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Submission FPM-1CS by Lorel Thomas and Stefano Perfili, with Free Palestine Melbourne (FPM), in response to the UN Special Rapporteur OPT’s call for input on the role of media in the context of Israel’s policies and practices toward the Palestinian people, especially after 7 October 2023. Lodged 7 May 2026; may not reflect later developments. Read all FPM’s submissions here.

Introduction

This cornerstone submission documents how, over more than two years of the Gaza genocide and other international crimes, Australian media functioned as a counterweight against public will. It dissipated political pressure on Australia’s obligations as a state party to the Genocide Convention and an ongoing supplier of arms components to the perpetrator state. It then manufactured the discursive conditions for the criminalisation of the very solidarity movement those outlets had spent two years delegitimising.

After the 14 December 2025 Bondi Beach attack, it yielded to the weaponisation of that tragedy by pro-Israel lobby organisations, building a five-week discursive bridge from grief to emergency legislation. What this submission documents is the operation of a lobby–media–government pipeline that has served to enable Israel’s genocide and other atrocity crimes — by recasting solidarity with the victims as bigotry to be policed by the state.

Australia’s media market is structurally primed for editorial uniformity. The Global Media and Internet Concentration Project ranks Australia the second-most concentrated media market among studied democracies, behind only Brazil; four corporations control 84 per cent of newspaper revenue. The two public broadcasters — the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) — remain the most trusted news sources in the country and the institutional counterweight to that concentration. However, they have absorbed cumulative funding cuts exceeding A$1.2 billion between 2014 and 2023. A small number of pro-Israel lobby organisations — the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), the Zionist Federation of Australia (ZFA), Zionism Victoria, and the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies — operate across this terrain in what a former Australian foreign minister has publicly described as “a foreign influence operation designed to put the interests of Israel above the interests of Australia and its foreign policy.”

The Australian coverage patterns documented in this submission do not arise organically. They are sustained by a two-sided mechanism — a cultivation pipeline that selects for compliant journalism through professional incentive and lobby-funded travel to Israel, and an enforcement pipeline that corrects deviance through co-ordinated complaint campaigns, employment consequences, and statutory and judicial process. Together these pipelines produce the editorial line that primed the Australian public to support state complicity in the genocide.

FPM’s companion submissions examine Australia’s public broadcaster (FPM-ABC), News Corp broadsheet The Australian (FPM-TAU), “research-based” outlet The Conversation (FPM-TC, forthcoming), and the Gaza reporting restrictions of Australia’s largest newspapers, with Hind Rajab as case study (FPM-HR).

The gap between the public and the press

Australian public opinion ran far ahead of Australian media throughout the genocide. In August 2025, approximately 300,000 people marched across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, in a nationwide outpouring of support for Gaza, sanctions on Israel, and recognition of Palestine. The march was endorsed by the Board of the journalists’ union (the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, MEAA). The Australian government formally recognised the State of Palestine on 21 September 2025, following — not leading — public demand.

While the public was marching, The Australian described the March for Humanity as a “barbarian turn” and called for “firm action to counter the slow sinking of our societies into the cesspit of anti-civilisational thought.” Crikey’s analysis of march coverage shows wildly disparate framing across outlets, with News Corp mastheads and the public broadcaster diverging sharply from the on-the-ground reality witnessed by participants. Sustained coverage asymmetries had been documented well before the march: a University of Technology Sydney analysis of news headlines (October 2024) found systematic disparity in how Israeli and Palestinian casualties were framed.

Wire-service dependency

Wire-service dependency transmits this gap into daily copy. The Conversation’s analysis of “churnalism” in Australian newsrooms records that, in some samples, 79% of Sydney Morning Herald and 87.5% of Age top stories were drawn directly from Australian Associated Press copy. Formulaic Gaza phrasing — “Hamas-run health ministry”, “Hamas does not distinguish between civilians and combatants” — became the default delegitimising frame for Palestinian casualty figures for almost two years (a result “long sought” by Mark Regev and his team, as he told The Australian six weeks into the Gaza genocide).

The physical exclusion of foreign correspondents from Gaza by the Israeli government drew no co-ordinated demand from Australian outlet management for access, despite AFP, AP, BBC and Reuters jointly warning that their journalists inside Gaza faced starvation. The Australian press was content to receive Gaza second-hand, through wire feeds in which the perpetrator state’s framings travelled forward unchallenged.

