Herzog visit to so-called Australia

Loud Jew Collective categorically rejects Prime Minister Albanese’s decision to invite Israeli President Isaac Herzog to visit Australia in what has been framed as an act of “solidarity” with the Jewish community. 

This invitation follows a week of relentless political exploitation of the ISIS-inspired Bondi attack, in which the Israeli state and its supporters have played a central role. Within hours of the killings, before the victims were even named, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu falsely blamed the attack on Australia’s recognition of Palestine. The following day, Antisemitism Envoy and prominent pro-Israel lobbyist Jillian Segal attempted to link the attack to the Sydney Harbour Bridge march opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Since then, efforts to associate Palestinian solidarity with terrorism have intensified, fuelling racist attacks and rhetoric directed at Palestinian, Muslim, Arab, and other migrant communities, exacerbating an already alarming level of anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia in Australia. 

In this context Prime Minister Albanese proposes to welcome President Herzog as a gesture of solidarity with Jewish Australians. We unequivocally reject this move. 

In September 2025, a United Nations Human Rights Council Commission of Inquiry found that senior Israeli leaders, including President Isaac Herzog, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and then Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, had engaged in incitement to genocide. The Commission cited Herzog’s public statements following 7 October, in which he asserted that “an entire nation” was responsible, explicitly rejecting any distinction between civilians and combatants. The Commission found such statements to be evidence of genocidal intent. 

The genocide in Gaza is ongoing. Children are freezing to death in makeshift tents. In a single month, at least eight newborns reportedly died from hypothermia. Israeli forces have continued to attack civilian sites. In a recent attack on a wedding at a refugee centre, six Palestinians were killed, including a five-month-old baby, a teenage girl, and two women from the same extended family. These atrocities receive scant coverage in mainstream media, while continuing to devastate Palestinian families and communities. 

Israel does not speak for Jews. This must be stated repeatedly and clearly, particularly in the wake of the Bondi attack. Jewish communities are diverse. Many Jewish individuals and organisations around the world reject zionism as a political ideology that has inflicted immense harm on Palestinians, is not a valid expression of Jewish self-determination, and has made Jews less safe globally by conflating Judaism with the Israeli state. 

Equating Judaism and Jewishness with the actions of a state accused of genocide erases anti-Zionist Jewish voices and feeds antisemitism by associating an entire people with the actions of a government and its military. Inviting President Herzog to Australia in the name of “comforting” Jewish Australians entrenches this dangerous conflation and does nothing to address the real sources of antisemitism. 

Australia does not require moral guidance from a foreign settler-colonial government whose leadership is implicated in grave breaches of international law, ongoing ceasefire violations, and the weaponisation of humanitarian aid. Welcoming Isaac Herzog is not an act of solidarity with victims of violence; it is a political endorsement of a genocidal project. 

We need a collective commitment to rejecting racism in all its forms, standing against settler colonialism and apartheid wherever they occur, and confronting the continuities between the violence inflicted on Palestinians and the ongoing harms of invasion, dispossession, and genocide against First Nations peoples in this country. 

The government must withdraw this invitation and listen to the wisdom and resistance of First Nations people, Palestinians, Muslim and Arab communities, and Jewish communities who oppose Zionism, who all understand that real safety comes from dismantling systems of racism and colonial violence, not aligning with them.  

And if his visit proceeds we commit to vigorously protesting his presence in this country, regardless of any laws that try to stop us. We’ll see you on the streets.