VANGUARD - Expressing the viewpoint of the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist)
For National Independence and Socialism • www.cpaml.org
It is now six days since the December14 massacre of Jewish Australians at Bondi Beach.
The Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) condemns this event, acknowledges the grief of those affected, and offers its condolences to the Australian Jewish community.
We draw on a long history of opposition to anti-Semitism within the Communist movement. Jews played a prominent part in the development of Marxism and were in positions of leadership in the Soviet Union during the attempts under Lenin and Stalin to build socialism.
Many underground anti-Nazis Resistance movements across Europe were led by Communist Jews during World War 2. Many German communists lost their lives fighting Nazism and Hitler.
Hitler was so enraged by the participation of Jews in the Communist movement that he coined the hyphenated term Jewish-Bolshevism to identify the close relationship between Jewish activists and the Communists.
In 1931, Stalin wrote a reply to an inquiry by the Jewish News Agency in the United States:
In answer to your inquiry :
National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism. Anti-semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism.
Anti-semitism is of advantage to the exploiters as a lightning conductor that deflects the blows aimed by the working people at capitalism. Anti-semitism is dangerous for the working people as being a false path that leads them off the right road and lands them in the jungle. Hence Communists, as consistent internationalists, cannot but be irreconcilable, sworn enemies of anti-semitism.
In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty.
J. Stalin
January 12, 1931
To our knowledge, this is the only statement by a major world leader, issued at the time of the rise of German Nazism, to so whole-heartedly denounce anti-semitism.
We claim this statement by Stalin as our own.
We abhor and condemn all anti-semitism and all forms of racism and vilifications of cultures, nationalities and peoples of colour.
However, we do not support the Bondi massacre being used to pursue other agendas in the name of anti-semitism.
Anti-semitism must not silence or criminalise condemnation of Israel’s anti-Palestinian genocide.
The Jewish faith is not Zionism. Zionism is a political ideology, rooted in colonialism and imperialism, that demanded an exclusive homeland of their own for Jews who wished to leave countries where they had suffered the violence of pogroms and institutionalised discrimination.
It was developed towards the end of the 19th Century and embraced by the wealthy anti-Communist Zionist leadership in US and Europe throughout 20th Century. Zionist leadership joined western imperialism in actively vilifying and attacking the young Soviet Union and communists. Zionism received a huge boost in the wake of the Holocaust when upwards of 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis. That homeland, however, could only be created out of another people’s country, and that country was Palestine. Zionist leadership weaponised the World War 2 Holocaust for its own colonial capitalist ambitions in the Middle East. This weaponisation of the Holocaust continues today to justify Israel and US Palestinian genocide and occupation of the West Bank.
The peak Zionist leadership forms a part of the capitalist and imperialist ruling class oppressing and exploiting Palestinians and its own Jewish working class and working people.
Attacks on Zionism can be inspired by anti-semitism; attacks on Zionism, equally, can be devoid of anti-semitism and inspired by belief in the human rights of all people. Criticism of Israel as a Zionist state in relation to its own genocidal killings of tens of thousands of Palestinians must not be prevented by labelling such criticism anti-semitic.
Democratic rights must be protected.
Politicians serving the ruling class always assess the opportunities for restricting people’s rights to protest. Spurious reasons are seized upon.
Over the past decade, successive governments have continued to expand police powers and criminal penalties.
In 2016, the NSW Baird government introduced move-on powers near mining sites after coal seam gas protests.
In 2022, the Perrottet government in NSW made it an offence to block major roads and entry to important facilities after blockades at Port Botany.
In 2023, the Malinauskas government in SA rushed harsh anti-protest laws through after an Extinction Rebellion action temporarily closed one city street. Obstructing a public place was deemed punishable by a $50,000 fine or imprisonment for three months.
This year, the Minns government in NSW created move-on powers for protests near places of worship —powers the Supreme Court later ruled unconstitutional.
The Victorian Assistant Police Commissioner decided to declare the entire Melbourne CBD and surrounds as a “designated area” for 6 months from 30 November 2025. The Designation gives Victoria Police extraordinary powers. Anyone in the Melbourne CBD over the next six months can be stopped and searched for no reason or be ordered to leave the area if they refuse to remove a face covering. This includes people engaged in peaceful protest.