On April 29, a nine-year old Palestinian boy, Adel Al-Najjar, was killed by Israeli soldiers while collecting firewood for his family. He was apparently deemed an “imminent threat” to soldiers because of his proximity to the Yellow Line. The headline that AAP ran for this article was “Five killed in Israeli strikes on Gaza Strip: medics”, rather than “Israeli strikes kill Palestinian child”. The framing of the headline does a number of things: it blunts the emotional response to the death of a child; the use of the passive voice distances Israel from responsibility for the death; and it dehumanises Palestinians by reducing both the boy and the other victims to statistics.

Australian media sources routinely repeat this sanitised language; Israeli responsibility is whitewashed and Palestinian suffering is minimised.

Composition of the Australian newsroom

The same gap is reinforced by the social composition of the Australian newsroom. In a June 2025 interview, an editor of Deepcut News described senior Australian journalists as disproportionately white, middle-to-upper class, and concentrated in affluent urban areas. The naturalisation of a particular subject position is the editorial function that follows.

The 23 November 2023 open letter from the MEAA, Australia’s journalists’ union, signed by 270 working journalists, was a refusal of that arrangement by those who felt safe enough to sign. The documented professional retaliation that followed — examined in “Enforcement” below and in companion submission FPM-HR — demonstrates the cost of that refusal.

The cumulative effect is a press apparatus running ahead of its own audience in delegitimising Palestinian solidarity, while running behind its own union in basic professional standards — and deflating, day after day, the public pressure on Australia to honour its obligations as a state party to the Genocide Convention.

The “governing schema” and Australia’s erased genocide obligations

Hallin’s spheres as a conceptual model for permissible discourse

Hallin’s three-sphere model maps how mainstream news organisations sort political topics into a sphere of consensus (assumed agreement, not subject to debate); a sphere of legitimate controversy (open to balanced reporting); and a sphere of deviance (positions treated as outside acceptable discourse).

What gets sorted into which sphere is itself an editorial choice.

Naming the “governing schema”

A former foreign editor, who has applied Daniel Hallin’s three-sphere model of permissible discourse to Australian Palestine coverage, has named what governs editorial choices on Palestine — the “governing schema” — putting the framing to FPM directly:

“Where you stand on this issue comes down to one question: Do you consider Israel to be a state in good standing? Do we share their values? If the answer is no, then all these journalistic avenues of inquiry open themselves up to you. If the answer is yes, I do consider them to be a state in good standing, then you can close all these doors and forget about it. You don’t have to worry about what Palestinians [or] Lebanese people think. You don’t have to worry about history [or] people’s accusations. You don’t have to worry about what the UN thinks, what Amnesty International thinks, what Human Rights Watch thinks. You don’t have to worry about the Geneva Conventions [or] the rule of law. You just don’t have to worry about it. You just have to say to yourself… they’re just like us, we’re just like them. End of story.”

The Australian Deputy Prime Minister articulated this schema aloud at a Jewish community gathering on 9 October 2023, two days after 7 October: “Israel is a liberal democracy. She cherishes human rights and values freedom of speech. And in that, Israel and Australia are the same.”

The press would spend the next two years working in conditions the Deputy Prime Minister had already set: Israel a state in good standing, the question of complicity foreclosed at the level of government speech.

Australia’s own obligations, erased

The first thing the schema erases is Australia’s own obligations under international law. Mainstream outlets covered the Prime Minister’s July 2025 statement that Israel was clearly breaching international humanitarian law but did not interrogate Australia’s own Article 1 obligation under the Genocide Convention to prevent genocide, nor its obligations as an arms supplier. Crikey’s August 2025 reporting that Australian-manufactured F-35 components continued to flow to Israel, concurrent with the Prime Minister’s international-law-breach statement, drew no equivalent coverage from the major commercial mastheads or the public broadcaster.

Language suppression was made explicit when the then-Managing Director of the public broadcaster told the Sydney Morning Herald that it was “not our place to use terms like genocide and apartheid” — effectively ruling out the legal vocabulary of the proceedings then before the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

The Sde Teiman case

The schema also erases stories that would be unmissable in any framework that did not presume Israel a state in good standing. The clearest single example is the Sde Teiman case. On 5 July 2024, Israeli reservists from the unit guarding Palestinian detainees at the Sde Teiman military prison gang-raped a detainee, leaving him with broken ribs, a punctured lung and internal rectal tears. When ten reservists were arrested on 29 July, far-right Israeli protesters, including serving members of the Knesset, stormed Sde Teiman and a second military base in defence of the suspects; the Israeli National Security Minister publicly called the suspects “heroes.”

