The boss of one of Australia\u2019s elite universities has failed to describe the Israeli flag during the anti-Semitism royal commission.<\/p>\n
Fronting the Royal Commission on anti-Semitism and Social Cohesion on Thursday, The Australian National University acting vice-chancellor and president Rebekah Brown made a startling blunder.<\/p>\n
During cross-examination from the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network\u2019s lawyer Yasser Bakri, Professor Brown was asked about Israel\u2019s actions toward Palestinians and to describe the Israeli flag.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m sorry. I\u2019m drawing a mental blank,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Mr Bakri offered to help the vice-chancellor.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes please do. I\u2019m embarrassed now,\u201d she replied.<\/p>\n
\u201cBlue and white. OK. There\u2019s a blue strip, a white strip, and then a blue strip. And in the middle, there is the Star of David,\u201d Mr Bakri said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Earlier in her evidence, Professor Brown faced cross-examination from Gabi Crafti, counsel for Australasian Union of Jewish Students. <\/p>\n
Professor Brown conceded the university had not acted quick enough given the height of \u201cpsychosocial harms\u201d reported by Jewish students peaked two years ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wish that we had have done much more and sooner \u2026 you\u2019re now moving at pace to try to address these issues,\u201d Professor Brown said.<\/p>\n
She came to the acting vice-chancellorship in September 2025.<\/p>\n
Professor Brown conceded that \u201con balance\u201d ANU made failures in its duties to Jewish staff and students.<\/p>\n
Ms Crafti asked if Professor Brown had a message to the university\u2019s Jewish community.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would say that all Jewish students and staff and their colleagues and friends, in fact, all students and staff \u2013 but, you\u2019ve asked me to talk directly to Jewish students and staff \u2013 have an absolute right to feel safe, respected and heard on our campus.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I\u2019m sorry that they didn\u2019t. And I\u2019ve committed in my role, as long as I am the interim vice-chancellor, to do better.\u201d<\/p>\n
Peer pressure<\/p>\n
Earlier in the day, the royal commission was told ANU students were pressured to stick with the country\u2019s longest-running campus Gaza solidarity encampment.<\/p>\n
The Australian National University\u2019s Gaza solidarity encampment ran the longest of 21-such protests at Australian universities in 2024.<\/p>\n
ANU acting provost Joan Leach said students protesting were under peer pressure to stick with it.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are a small university, and so the security services at the university tend to know many of the students and staff. And they were quite active in interacting with the encampment,\u201d Professor Leach said.<\/p>\n
\u201c \u2026 To ensure they had kept a constant watch on what was going on. And again, to encourage any students who wanted to leave or maybe were feeling peer pressure to stay on to do so.\u201d<\/p>\n
Counsel assisting the commission, Zelie Heger, asked why the uni did not just shut down the encampment.<\/p>\n
Violent clashes between police and students at US encampments were \u201cfront of mind\u201d, Professor Leach said, in evidence echoing management at other elite Australian universities.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was media attention on US universities, and some images around students being pulled by police off campuses. I think colleagues were very aware of that, very concerned not to bring violence here to Australia, where the context was perceived to be different.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom that moment at that time, there was attention to how to bring the encampment to a close peacefully, without violence, and with some agreement with the students.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn hindsight, that might appear naive or inadequate, but I do believe at the time there was a hope that the encampment could be brought to a peaceful end.\u201d<\/p>\n
Professor Leach denied the university \u201clost control\u201d of the campus\u2019 epicentre as the protest encampment swelled, as posited by Ms Heger.<\/p>\n
\u201cI could not characterise it in that way,\u201d Professor Leach said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I think there were concerns about the risks to students and to people in the university community at that point.\u201d<\/p>\n
Three things ended the ANU camp; the electricity was shut off, ANU tightened its screening on links with weapons manufacturers which the protesters were demanding, and thirdly the university effectively banned encampments.<\/p>\n
Earlier in the week, a Jewish ANU student giving evidence under the pseudonym Liat said she was called a baby killer and genocide supporter on campus.<\/p>\n
\u201cStudents should be able to walk through campus without that kind of, what I would refer to, as harassment,\u201d Professor Leach said.<\/p>\n
A Jewish student being called a baby killer at an Australian university was anti-Semitic, she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause it was asking her, as a member of the Jewish community, to take responsibility for something very many miles away, and shouted at her in a harassing tone,\u201d Professor Leach said.<\/p>\n
The ANU has brought in mandatory anti-Semitism training and \u201cbystander training\u201d for all students who live on campus.<\/p>\n
ANU is also working with the Australasian Union of Jewish Students to create scenarios where the training will be further implemented. Students not living on campus will do the training by video meeting at some point in the future.<\/p>\n
Neo-Nazis on campus<\/p>\n
Lawyer for the Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism, David Knoll, cross-examined Professor Leach.<\/p>\n
Mr Knoll asked if an ANU academic were to post online that Israel was a \u201cbaby-murdering state and deny sexual violence by Hamas against Israeli women on 7th October\u201d, but does not name ANU, \u201cthere\u2019s nothing ANU can do about it?\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the social media guidelines, that is the case. Yes,\u201d Professor Leach said.<\/p>\n
Mr Knoll then asked if that academic took those \u201cextreme views\u201d into classes about the Middle East, whether the university could take action.<\/p>\n
Professor Leach confirmed ANU could then act.<\/p>\n
