The father of the Bondi terror attack’s youngest victim has accused the royal commission of giving a platform to organisations that support terrorism, as he joins the nation’s top Jewish body in condemning pro-Palestine protest groups for trying to hijack the inquiry’s hearing on antisemitic protests with “clickbait theatrics and gratuitous slurs against Israel”.
On a day when the antisemitism royal commission investigated the pro-Palestine protest at the Sydney Opera House where crowds chanted “f..k the Jews” on October 9, 2023, a Jewish leader was pressed on Israel’s military action and Palestinian death tolls instead of domestic antisemitism.
Lawyers for Palestine Action Group – which organised Sydney’s infamous February protest against Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s visit – and the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network were allowed to cross-examine NSW Jewish Board of Deputies president David Ossip during Tuesday’s hearing.
With PAG organiser Josh Lees attending the hearing, Mr Ossip rebuffed the group’s lawyer, Dominic Toomey, after he pressed him on specific Israeli air strikes on Gaza on October 7, 2023.
“This is the Royal Commission on Antisemitism. We’re dealing with the protests where protesters shouted out, ‘F the Jews’, ‘Where are the Jews’, and ‘I’m going to kill them all’, and I’m a bit confused as to why we’re getting caught up in the minutiae of the timeline of a foreign military operation,” Mr Ossip said.
Royal commissioner Virginia Bell had to step in when APAN’s counsel, Ragni Mathur SC, followed a similar line of questioning.
The lawyers’ attempts to shift the hearing’s focus away from antisemitism and towards Israel drew strong criticism from the Jewish community, including from Michael Britvan, father of 10-year-old Bondi attack victim, Matilda Bee.
Mr Britvan told The Australian he couldn’t understand why the commission allowed the protest groups, via their lawyers, to cross-examine witnesses.
“What I struggle to understand is why supporters of terrorists were allowed to be there in the first place, let alone use the royal commission to ask questions that shift the focus away from the antisemitism that led to it,” Mr Britvan said.
Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin shared the grieving father’s frustrations.
“It is deeply concerning that these groups predictably used the opportunity to hijack an examination of lethal antisemitism for their clickbait theatrics and gratuitous slurs against Israel,” Mr Ryvchin said.
He told The Australian the protest groups were in no position to ask questions at the royal commission.
“These groups have tried to use a royal commission called in the wake of the Bondi horror — where I and so many others lost loved ones — to prosecute the actions of a country they loathe,” Mr Ryvchin said.
“They are attempting to redirect the eye because they are culpable for the demonisation of Australian Jews to the extent that we are now routinely threatened, harassed and abused.
“They normalised egregious lies of genocide and child-killing which in turn positions anti-Jewish actions as noble and courageous. They should be answering for their abominable actions, not asking the questions.”
There was a particular focus on two protests during Tuesday’s hearing: a neo-Nazi rally outside NSW parliament last November, where 60 members of the National Socialist Network brandished a banner reading “Abolish the Jewish lobby”; and the pro-Palestine protest on October 9, 2023, where crowds chanted “f..k the Jews” as they lit flares and burned Israeli flags on the steps of the Sydney Opera House.
In his testimony on Tuesday, Mr Ossip told the royal commission Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel “had a profound psychological impact on the Jewish community of NSW” so the state government’s decision to light the Opera House in the colours of the Israeli flag two days later was moving.
Mr Ossip said it was “quite extraordinary” and deeply upsetting then to be told by police to stay away from the Opera House to avoid a potentially unsafe pro-Palestine rally.
In his cross-examination, Mr Toomey put to Mr Ossip that the October 9 rally was motivated by sympathy for Palestinians, not support for Hamas, but Mr Ossip said PAG’s motivations were “extremely difficult to understand”.
“Your clients effectively called for a protest at Town Hall on the evening of seventh of October, whilst the attacks in southern Israel were still ongoing, women were still being raped, children were being kidnapped into Gaza, and terrorists were going house to house and burning people alive,” he said.
“I still don’t understand why they thought calling a protest in such circumstances was in any way necessary or justified. I thought their conduct was appalling.”
When Mr Ossip said “a lot of the social media activity pertaining to that protest was quite celebratory of (the attack)”, Mr Toomey said: “I want to suggest to you that you have seen nothing that has emanated from the organisers of the rally … which would suggest in any way that the rally was being convened to celebrate those despicable attacks.”
Outside the commission’s hearing, ECAJ pointed to a Facebook post advertising the Opera House protest that called the October 7 attack a “humiliation”.
“Israel has declared war on Palestine for the humiliation it suffered today when Palestinians tore down apartheid walls at a Gaza border, and began to enter ‘48 land that is rightfully theirs,” the post read.
During her cross-examination, Ms Mathur probed Mr Ossip on the number of Palestinians killed by the Israeli military before October 7, 2023, which he said he was not prepared for and could not answer.
Ms Mathur pressed on, asking him if it was his responsibility to “keep abreast” of such statistics.
“Look, I read a wide variety of materials. I think just relying on the United Nations probably doesn’t give you the full scope … (but) what’s happened to Gaza … and what Hamas has done to that territory … has concerned me greatly,” he said.
“Innocent Israelis and innocent Palestinians have really been the victim of a very violent terrorist organisation.”
When Ms Mathur tried to continue asking about Israel, Ms Bell interrupted to say: “I don’t think you’re going to get very far with this.
“This witness has acknowledged that it is a very contested history that there have been innocent Palestinian lives lost, just as innocent Israeli lives lost.”
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