In a Knesset committee hearing, when an Arab member of parliament asked whether it was acceptable “to insert a stick into a person’s rectum,” a member of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party shouted in reply: “Yes! If he is a Nukhba [Hamas militant], everything is legitimate to do! Everything!”

Across the Australian commercial press, the abusive reservists registered as a Reuters wire item in a handful of regional papers, if at all — in sharp contrast to front-page coverage at the BBC, CBS, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, and Le Monde.

As the same former foreign editor put it to FPM directly: 

“Any normal journalistic organisation would have covered the Sde Teiman affair. Because it is like a soap opera. It’s like a telenovela. It’s got every dramatic twist you can possibly imagine. I defy you. You won’t find coverage of it. […] If you were a journalistic organisation that was serious about what’s going on in Gaza and the West Bank, you would then say, well, how common is that sort of thing? Is torture endemic in Israel’s jails? What would that say about Israel if it were true? But people don’t want to go down this road.”

The death penalty law and segregated executions

When the public broadcaster reported the passage of Israel’s 30 March 2026 death penalty law — applicable to Palestinians through military courts but not to Israelis through civilian courts — it did not use the word “apartheid” once. This is in spite of the legislation falling squarely within the apartheid finding already made by Human Rights Watch (2021), Amnesty International (2022), B’Tselem (2021), and the ICJ in its July 2024 advisory opinion, finding Israel in breach of the prohibition on racial segregation under Article 3 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

The Herzog visit: who the schema permits

The Israeli President’s February 2026 visit to Australia shows whose voices the schema permits. He is named in the September 2025 finding of the UN Commission of Inquiry on the OPT as among those who incited the Gaza genocide. Coverage of the visit by Australia’s second-largest commercial broadsheet group ran to more than 20,000 words: nearly 1,000 words were given to Jewish community members; fewer than 100 words from two Palestinians were quoted in total; and not a single Palestinian, Lebanese, Arab, or Muslim Australian community member was sought for comment.

As the same former foreign editor put it to FPM directly: 

“We are outside consideration. If we weren’t outside consideration, the coverage would look very different.”

A press apparatus that segregates Palestinian voices, suppresses the legal vocabulary of the proceedings before the International Court of Justice, and refuses to cover an evidentiary record of torture so dramatic that international peers ran it on their front pages, while platforming a head of state named by a UN Commission as having incited genocide, does not merely fail the public’s right to receive information. It primes the population to support government complicity in genocide.

Cultivation: how the commentariat is built

The Rambam pipeline

Australian opinion journalism on Israel and Palestine is dominated by a small cohort of writers, many cultivated through lobby-funded travel to Israel. The Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council Rambam Israel Fellowship was launched in June 2003 by then-Labor leader Kim Beazley, as documented in The Australian Jewish News of 13 June 2003 digitised on the National Library of Australia’s Trove. By November of the same year, journalists were already reporting back from the program. Michael West Media’s 2024 investigation documents that Rambam has since sent more than 400 Australian politicians, journalists, advisers and senior public servants to Israel, with initial intakes including future prime ministers, opposition leaders and premiers.

Crikey’s running tally, last updated October 2024, names more than 130 Australian participants (media and political) in Rambam and the parallel NSW Jewish Board of Deputies missions, with News Corp alumni (~45) nearly doubling Nine (~25). Cultivation reaches every level of the editorial chain at both networks: editors-in-chief, executive and deputy editors, foreign and political editors, bureau chiefs, correspondents and columnists. The top five bylined opinion contributors on Palestine and Israel at The Australian during FPM’s May–August 2025 media monitoring period were all Rambam alumni. So were the four Nine editors who barred signatories of the November 2023 petition for fairer Gaza coverage from any role in covering the conflict. When asked by Crikey about disclosure policies, Nine, News Corp, Sky News and others did not respond; Australian Financial Review (AFR) and public broadcaster SBS (Special Broadcasting Service) indicated any resulting reporting would carry a disclosure; only public broadcaster ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) confirmed it bars staff from such travel, though did not respond to questions about a trip taken by its then-political editor in 2010.

