help organise CAM’s first conference. He was dispatched back to Australia this year to head CAM in Australia.
Alex Polson is CAM’s senior advisor. He was originally a national officer of the Australasian Union of Jewish students. After that for eight years he was an advisor to Liberal Ministers and MPs.
PRs, astroturfers and lobbyists
In early 2024, Polson established his boutique advisory and investment company DBK. DBK registered the name Better Councils and Polson was the key Liberal organiser of the major parties’ ‘Put the Greens’ Last’ astroturfing campaign for ‘Better Councils’, and its successor for the Federal election ‘Better Australia’. (ALP member Sophie Calland was the Labor end of Better Australia.)
Bipartisan Better Australia raised at least $1.3 million (with no donors disclosed) much of which must have been spent on its slick electoral materials. For this, Better Australia partnered with strategic communications company Agenda C.
Agenda C was established by strategist Carrington Brigham in 2019. Earlier, Brigham developed his skills working under Yaron Finkelstein at Crosby Textor. CT is known for its role in conservative electoral wins in Australia and the United Kingdom.
Finkelstein was a founding member of NSW Liberal friends of Israel and played a powerful role in the Morrison government as the PM’s personal private secretary. After the Coalition defeat in 2024, Finkelstein worked for NSW Premier Dominic Perrotet and then founded Society Advisory Pty Ltd, which has been granted a $200,000 contract to advise Special Envoy Jillilan Segal until April 2027.
Trickery claims
Polson and Brigham worked together on the Better Australia campaign. Finkelstein attended a meeting where campaign materials and a detailed campaign strategy were discussed with Labor party members of Better Australia. Everyone listed as present was a committed pro-Israel Zionist – but the campaign messages were
‘Don’t be Tricked by Teals’ and ‘Put the Greens Last’.
Agenda C claimed its campaign successfully defended four major seats and won back another four.
Brigham celebrated when his friend Tim Wilson narrowly defeated Teal Zoe Daniel in Goldstein after his campaign branded her as untrustworthy.
With the success of Better Australia behind them, Alex Polson and his DBK consultancy again linked up with Brigham and Agenda C for the CAM’s first conference. Polson and Brigham both signed the media release for the conference, along with a PR person in the US.
Agenda C aimed to deliver a “fully integrated, multi-channel strategy that positioned the summit as a credible, necessary platform for national leadership.”
Agenda C and CAM continue to work together, partnering on exclusive polling for The Sunday Telegraph about levels of fear in Australia, which was featured in a piece promoting the CAM conference.
“The Hebrew Hammer”: inside the Gold Coast’s antisemitism junket
CAM’s political agenda
The 2026 conference program promotes CAM as being all about interfaith, inclusive and sharing cultural approaches. Everyone is expected to commit to goals in the final session.
There are no speakers from Jewish, Palestinian or other human rights organisations that favour broad anti-racism strategies and do not accept that anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism (unlike CAM).
CAM’s actual political agenda is clarified in its submission to the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, which was published on the Commission’s website in mid-September.
The CAM submission has four authors – the first is CEO Roytman and the second is CAM’s Australia CEO Nissel. Nowhere is it mentioned that Roytman is in Israel or that Nissel is on leave from an organisation that partners with the Israeli state. The other authors are Polson and Gutnick.
Despite their ‘grassroots’ talk, CAM’s agenda is a top down one.
CAM wants the Royal Commission to recommend training police to enforce IHRA as it is doing in several US states where CAM trains police in “evolving forms of antisemitism”.
It favours passing laws which prohibit posting online material viewed by CAM as antisemitic. It wants a National Local Government Partnership Against Antisemitism and for Social Cohesion, delivered through Australian Local Government Association LGAs built on CAM’s Action Plan’s four pillars.
Even by Zionist standards, CAM’s version of IHRA is wide. A symbols document that they distributed to conference attendees last year is attached to their submission. It takes in everyday symbols like ‘keffiyehs’ and ‘watermelons’ and a broad range of pro Palestinian slogans.
Israel lobby has luxury antisemitism summit on Gold Coast while Gaza burns
In the submission CAM attacks union and activist campaigners who wrote letters (including one to Darcy Byrne signed by 700 people) urging a boycott of last year’s conference.
They accuse them of intimidation, harassment and antisemitism – for example by referring to a Zionist Lobby or Israeli propaganda. It asks the Royal Commission to conclude that the albeit peaceful action of critics demonstrates the need for a Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.
Peace protestors to blame
CAM blames peaceful protesters for costing them thousands of dollars and forcing them to bring in a counter-terrorism squad.
One of these protesters was Jewish anti-Zionist Veronica Sherman. Sherman told MWM that she was one of about five people who “travelled independently from around Australia to protest outside the conference …
nothing about us could be described as intimidating.
“Even the cops told me how surprised they were at how few protestors there were because they had been told there would be hundreds if not thousands. Which explained why there was such a heavy police presence. Including helicopters,” she said.
Protesting is a “basic Australian and democratic right. It’s important that Australians know that the Zionists don’t represent all Jews which is one of the reasons I flew up to hold a banner peacefully outside the venue”.
Pressure and complaints
Recently Polson exercised his democratic right to write on behalf of CAM to the organiser of an event at the University of Tasmania at which Nick Hanna, co-founder of the Civil Defence Legal Centre and lawyer at Hanna Legal was delivering the keynote address.
CAM claimed that Hanna had produced an antisemitic video and asked the University to reconsider its invitation. The University rejected CAM’s argument and said the event would go ahead. Hobart Synagogue, which is supporting the CAM conference, then wrote a letter complaining that while Hanna sounds ‘calm and reasonable’ he is “extremely dangerous” for its Jewish community.
In releasing his video about this behind the scenes pressure, Hanna says it showed that people can resist pressure and win.
Polson has high hopes for the November conference, hoping that it will “scale a national movement already underway”.
But MWM hears applications to attend the conference, which this year costs $600 without accommodation, are slow – and a new campaign to discourage councillors from attending has just begun.
Detailed questions for this story were put to CAM, Polson and Waverley Council but we received no reply or acknowledgement.
Critics of Antisemitism Summit ‘antisemitic’ says Israeli antisemitism chief
Wendy Bacon is an investigative journalist who was the Professor of Journalism at UTS. She worked for Fairfax, Channel Nine and SBS and has published in The Guardian, New Matilda, City Hub and Overland. She has a long history in promoting independent and alternative journalism.
She is a long-term supporter of a peaceful BDS and the Greens.