By: Nomi Kaltmann as seen in The Jewish Independent

11 August 2026

Imagine if a Melbourne councillor spent every council meeting debating Donald Trump’s immigration policy, or a New South Wales State MP made abortion law in Texas the centrepiece of their legislative agenda.  

Most Australians would rightly ask what any of that had to do with their jobs of collecting rubbish, improving the roads, maintaining the local parks or approving planning permits for new buildings. 

Yet over the past few years, councils across Australia and MPs in State Parliaments around Australia have spent hours discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the war in Gaza. 

Lobbying federal MPs on Australia’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war in Gaza or Australia’s position on Israel, is understandable. Federal elected representatives have some power to change Australia’s foreign policy positions. 

But local government level and state MPs have no role in shaping Australian foreign policy on the conflict and the war in Gaza. 

State and local governments are there to maintain parks, open libraries, organise rubbish collections, approve planning permits and fix potholes on our roads. None of these jobs has any capacity to end a war more than 8,000 kilometres away from Australia. Their motions and resolutions on Gaza have never once shifted anything in Washington, Jerusalem or Gaza City. 

What these motions have done, consistently and measurably, is reshape the temperature for Jewish life in Australia. 

In the past month, there have been two disturbing allegations of violence and threats against Jews in Australia. In Bentleigh, in Melbourne, a young visibly Jewish student from Canada was assaulted on the street, punched in the stomach, threatened with a knife and antisemitically slurred. In Sydney, Alex Ryvchin, co-chair of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) and one of the country’s highest profile Jewish leaders, along with his employee Evan Zlatkis, who was shot and survived the Bondi Chanukah attack, were allegedly antisemitically slurred by a woman at the site of the Bondi massacre. 

However, since October 7, Australian antisemitism has surged to levels this country has never seen before. We are seven months on from Australia’s worst terror attack, one that targeted Jews at a Chanukah party on Bondi Beach, and Jews still do not feel safe. 

The dynamic we are seeing in Australia is playing out across the world. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s recently released a video on X saying he had “reviewed New York City’s capacity to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu as a war criminal and calling on the US government to enforce the International Criminal Court’s warrant against the Israeli prime minister.”

The video, viewed by more than 100 million people, was pure showmanship. As a local mayor in New York, he never had the jurisdiction to arrest Netanyahu, and he and his campaign team knew that perfectly well.  

So, what did releasing that video actually achieve? It whipped up a frenzy. Within 24 hours of it going live, a visibly Jewish man was stabbed in the chest with a screwdriver in broad daylight in the middle of Manhattan. I can’t prove causation, and the attacker is reportedly experiencing serious mental health issues, but as Jews, we know the pattern by heart. When you incite against Israel from a position of no actual power to influence anything in Israel, the local Jewish population cops the fallout. 

Every time a council chamber in Australia spends an evening arguing over a symbolic motion on the Middle East, it tells everyone watching that this is an acceptable, even admirable, use of their time serving the public. It also blurs a line that I think should remain unmistakably clear: the difference between debating a conflict overseas and making Australia’s Jewish community endure the reaction of the heightened tension at home.  

I do not doubt that many councillors and MPs who moved these motions believed they were acting from a place of principle. I would simply ask them to sit with the consequences for the Jewish community that are not theoretical, but real and measurable. No council resolution has ever changed the reality in Gaza, and no state parliament motion has changed Israeli policy, but here in Australia, these kinds of symbolic motions have added fuel to the fire of antisemitism, which many Australian Jews already feel is out of control. 

In a few months, Victoria will go to the polls for our upcoming state elections. I hope those who are asking for our votes remember that their words do not disappear once their speeches are over. Their words continue to shape the culture all Australians have to live in together.  

When elected representatives repeatedly elevate a conflict thousands of kilometres away, they should also ask who bears the weight of those discussions here at home. 

For many Jewish Australians, we know we do.  

For others debating them, it is purely theoretical, but for us it means wondering whether today is another day our synagogues need extra security, whether our children will be targeted at their Jewish schools, or whether wearing something visibly Jewish is worth the risk. What I am saying is not paranoia. It is the product of living through attacks in places like Bondi, of seeing several of our Australian synagogues targeted, and of watching antisemitic incidents become an increasingly familiar part of Australian Jewish life. 

Elected officials at local and state government levels have an important role to play in our community. In fact, their policies and legislation usually have the biggest impact on our day-to-day quality of life. They are the people who make sure our roads are safe for cyclists, our streets are clean, and our parks are renovated and beautiful for our children. I think they should stick to the important jobs they have and leave the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war in Gaza and the problems of the Middle East to the people who were actually elected to deal with it.