While the ABC may defend its coverage by noting that, unlike commercial outlets, it does not permit its staff to accept lobby-funded trips to Israel, Deepcut News has identified the flaw in this defence: many of the senior editorial staff now at the ABC went on Rambam trips earlier in their careers while working for commercial outlets. The cultivation pipeline does not need the ABC to send its own staff; it only needs the ABC to promote people previously cultivated elsewhere. The same pattern operates at SBS, the other public broadcaster, whose current senior management includes Rambam alumni.

Editorial control at News Corp

On page 22 of Dateline Jerusalem: ​​Journalism’s Toughest Assignment, Lyons writes that “there are only three people who can tell the editors of The Australian what they can or can’t use: Rupert Murdoch, Lachlan Murdoch and [AIJAC Executive Director] Colin Rubenstein. Only one of them doesn’t have Murdoch as his surname. That’s power.”

Cultivation-pipeline alumni

Three of the most prominent commercial-media voices in this submission’s evidence base — Gemma Tognini, Chris Kenny and Erin Molan — were cultivated through the same pipeline.

Tognini travelled to Israel in June 2023 as an AIJAC Rambam scholar and described the experience as “genuinely life-changing”, returning after October 7 for a second wartime trip and publishing a series of Australian columns opposing Palestinian recognition. Even before 7 October she was openly hostile to Palestine solidarity, writing that “Israel haters aren’t ‘cool’, they are mostly just plain ignorant”. At an AIJAC supporters’ function in August 2023 she described Australian media coverage as showing “insane sponsorship of the Palestinian cause, without any seeming analytical or sober-minded analysis”.

Sky News host Chris Kenny reported live from Jerusalem after October 7, then published a column in The Australian titled “Israel vs Australia: differences highlight some home truths” and used his program to describe ABC coverage as “relentlessly anti-Israel” and campus protests as “full of lies, full of incorrect information, full of ignorance”.

Sky News’s Erin Molan, who had never been to Israel before October 7, made at least three visits in the space of about a year by May 2025, becoming one of the most visible pro-Israel advocates on Australian commercial television.

Cultivation in flight: Sharri Markson

Sharri Markson’s career arc is the cultivation pipeline operating on a single person — and the bridge from cultivation to enforcement. Markson participated in an AIJAC Rambam trip while at The Australian and was subsequently appointed host of a flagship Sky News Australia program. In February 2025 she organised Sky News’s “Antisemitism Summit”, convening a former Australian PM (John Howard) and a sitting Federal Court justice.

On 25 August 2025 she interviewed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and framed credible genocide accusations and the documented starvation of Gaza as “libels”. That interview was three days after the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) confirmed Famine in Gaza — and two weeks after leaked Israeli cabinet minutes showed starvation had been chosen as a strategy of war — actively obscuring this war crime in progress.

In her written response to Media Watch, Markson described the interview’s purpose as ensuring “Australians hear from Netanyahu how Israel takes unprecedented measures to avoid civilian casualties and deliver aid”, thus framing the dissemination of Israeli government propaganda as the antidote to a “dangerous antisemitism crisis.” The interview is the laundering operation in flight: an Australian flagship host platforms a head of government subject to an ICC arrest warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and editorially endorses his characterisation of UN findings as “libels”.

Markson was later named as a respondent in a racial discrimination case in which 20 Sky News media appearances were impugned (see below).

The cultivation pipeline produced an editorial cohort whose function across News Corp, Nine and Sky News has been to platform Israeli government statements unchallenged, recast Israel’s documented international crimes as Israeli self-defence, and dismiss UN findings, ICJ rulings and human-rights organisations’ determinations as antisemitic — laundering perpetrator-state framings into Australian public discourse on an industrial scale. The commentariat that polices Australian discourse on Israel and Palestine is, in substantial part, the product of lobby investment in editorial selection and editorial promotion.

News Corp before the Federal Court

The cultivation pipeline’s editorial output is now itself before the Federal Court of Australia. On 13 November 2025, the Australian Human Rights Commission accepted four group complaints lodged under the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 by eleven complainants including Australia Palestine Advocacy Network President Nasser Mashni, covering 81 impugned publications or broadcasts, across 31 named individual and four corporate respondents under News Corp, including The Australian, Sky News and the Herald Sun. The most prolific named respondents include the cultivation-pipeline alumni profiled above.