Mr Bakri asked about \u201ca presence of neo-Nazis on campus\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re aware that students and the representatives of students and staff have reported that there\u2019s been a neo-Nazi presence at the university in recent times?\u201d Mr Bakri said.<\/p>\n
Professor Leach said she was aware of stickers referencing neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideologies.<\/p>\n
The stickers referenced the National Socialist Network saying \u201cAustralia for white men\u201d, were pulled down within 24 to 48 hours, and charges have since been laid, the royal commission was told.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have no tolerance for when we see them. And we are, as we\u2019ve discussed today, altering our policy so that when we when we find these things, we can deal with them promptly,\u201d Professor Leach said.<\/p>\n
Mr Bakri asked about an ANU student who, in 2024, sought an extension because multiple family members had been killed by the Israel Defence Forces in Gaza.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re aware that the student was told by the course co-ordinator that she needed to provide a death certificate for every member of her family, that had been killed in order for the extension to be considered. That\u2019s correct, isn\u2019t it?\u201d Mr Bakri said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat is very unfortunate if that is the case,\u201d Professor Leach said, adding she was not aware of the incident.<\/p>\n
\u201cFurther to that,\u201d Mr Bakri said, \u201cafter those death certificates were procured, which was very difficult given the circumstances in Gaza, the student was then told to obtain a notarised translation of the death certificates.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt took over a year for the special consideration to be granted, and only after the issue had been escalated to higher levels in the university. You\u2019re not aware?\u201d Mr Bakri said.<\/p>\n
\u201cOf that? I am not aware of that,\u201d Professor Leach said.<\/p>\n
Under cross-examination from Jim Hartley, representing the Jewish Council of Australia, the commission was told there were Jewish students in the ANU encampment, and Jewish staff were liaising between the protesting students and the university administrators.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt would be wrong to treat the Jewish community as some indivisible whole, wouldn\u2019t it,\u201d Mr Hartley said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s right,\u201d Professor Leach said.<\/p>\n
\u2018I needed to get home\u2019<\/p>\n
Monash University vice-chancellor and president Sharon Pickering said she changed travel plans and flew straight back to Melbourne from New York as she learnt there would be a Gaza solidarity camp on campus.<\/p>\n
Monash University is named after prominent Jewish Australian Sir John Monash, and its Clayton campus is in Melbourne\u2019s southeast, where many Holocaust survivors settled and a general area where many Australian Jewish families live.<\/p>\n
Monash University leapt to action from October 7, 2023, Professor Pickering said, to support students whose families lived in the contested and violent region. The university has particularly large numbers of Jewish and Muslim students.<\/p>\n
Six months later, Gaza solidarity encampments were popping up across the US and Australian universities. Professor Pickering got word such a camp was being organised at Monash.<\/p>\n
\u201cI received an email from the chief operating officers. I\u2019d been at graduations in Malaysia.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was on a flight from Singapore to New York, which fortunately had wi-fi. I landed at Newark and transferred to JFK (Airport) and came home. <\/p>\n
Asked by counsel assisting the commission why Professor Pickering felt that necessary, she said violence at Columbia University in New York between police and protesters served as a warning.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was, I was deeply concerned. I sat in the lounge at JFK, and I watched the police come on to campus at Columbia, and I watched what happened. I needed to get home.\u201d<\/p>\n
Victoria Police wrote to a host of Melbourne vice-chancellors saying protesters who were not students were going onto campuses and \u201cinflaming tensions\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThinking back, I actually wonder whether we were partly the cause of that letter,\u201d Professor Pickering said.<\/p>\n
A few days before the letter from the Police Commissioner, police identified antagonists at Monash who were not students.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey identified them immediately as not being part of our community, and they were individuals of concern to Victoria Police,\u201d Professor Pickering said.<\/p>\n
\u201cVictoria Police gave us very clear advice in relation to that. Those individuals were issued with what we referred to as exclusion notices.\u201d Seven outsiders were kicked out.<\/p>\n
When the encampment got set up, Jewish students started reporting being abused when they walked past, feeling targeted and vilified, and began changing where they went or not coming to the university at all.<\/p>\n
Speaking about the response after the period of heightened tension, Professor Pickering said university complaint responses alone could not address such issues.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can\u2019t deal with it incident by incident. And so I think the work that we\u2019ve done, for example, around brave conversations, is really important.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the end of last year, start of this year, nearly a thousand academics had undertaken that work at Monash. And, I would make the observation it\u2019s not easy to get academics to undertake professional development,\u201d Professor Pickering said.<\/p>\n
By the end of this year the university expected 2000 of its staff to have done the training, with effects to flow onto the students.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do say there is a place for punitive judgement. But we\u2019re dealing with 18 to 21 year olds largely, if we can get this right with them, then we stand a chance on social cohesion and that\u2019s where our focus is.\u201d<\/p>\n
More to come<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The boss of one of Australia\u2019s elite universities has failed to describe the Israeli flag during the anti-Semitism…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":51786,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[22,21,379],"class_list":["post-51785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-austrlia","tag-newswire-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51785\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}