Antinuclear

Herzog’s Visit to Australia: Just Who Is Being Comforted, and at What Cost?

12 February 2026 AIMN Editorial, By Ricky Pann, https://theaimn.net/herzogs-visit-to-australia-just-who-is-being-comforted-and-at-what-cost/

Chris Minns, symbolism, policing, and the narrowing of dissent

The five-day visit of Israeli President Isaac Herzog to Australia in February 2026 was framed by the federal government as a gesture of compassion. A “moment of profound significance,” we were told, intended to comfort a Jewish community still reeling from the Bondi Beach massacre. Yet as Sydney’s CBD was placed under extraordinary police powers under the authority of NSW Premier Chris Minns, and peaceful dissent was progressively marginalised, a harder question emerged. Who exactly was being comforted, and who was being disciplined?

This essay is not about Jewish Australians, nor is it an attack on Jewish identity, culture, or faith. It is about power. Specifically, it examines the political influence of pro-Zionist lobbying networks, their intersection with far-right activism, and the way criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza has been recoded as antisemitism in order to narrow the space for lawful protest and political dissent in Australia.

The radicalization confronting this country is not racial or religious. It is ideological.

Symbolism, Selectively Applied

Symbolism, Selectively Applied

Political authority in modern Australia is increasingly exercised through symbolism. In October 2023, the Premier Chris Minns NSW Labor Government authorized the projection of the Israeli flag onto the Sydney Opera House, a unilateral display of solidarity following the outbreak of war in Gaza. No equivalent space was afforded to Palestinian grief, despite mounting civilian casualties and credible allegations of war crimes.

Less than two years later, when hundreds of thousands of Australians sought to march peacefully across the Harbour Bridge in the “March for Humanity” to protest the starvation and bombardment of Gaza, NSW Premier Chris Minns attempted to block the demonstration entirely. The stated reasons were “logistics” and “public safety,” yet the inconsistency was glaring. The same government that had no difficulty illuminating national icons for one side of a foreign conflict suddenly discovered insurmountable risk when confronted with mass civic dissent.

This contradiction matters because Minns’ own federal party had already moved to recognize the State of Palestine in early 2025, a move grounded in international law and bipartisan precedent. His resistance to the march therefore cannot be explained by party policy. It must be understood as political pressure from lobbying networks that historically provide the largest sponsorship of non-government funded international trips for federal parliamentarians.

Electoral Mandates and Managed Fear

Minns’ 2023 election was powered by Muslim and multicultural Western Sydney electorates. These communities did not merely vote Labor. They organized, volunteered, and mobilized. By 2026, those same voters found their protests discouraged, surveilled, and in some cases forcibly dispersed under expanded “Major Event” police powers.

The Premier moved from campaigning on inclusion to presiding over the criminalization of dissent. Symbolically, he shifted from promising a “fresh start for all of NSW” to publicly accepting praise from Isaac Herzog as a “friend of Israel,” even as Palestinian Australians were told their grief must remain silent.

Why?

Dissent Recast as Disloyalty

That question sharpened further when the police response and official rhetoric began to frame protesters as “anti-Australian.” The remark was not incidental; it signaled a reframing of peaceful assembly as national disloyalty.

Anti-Australian is not marching with placards. Anti-Australian is pepper-spraying, manhandling, and arresting ordinary citizens exercising democratic rights. Among those dispersed and detained at Town Hall and Bondi were young people affiliated with the Labor movement itself. The irony is difficult to ignore: a government elected by grassroots mobilization now presiding over the physical suppression of its own political base.

When dissent is redefined as threat, the social contract fractures. Protest becomes suspicion. Citizenship becomes conditional.

The Infrastructure of Influence

The answer lies not in religion, but in networks. Central to this landscape is Jillian Segal, Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism appointed by Prime Minister Antony Albanese. Appointing any lobbyist as a special envoy is a dangerous move for social cohesion, especially one with strong links to a right wing government that operates with its military, intelligence agencies, the military industrial complex and propaganda machine hand in glove.

While the role is framed as protective, its credibility has been undermined by Australian Electoral Commission data showing her household, via the Henroth Discretionary Trust, as a significant donor to Advance Australia. Advance Australia led the campaign against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, arguing that constitutional recognition would grant disproportionate influence to a single minority. Yet the same ideological ecosystem now demands exceptional legal protections that redefine criticism of a foreign state as racial hatred. In doing so, it collapses the distinction between antisemitism and opposition to Zionism or Israeli military policy.

This is not a contradiction. It is a strategy.

By expanding definitions of antisemitism to include phrases, political speech critical of Israel, these actors create a legal and cultural environment in which Palestinian Australian identity itself becomes suspect.5 Protest becomes threat. Dissent becomes hate. Assembly becomes extremism.

Fear as a Political Tool

Former Foreign Minister and Labor Premier of NSW  Bob Carr has described the pro-Israel lobby in Australia as a “well-funded foreign influence operation.” Its power does not rest solely on donations, though the Henroth Trust alone provided $280,000 to the Liberal Party in 2024-25, but on fear. Fear of reputational destruction. Fear of being branded weak on security. Fear of becoming the next viral political target of confected rage.

Public rebukes from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, including claims that Australian policy “fueled” the Bondi attack, functioned as signals. The message was clear: deviation will be punished. For a state premier, the threat of an organized backlash from internationally connected lobbying networks appears to have outweighed the expressed will of his voters, the principles of his party caucus, and the basic democratic right to protest.

The Theatre of Tragedy

The Bondi Beach attack must be named for what it was: outright terrorism driven by radicalized ideology. It is a national trauma. Australians are grieving. Jewish Australians are grieving. Muslim Australians are grieving. This pain is real and shared.

To use that tragedy as diplomatic cover for Herzog’s visit is not an act of healing. It is socially inflammatory populist theatre. It is exploitation pornography, weaponizing grief to silence dissent and to morally coerce the public into picking a side while laws are quietly rewritten in the background. Politicians call for social cohesion while banning words, narrowing protest rights, and empowering police to detain, search, and suppress political opponents. They invoke unity while demanding ideological compliance.

Is this cohesion, or is it theatre?

Surveillance and the Authoritarian Horizon

That question becomes more urgent in light of the federal government’s expanding relationship with Palantir, the data analysis firm whose platforms underpin United States immigration enforcement (ICE) and provide battlefield intelligence to the Israeli military.

Australia has now granted this company “protected-level” access to sensitive national data following its Nov 2025 assessment. The question is no longer theoretical. How long before these tools are turned inward? How long before citizens who challenge laws championed by foreign-aligned lobbyists find themselves catalogued, profiled, and neutralized in the name of security?

True social cohesion is not achieved through surveillance, intimidation, or moral blackmail. It is built through consistency, restraint, and the protection of civil liberties. When governments abandon those principles, they do not preserve democracy. They hollow it out. And no amount of symbolic lighting can conceal that erosion.

Author’s Note

I am pro-Jewish. I am pro-Arab. I am unequivocally opposed to antisemitism, Islamophobia, and political violence in all forms. I draw a clear distinction between race, religion, and ideology. In an age of populism and misinformation, where mainstream and social media demand that we pick a side, I refuse to do so. As a centrist, I reject the false binary that equates moral clarity with tribal allegiance. Democracies fail not when citizens disagree, but when dissent itself is recast as disloyalty. I have resigned from the Labor party as it no longer hears my voice or  represents my values

February 13, 2026 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets and lies