The complaints allege that News Corp outlets published debunked Israeli atrocity propaganda as fact — including claims about Palestinians “beheading” 40 Israeli babies and putting a baby in the oven on 7 October 2023 — and dehumanising language including “sick culture”, “savagery”, “black-hearted Arabs”, “the gorillas of Gaza”, and, of Arab Muslims, a culture “steeped in antisemitic hatred”.

After the AHRC process did not resolve the complaints, on 8 April 2026 it was reported that seven of the complainants filed a Federal Court application alleging News Corp breached the Act by “publish[ing] and disseminat[ing] atrocity propaganda” that created hatred and contempt for “Muslim, Arab and/or Palestinian Australians”. Mashni said News Corp had “engaged in hateful, extreme, dangerous, divisive and racist conduct, and it’s time that they stopped being treated as credible news sources.”

The case now before the Federal Court now alleges that the lobby-cultivated commentariat produced exactly the kind of discourse that the Racial Discrimination Act exists to prohibit: propaganda whose editorial function was to dehumanise the targets of the Gaza genocide — and prime the Australian public to accept government complicity in it.

Enforcement: what happens when the line is challenged

The November 2023 MEAA letter

The November 2023 MEAA open letter, and Nine Entertainment’s response to it, established the enforcement template four weeks before journalist Antoinette Lattouf was sacked.

On 23 November 2023, 270 Australian journalists, endorsed collectively by the MEAA journalists’ section and by the ABC and Guardian Australia MEAA house committees, signed an open letter calling on Australian newsrooms to “support ethical reporting on Israel and Palestine”. The letter drew on the documented killing of 53 journalists by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the disproportionate prioritising of Israeli government sources in Australian coverage. Within a week, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age editors banned all signatories from any role in covering the war; the ABC’s then-Director of News warned his staff that signing the letter may call their impartiality into question; The Australian reported the signatories in an enforcement frame and ran an editorial casting the letter as the end of independent journalism. By July 2024, four Nine signatories had departed the company; Crikey reported that Nine’s “heavy-handed” response to the letter was a contributing factor in at least one of the departures.

Former SBS The Feed host Jan Fran posted publicly on 24 November 2023: “Not included: the names of journalists who wanted to sign but couldn’t for fear of losing their livelihood. Think about that for a minute. Journalists fear losing their journalism jobs for … wanting […] better journalism.” Fran and Antoinette Lattouf would go on to co-found independent outlet Ette Media in July 2025. Four weeks after Fran’s post, Lattouf was unlawfully dismissed by the ABC for sharing an Instagram story about a Human Rights Watch report on Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war — on the same day that ABC themselves reported on the story.

Lattouf v ABC

Lattouf v ABC was the first Australian case that evidenced this enforcement mechanism in open court. The Federal Court of Australia found the ABC unlawfully terminated Antoinette Lattouf for holding a political opinion opposing Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, with Justice Rangiah finding that the ABC “abjectly surrendered the rights of its employee Ms Lattouf to appease a lobby group.” Court-tendered evidence shows the ABC’s decision was triggered by a single inquiry from The Australian (our companion submission FPM-ABC, on the public broadcaster, examines the case in detail).

The National Press Club

Australia’s National Press Club (NPC) — a Canberra-based members’ association, founded in 1963, whose weekly addresses are broadcast nationally on the ABC and which describes itself as “a vigorous champion of media freedom” — performed a comparable enforcement move on its own program.

In late September 2025, the NPC withdrew its written confirmation of an address by Pulitzer Prize–winning American war correspondent Chris Hedges, scheduled for 20 October 2025 and titled “The Betrayal of Palestinian Journalists.” Correspondence later obtained by Lamestream records the Press Club’s chief executive citing concerns about “balance,” having hosted too many speakers “in favour” of the Palestinian cause. The figures the Press Club categorised as advocates “in favour” of Palestine were UN office-holders: Pillay and Sidoti of the Commission of Inquiry; Special Rapporteur Ben Saul; and UNICEF spokesman James Elder. For this Australian press institution, applied international human rights law had become a partisan position requiring offset.

Six months later, on 31 March 2026, the same podium was given to Israeli Ambassador Hillel Newman, who used that platform to deny the genocide, discredit dead journalists, and link Palestine solidarity protests to the Bondi Beach attack. Newman’s address came two days after the IDF admitted to doctoring an image of Lebanese journalist Ali Hassan Shoeib in a Hezbollah uniform to justify his killing; Newman defended the doctored image from the podium, claiming authentic photos existed. He refused three times to apologise for the Israeli killing of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom, and could not explain the discrepancy between his claim of “full access” for the inquiry by former Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin and Binskin’s own statement that he had been denied the drone audio. Many of his other claims — including that “the majority” of Palestinian journalists killed by Israel since October 2023 were “actually activists guised as journalists” — went unchallenged from the floor.