On December 18, NSW Premier Minns declared, “So we’re looking at reforms whereby when there is a terrorism designation in the state, the police commissioner may not accept applications for protests on the grounds that it will both stretch police resources and secondly, add to community disharmony.”
But it is not just restrictions aimed at support for Palestine. Minns has also indicated his support for arming the private Community Security Group, a body boasting of hundreds of members in NSW and Victoria, and reported to have close ties to Israel’s special operations organisation, Mossad. This would be state approval for the use of violence against critics of Israel and legalise vigilante groups.
Thanks to the murders at Bondi committed by two adherents of ISIS, the democratic rights of the whole community are under attack. Bondi has given politicians who have been pushing an anti-democratic agenda the excuse they are so keen to use.
The defence of the rights of all must take precedence over sectional considerations.
Prime Minister Albanese has been weak in responding to criticism of his response to anti-semitism. In July 2024, he appointed Israeli advocate and immediate past president of the pro-Zionist Executive Council of Australian Jewry, Jillian Segal, as the government’s Special Envoy to Combat Anti-semitism.
Segal and her husband had been major donors to the ultra-right anti-immigrant lobby group Advance which had campaigned prominently against the Yes referendum. Despite slandering pro-Palestinian demonstrators, she remained silent when Nazis helped organise the anti-immigration March for Australia on August 31, and also when some 60 Nazis paraded outside the NSW Parliament on November 8 with police approval under a banner reading “Abolish the Jewish lobby”.
This is the same Segal who released a 13-point Plan to counter anti-semitism which adopted the definition of anti-semitism advanced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). The latter definition conflates anti-semitism with anti-Zionism. It was denounced by nine Australian Jewish organisations. Jesse McNicoll, of Jewish Voices of Inner Sydney said: “Australian Jews who value justice for all people are deeply concerned about the proposal to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism. This definition purposefully blurs the line between real antisemitism and legitimate criticism of the State of Israel. Around the world the IHRA definition has been used to silence debate, and we are alarmed to see attempts here in Australia to use it to suppress scrutiny of Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank.”
On July 10, the Jewish Council of Australia warned that Segal’s Plan risks undermining Australia’s democratic freedoms, inflaming community divisions, and entrenching selective approaches to racism that serve political agendas.
“The Council,” it said, “criticised the plan’s emphasis on surveillance, censorship, and punitive control over the funding of cultural and educational institutions: measures straight out of Trump’s authoritarian playbook. We caution that some of the recommendations — including visa powers and judicial inquiries into student activity — risk censoring criticism of Israel, deepening racism, and failing to meaningfully address the root causes of antisemitism.”
Albanese was aware of concerns about Segal’s plan voiced by civil libertarians, unions, peace activists and Jews, but criticism of his allegedly soft response to the Plan has led him, as of December 18, to completely capitulate to the Zionist influencers and declare that the Government is taking action on all 13 recommendations outlined in the Plan and would fully adopt the Segal report.
The appointment of Segal as the Special Envoy was wrong; the creation of a Special Envoy was wrong. A position such as this should embrace the whole community, or, as Judith Treanor, of Jews Against the Occupation ‘48 said: there should be “a whole-of-society approach that unites communities instead of dividing them”.
A Special Envoy for Human Rights would prioritise all racism and division. It would tackle anti-semitism alongside anti-immigrant racism and criminalise calls for remigration (sending all non-White migrants back to the places they, or earlier members of their families, came from). It would require action to stop institutionalised racism against the First Peoples.
People will not be silenced
There is a significant, encouraging and growing push-back by communities opposing division, racism and clamping down on democratic rights. It will take many forms, develop unevenly, and require courage in the face of state violence and the threat of violence and vilification.
But people will not be silenced. Our strength lies in our unity as a class, not in division on the grounds of race, colour or religion.
We will not let the weaponisation of allegations of antisemitism against pro-Palestinian activists in any way diminish our determination to act against the genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza and the West Bank.
We repeat the unanimous call of the rebellious miners at the 1854 Eureka Stockade for people “irrespective of nationality, religion and colour, to salute the Southern Cross as the refuge of all the oppressed from all countries on earth.”