I thought I was an expert in “Aussie.” But it seems that President Isaac Herzog’s visit to Australia has introduced a new slang word: social cohesion. This is the language coming out of Canberra.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says the visit should help Australia “look toward uniting,” while carefully reminding everyone that Australians still have the right to protest.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong says she “really understands the depth of feeling in the community” about what people have seen in Gaza. One has to ask: Is anyone in Canberra thinking through the consequences of the language they are using? Because every time they repeat “unity” and “social cohesion,” they’re admitting the panic: They’re not sure they can control the temperature inside their own population.
That is not leadership: that is crisis management. So, the buzzwords come out.
Concerns about Australia
This is surprising, because Australia prides itself, rightly, on being one of the world’s great multicultural success stories. A social justice powerhouse. A free speech champion. A country where protesting foreign regimes is practically a civic sport. And yet, it seems that a visit by a ceremonial head of state could strain Australia’s social fabric in ways that should deeply concern its leaders and turn an Australian ethnic minority into a security concern.
That ought to concern Australians far more than any single protest. Because one of Australia’s foundational principles has always been clear: Ethnic communities are not held responsible for the actions of their countries of origin.
When Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Australia in 2014, massive protests erupted over Beijing’s human rights record. But no one spoke about fortifying Chinatown. No police commissioner warned that Chinese Australians might be at risk. And no one treated an entire community as a volatility index. Of course not.
So why, now, in official speeches and security briefings, is a diplomatic visit explicitly linked to the safety of the Jewish community?
Can’t they see that, by linking it, they are making the same mistake again, only this time with a microphone? They are normalizing the idea that a Jewish grandmother in Bondi is somehow responsible for a war in Gaza. That is how Australian Jews become “radioactive citizens.”
Managing antisemitism in Australia
That is precisely why Australia now finds itself invoking major event policing, restricting protest routes, and holding anxious press conferences about keeping the peace. This is not social cohesion: It is a society being managed through permanent emergency measures rather than through norms and trust.
There is little doubt that President Herzog’s invitation came from a good place, an acknowledgment that something had gone wrong, and that Jewish Australians deserved reassurance. But a gesture cannot heal a wound when the permission structure that created it remains intact.
Just this week, antisemitic graffiti was sprayed on the steps of Victoria’s Parliament House, including the slogans “Herzog, fear” and “Globalize the Intifada. It remained in place as Members of Parliament walked past it, as though it were part of the building’s décor.
And in Melbourne, banners were hung over a major road running through Jewish residential areas reading “Israeli war criminals out” and “Israel terrorism kills kids.” The banners were left there, in plain sight. When this kind of “free speech” carries no consequences, nothing changes. What is tolerated becomes permission.
And the state’s solution becomes permanent security management of Jewish life – not addressing hate, but containing its consequences.
Like a shark alarm at the Australian beaches, the swimmers are told to get out of the water, or a net is thrown around them – and the sharks remain.
In the process, Australia risks losing the very DNA it is so proud of. Because a real multicultural society does not need a standing army to protect one minority. That is not social cohesion: It is the management of a minority through fear.
And Jewish Australians are not asking for nets: They are asking Australia to stop feeding the sharks.
The author is president of World WIZO, the Women’s International Zionist Organization.