The Press Club’s chief executive sent a mass email to complainants, describing criticisms of the Newman invitation as “conspiracy theories”, characterising some complaints as “vile and abusive, including antisemitism and hate speech.” He warned that such complaints would be referred to the Australian Federal Police “and other national security agencies.” Only after the backlash did the NPC extend invitations to the Palestinian and Lebanese ambassadors.

Free speech on an uninterrupted platform for Newman; federal police referral threats, accusations of “antisemitism and hate speech”, and dismissal as “conspiracy theorists” for the public who objected. The country’s press club thus functioned as an instrument of Australian complicity in the genocide, with public objection treated as a security risk.

The NPC’s 2022 standard establishes that the same institution applied the inverse test to Israel. In March 2022 the NPC withdrew its invitation to Russian Ambassador Alexey Pavlovsky, citing “allegations of war crimes and bombing of civilian targets” and “media censorship in Russia”. Under that standard, an Israeli ambassador should never have been invited. The NPC’s corporate sponsor list might help explain the inconsistency: the press club has more than 80 corporate and government sponsors, including arms manufacturers BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, SAAB Technologies and Thales. Thales supplies components to the Israeli military, and Zomi Frankcom and her World Central Kitchen colleagues were killed by an Israeli Hermes drone.

Additional cases establishing industry-wide pattern

In February 2025, SEN Radio dismissed veteran cricket journalist Peter Lalor mid-series during Australia’s first Test against Sri Lanka in Galle over re-posts about Gaza and Palestinian prisoners. Lalor’s public account — that he was variously told by SEN that lobby complaints were and were not the cause — captures the enforcement mechanism: lobby pressure exerted, then denied, with dismissal the outcome either way.

Veteran broadcaster Mary Kostakidis is facing a Federal Court racial discrimination case brought by the Zionist Federation of Australia in April 2025 over her social media activity on Palestine.

A co-ordinated WhatsApp campaign against two ABC journalists, John Lyons and Laura Tingle, in January 2026, using templated complaints funnelled through lobby groups, followed the same mechanism as the Lattouf v ABC campaign.

The Australian itself reported the campaign against the ABC’s John Lyons in a piece headlined “ABC correspondent John Lyons accused of using ‘antisemitic tropes’ in Iran analysis” — the outlet that the Lattouf judgment documented as a pressure vector on the ABC was now amplifying the new campaign, illustrating how enforcement moves through the system: lobby to commercial media to public broadcaster.

On 7 January 2026, in the wake of the Bondi massacre, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald published a cartoon by Cathy Wilcox called “Grass roots”. It depicted the Royal Commission campaign as manufactured by lobby and political figures marching to Netanyahu’s drum. ECAJ, Zionism Victoria, the Zionist Federation of Australia and AIJAC condemned it as antisemitic, and The Australian amplified those condemnations. Rather than defending its artist, Nine apologised for the cartoon within four days — yielding to the same lobby that was exploiting Bondi grief, thus repudiating Wilcox’s astute critique.

Enforcement can also operate through induced resignation: former Guardian Australia journalist Antoun Issa resigned in 2024 over the outlet’s Gaza coverage and patterns of racism, and co-founded the independent outlet Deepcut News whose quantitative analysis of ABC coverage is cited in FPM’s submissions. His pre-Guardian career included running a team of Palestinian journalists in Gaza as news editor of Al-Monitor and senior editorial work at The Atlantic — arguably the strongest CV in Australia for covering the region from inside a mainstream outlet. Some of the first quantitative studies of Australian media’s pro-Israel bias are now produced by journalists who had resigned from the institutions they are analysing.

The pattern is consistent across this section: editorial conformity is enforced through institutional, employment and legal mechanisms whose collective effect is to police the boundaries of what Australian audiences are permitted to see and hear about the genocide. The cumulative function is the silencing and segregation of Pro-Palestinian voices that document or oppose the conduct of the State of Israel — whether Lebanese, Greek-Australian or Jewish-Australian.

