Foreign Actors and Criminals Rather than Local Protesters Are Likely Behind Antisemitic Attacks

Deputy commissioner of the New South Wales Police Force, David Hudson, told reporters on Thursday that detectives are considering whether a caravan packed with explosives found abandoned on the side of Derriwong Road in the northwestern semirural Sydney suburb of Dural, which was located by NSW police on 19 January 2025,  might be an elaborate setup.

The reason the deputy suggested law enforcement was looking at whether the incident could be a hoax is due to the obvious clues left behind, as a note containing antisemitic sentiment and a list of targets, including a synagogue, was found in the caravan, along with the sizable amount of Powergel explosives, which are usually used in mining and had the potential to create a 40 metre blast wave.

NSW police announced the discovery of the caravan on Wednesday 29 January 2025, 10 days after the fact, which was apparently due to the ambiguities involved in the find. And NSW police terrorism expert, Peter Moroney, told Nine’s Today program that one issue involved is that if the explosives were stolen from a mining site “say 12 months ago”, where were they being stored in the interim.

A fortnight ago, at the time the caravan was discovered in Dural, a media storm around a spate of anti-Israel and antisemitic attacks was peaking, and it was then that Australian federal police commissioner Reece Kershaw announced that these vandalism attacks could be the result of foreign interference, with foreign actors paying local criminal elements to carry out the attacks.

NSW police has also confirmed that all ten suspects that have been arrested in relation to these “Jewish hate crimes” have not been motivated by any ideology, so the earlier framing of the antisemitic fear campaign as being potentially linked to the local pro-Palestinian movement were not only unfounded but were likely too part of an effort to deflect criticism of the Israeli state.

Potential foreign interference

New South Wales premier Chris Minns told reporters out the front of Surry Hills police station on Wednesday, 30 January 2025 that he was there to discuss “the very disturbing pattern of escalating criminal behaviour in relation to antisemitic attacks in NSW.” And he went on to raise yet another such attack that had occurred overnight and involved the spray painting of a Maroubra school and nearby house.

Minns then turned his attention to the explosives in the caravan, which he referred to as a “very serious and ongoing inquiry into a potential terrorist event in NSW”. And he added that the discovery “represents, undeniably, an escalation… in race-filled hatred and potential violence in NSW”.

But if the foreign interference version of events is linked to the explosives sitting in a caravan on the side of the road in Dural, it would appear that it is foreign actors who either harbour this “race-filled hatred” or they like to convey to Australia and the globe that there is an epidemic of individuals amongst us who are so filled with antisemitic sentiment that they’re perpetrating these attacks.

Police raided a Dural property where the caravan was parked on 19 January. The owner told police that he’d towed the van onto his property, as it had been sitting on roadside for a number of days and posed a traffic hazard. And the property owner further told the ABC that the search warrant included the names Tammie Farrugia and Scott Marshall.

Farrugia was arrested, charged and remanded on 20 January, in relation to an antisemitic incident in the inner-city suburb of Woollahra in December. Police had noted that she’d been posting on Facebook in an attempt to find jerry cans evidently used in that attack, and it turns out that she’s also been attempting to locate a caravan over social media.

Marshall is too on remand in respect of unrelated weapons offences.

AFP commissioner Kershaw then told a meeting of national cabinet on the day following the Farrugia arrest that his agency is seriously considering that a foreign organisation is involved in paying locals to carry out these attacks for financial reward.

However, the authorities have not publicly speculated on who these foreign actors may be.

A bias in approach

The antisemitic attacks have been front and centre in the news cycle since they began in November, which initially involved another incident in Woollahra and then the blatant firebombing of the Addas Israel Synagogue of Melbourne in early December, which dramatically escalated the urgency around these attacks.

However, according to Islamophobic envoy Aftab Malik, the nation is currently undergoing the highest levels of Muslim hate incidents ever recorded, yet the public wouldn’t know about it. And he puts this down to Islamophobia being so normalised it is going unnoticed, whereas antisemitism is an aberration.

Of course, the lack of outrage and attention being directed towards rising Islamophobia might be as a result of a dearth in the political and media attention paid to these incidents, while the outrage and attention that has been directed towards the antisemitic attacks did serve to demonise the local pro-Palestinian movement prior to the alternative foreign interference reasoning becoming apparent.

The spate of incidents that have been classed as antisemitic did commence with anti-Israeli messaging, and since the nation of Israel has been blatantly killing innocent Palestinian civilians in their tens of thousands since October 2023, the countering response to the assertions that these crimes were antisemitic was that they were reflecting violent political criticism, not religious hate.

And after some weeks, the messaging of the vandals shifted so that “Jews” became the subject of derision, and no longer was it the apartheid Israeli state.

The Islamophobia Register of Australia noted in December that there had been a 530 percent increase in reported Islamophobic incidents in this country since October 2023.

So, if the government, law enforcement and the media had showcased these crimes in a similar manner to the anti-Israel and antisemitic attacks, there would likely be a public scare around rising Islamophobia as well.

A dangerous conflation

Jewish Council of Australia’s Sarah Schwartz told Sydney Criminal Lawyers early last year that a dangerous conflation has been at play in the Australian community since the beginning of the Gaza genocide, which serves to deflect criticism of Israel and the settler colonial doctrine of Zionism by construing it as antisemitism, or hatred towards Jews, in order to deflect such criticism.

Esteemed US academic Judith Butler raised this conflation during a forum in Paris last March, outlining that it has been propagated by certain Israelis since the 1970s, as it serves to block criticism of Israel for fear of being labelled antisemitic, which is a heavy charge as most people don’t want to be associated with the prejudice that fuelled the Holocaust.

So, as the Albanese government was providing unbridled support to Israel in its commission of the gravest of all crimes, it might be considered that the fear campaign around a spike in antisemitism in the community, as opposed to any attention paid to increasing Muslim hate crimes, the authorities were actively propagating the conflation in order to stymie criticism of Israeli crimes in this country.

Indeed, if foreign actors are at play, this might be the reason that early anti-Israel messaging was dropped for the more precise antisemitic messaging of the later incidents.