Bondi Royal Commission. What this report refuses to see

“This report is designed to produce results rather than find them.” Response to the provisional findings of the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion: Andrew Brown.

As an ordinary Australian reading this interim report, I have a very important feeling. Something important is being overlooked. Not by mistake. Deliberately.

I say this as the godson of two Hungarian Holocaust survivors. I know what antisemitism looks like. I know how much it costs. I know where this goes when good people stay silent. This history lives in my family and is not abstract to me.

This is exactly why I will not allow this word to be weaponized. Antisemitism is too steeped in real historical fear to be used as a conversation stopper every time the death toll in Gaza rises. Such a situation does not protect the Jewish people. He uses their suffering as a shield against an oppressive government. This in itself is disrespectful.

Antisemitism is real and must be confronted without evasion. That’s not the point. This is about a commission that had the opportunity to honestly examine the social fractures in this country and from the very beginning chose to distance itself from half the picture.

A predetermined exercise

The Royal Commission was announced less than four weeks after the Bondi massacre, rising under fierce political pressure, its terms of reference crafted in trauma and shaped by the loudest voices in the room. The result was an investigation whose outcome was seen from the day the Letter Patent was published.

The terms cover four areas. Antisemitism. Law enforcement recommendations. Bondi attack. Greater social cohesion. That’s the full scope.

There is no mention of the behavior of the Israeli government.

Gaza is not mentioned.

It has no authority to investigate Islamophobia. There is no instruction to ask why social tensions have increased so sharply or what role political decision-making plays.

When it was suggested that the commission also examine discrimination against Muslims and Indigenous Australians, Commissioner Bell made clear that the focus would remain on antisemitism.

A commission that cannot examine what disrupts social harmony is not an investigation.

This is a performance.

The conclusion preceded the evidence. The commission was built around this.

Executive. The lobby that bought Australian democracy

What are Australians watching

This commission describes social tensions as if they occurred abstractly. They didn’t. They were created in the palm of every Australian’s hand.

For two years, social media feeds featured images that no publisher would publish without editing. Trapped in a car in Gaza, surrounded by the bodies of her family, six-year-old Hind Rajab calls for help. Two paramedics were then sent to rescue him. They were all killed.

Children were pulled out from under the rubble. Doctors were dragged from the wards. Journalists were killed in targeted attacks, the cameras are still working. More than twenty thousand children died. Australians didn’t read this issue.

They saw the faces of those children.

They watched as Zomi Frankcom, an Australian aid worker distributing food in Gaza, was killed when Israeli drones hit his clearly marked World Center Kitchen convoy in three consecutive attacks. The IDF had his coordinates. Israel hid drone audio from Australian investigators. Two officers were dismissed. No lawsuits were filed against anyone.

Murder of Zomi Frankcom. Press Club appointed Israeli ambassador

The government accepted this and moved on. Most Australians did not.

That accumulation will not leave you. It’s building. And then those same Australians were told by their own political class that the real concern was the feelings of the perpetrator state’s supporters. The Royal Commission is working. The word Gaza does not appear in the job description. Do not include the word Palestine. This is not management.

This is gaslighting on a national scale.

Whose voices did this commission choose?

Organizations such as the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council and the Zionist Federation of Australia have spent two years defending Israel’s actions without reservation, without saying anything meaningful about Palestinian civilian deaths.

This commission amplified these voices as if it represented all Australian Jews. They don’t.

A significant number of Australian Jews marched, spoke out and rejected the scenario.

Their voices carry a special moral weight. They were systematically suppressed by the loudest and most politically connected group, who used the language of antisemitism against anyone who opposed them. This commission should have made room for the entire spectrum.

It didn’t tell you everything about whose interests it was built to serve.

untenable combination

Any attempt to link pro-Palestinian protests to the Bondi massacre is not analysis. This is a smear. The attack was carried out by ISIS radicals. Hundreds of thousands of people marching were using democratic expression.

Combining these insults the Bondi victims and criminalizes the community of conscience.

While the commission examined the ideological conditions that led to the Bondi attack, it did not show any willingness to examine the structural conditions.

The father allegedly legally possessed six firearms. If new laws had been passed after the attack, he and his son would not have had legal access to this number of guns. Any serious inquiry into what enabled the worst terrorist attack in Australian history will ask how it was possible. This did not happen.

The political will called for to quickly get this Royal Commission off the ground was apparently not there for the tougher debates about legally obtained guns in suburban Sydney.

In March 2025, the UN Commission of Inquiry found that Israel’s use of sexual violence against Palestinian detainees was systematic, carried out under clear orders or at the encouragement of Israel’s military and civilian leadership. B’Tselem described the prison system as a network of torture camps.

The Australian media buried it.

This commission continued as if it had never happened.

This commission should make clear that opposition to Israeli government policy is not terrorism. This pain experienced by Palestinian civilians is not radicalization. People walking are not people killing. Anything less is not a finding. It’s a cover.

This report is designed to produce results rather than finding results.

Australians who came to this process in good faith deserved better. They are watching. And they’re not leaving.

Foreign Influence. How the Israel lobby bought Australian democracy