The feedback loop: Bondi and the manufactured crackdown

Capture, within hours

The Bondi Beach attack was captured for a new discursive purpose within hours. The 14 December 2025 shooting killed 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration and was established by NSW Police as ISIS-inspired, with no connection to the Palestine solidarity movement. Within hours, statements from the Israeli Prime Minister and from the Australian Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism (a former president of ECAJ) directly linked the Palestine solidarity movement, and the Australian government’s recognition of Palestine, to the mass murders. While the Jewish Council of Australia called these remarks “highly irresponsible”, the major commercial outlets did not challenge the framing — they amplified it.

The five-week compression

The five-week compression from grief to emergency legislation is the causal mechanism this submission demonstrates. On 14 December the attack occurred; on 18 December the federal government adopted the Special Envoy’s prior plan in full; in late December an open letter signed by more than 100 business leaders, including the News Corp Australia chairman called for a Royal Commission; on 8 January 2026 the government announced the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion; on 13 January the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill exposure draft was released (2 days for public consultation on 144 pages); on 19–20 January Parliament passed the Bill through both houses in a single day. This compression could not have happened without the press manufacturing the discursive bridge.

The Bill contains a striking carve-out: its new “hate group” proscription regime exempts the offence of advocating genocide. The Explanatory Memorandum defends the exclusion on the basis that “hate crime conduct is… distinct from genocide”, and “best criminalised through existing frameworks within the Criminal Code” — yet all of the acts in the “hate crime” definition are already criminalised under that Code. Advocating genocide is, as a legal commentator in Crikey put it, “the mother of all hate crimes.” With Israel before the World Court for genocide, this Bill criminalises genocide opponents while shielding genocide advocates. Not only does this carve-out expose the Israel lobby’s capture — it is the state’s admission that it knows it is complicit. After two years of editorial priming, Australia’s complicity is now written into law.

Sky News, News Corp commercial mastheads, and the broader commentariat manufactured the false equivalence between Palestine protest and antisemitism that became the legislative predicate. Cathy Wilcox’s 7 January 2026 cartoon named, in a single image, the argument this submission makes in full: that the Royal Commission campaign was not grassroots; it was manufactured by a lobby–media–government nexus. ECAJ, Zionism Victoria, the Zionist Federation of Australia and AIJAC immediately condemned it as antisemitic, which The Australian amplified. Nine’s swift apology, in an echo of the Lattouf case, “abjectly surrendered the rights of its employee… to appease a lobby group”. The cultivation-and-enforcement engine had kicked into maximum velocity: a cartoon naming the manufactured character of the post-Bondi campaign was punished by the platform that published it, inside the same five-week compression the campaign itself had produced.

“Alarm Bell”: pressure on the Royal Commissioner

The lobby-cultivated commentariat then turned on the Royal Commission itself. The Australian Government appointed former High Court Justice Virginia Bell as Royal Commissioner on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion on 8 January 2026; on the same day, former federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg publicly opposed the appointment on the basis of unspecified concerns from “leaders of the Jewish community”.

By March, The Australian’s editor-at-large had devoted a column to questioning Bell’s “capacity” and “judgment”. This shows the cultivated commentariat applying public pressure on the very inquiry charged with assessing media coverage of the genocide. It also acts as an implicit enforcement warning to the Commissioner — pre-emptively manufacturing the grounds to discredit any finding that does not align with the lobby’s wishlist.

Lakemba: the government’s intent reveals itself

On 20 March 2026, the Prime Minister and Home Affairs Minister were heckled during Eid prayers at Lakemba Mosque in western Sydney by worshippers calling them “genocide supporters”. Albanese told reporters the disruption came from “people who don’t like the fact that we have outlawed extremist organisations like Hizb ut-Tahrir.” In doing so, the head of government publicly cast Australian Muslims objecting to their country’s complicity in genocide as sympathisers with a designated extremist organisation. His response revealed, in plain speech, what the press had spent two years manufacturing consent for: recasting objection to state complicity in genocide as a security problem requiring suppression, not a democratic grievance requiring response.

The apex: lobby wishlist becomes state policy

While the lobby–state pathway documented in this submission was in motion before Bondi, it had slowed to a standstill. Special Envoy Jillian Segal’s July 2025 plan to combat antisemitism preceded the December 2025 attack by five months, during which the federal government had largely declined to act on it, and nine Jewish organisations signed an open letter opposing it. What Bondi delivered was the political momentum — and manufactured mandate — to convert that plan into legislation, and from legislation into operational state speech-instruction on a Commonwealth scale.

From plan to handbook: the Segal pathway

On 24 April 2026, the cultivation pipeline reached its operational apex. Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism (Jillian Segal, former president of ECAJ) published Understanding Antisemitism in Australia, a 78-page Commonwealth handbook for institutional use across schools, universities, public service, community organisations, and content moderation — including “Practical use of the IHRA [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance] definition in the Australian context” for media.

The trajectory: Segal’s July 2025 plan; the December 2025 Eliminating Antisemitism government response; the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill, passed in January 2026; the April 2026 handbook. Each stage was preceded by lobby publication and followed by state adoption.

Inside the handbook: “antisemitic tropes… in the language of human rights”

The handbook’s evidentiary base is largely the lobby’s own. The Jewish Community Council of Victoria, the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, AIJAC and the Zionist Federation of Australia appear repeatedly; Executive Council of Australian Jewry incident reports (also 2025) are cited as primary authorities on Australian antisemitism — reports which equate “Free Palestine” graffiti and BDS signage with “Kill Jews” and “Heil Hitler” graffiti, yet have nonetheless been “treated as a serious, even definitive, source by the mainstream media”. A foreword by former Chief of the Defence Force Sir Peter Cosgrove supplies state-and-military legitimacy.

The handbook states that “antisemitic tropes are conveyed and justified in the language of human rights and international legal arguments” (p. 15). Its case study labels accusations against Israel of “apartheid and ethnic cleansing” and “the genocidal, racist Zionist project” as antisemitic (pp. 75–77), closing with “Antisemitism and antizionism [sic] are both expressions of hatred towards Jews” (p. 77). It lists “End the Genocide” graffiti as Holocaust inversion (p. 47). It pre-empts the obvious objection by classifying any claim that the IHRA definition “is designed to intentionally silence criticism” of Israel as itself antisemitic (p. 64) — a meta-rule that, on its face, disqualifies the very inquiry this Special Rapporteur’s mandate exists to assess.

The lobby’s longstanding wishlist is now a Commonwealth document instructing every institution within the state’s reach to treat the language of UN findings, ICJ rulings, Amnesty International, Médecins Sans Frontières, B’Tselem and this Special Rapporteur as bigotry.

The Royal Commission’s Interim Report closes the loop

On 30 April 2026, the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion delivered its Interim Report. Two findings close the loop documented in this submission:

1. First, the Commission found: “No material or advice from any agency identified any gap in the existing legal and regulatory frameworks” preventing Australia from responding to the kind of attack that occurred at Bondi on 14 December 2025. But three months earlier, the Attorney-General had urged Parliament not to wait for the Commission’s findings before passing the Bill: “We cannot wait for its findings to act. Waiting a year gives in to the very people this bill seeks to target and leaves the safety of Australians exposed.” Both houses passed it in a single day, on press-primed urgency.
2. Secondly, the Commission’s founding document formally adopts the IHRA working definition of antisemitism. The Commission’s mandate covers media coverage of the genocide. The Special Envoy’s handbook declares that “antisemitic tropes are conveyed and justified in the language of human rights and international legal arguments”. This is the legal language of the World Court. The Australian state will assess the press for antisemitism — under the lobby’s definition of it.
   

The endpoint: from mass mobilisation to silence

Two and a half years of sustained Palestine solidarity have produced no equivalent journalistic accountability culture, and the contrast with the Iraq War is structural. The Australian War Memorial records that an estimated 500,000 Australians participated in February 2003 rallies against the impending invasion of Iraq, with sustained sympathetic coverage that ran the political cost of the invasion through the remainder of the conservative government of the day. The Palestine solidarity movement has sustained regular mass protest at comparable scale with press coverage that has often been negative and at times vitriolic. The structural difference is not in the public; it is in the press.

Analysis in Lamestream names the mechanism: a press corps that no longer treats Western military violence as a story worth contesting. When in February 2026 the United States and Israel launched co-ordinated strikes on Iran, the same protest movement that had sustained two years of weekly action on Palestine did not mobilise at scale. At the 31 March 2026 Press Club address documented above, the Israeli Ambassador framed the Iran war as “not Israel’s struggle alone” — a shared democratic obligation; the platform that had refused a Pulitzer Prize–winning correspondent on Palestinian journalists was now amplifying the justification for a new war. Demoralisation is the measurable consequence of a press apparatus that counterweights public opinion long enough that public opinion stops trying.