Witness after witness at the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion has said a version of the same thing: that, whether through intent or accident, people have taken their hatred of Israel out on Australian Jews.

Why?

Part of the answer is a false story that has become widely accepted. It says Palestinians are indigenous, Jews are foreign colonists and Israel is therefore not the Jewish national homeland, but a colonial project built on dispossession.

Once someone accepts that story, Israel is seen less as a country with flaws, enemies, interests and rights, and more as an illegitimate intrusion. Zionism is no longer understood as the national movement of the Jewish people, but as racism. Palestinian violence is no longer judged by its murderous intent but excused as ‘resistance’. And Jews who identify with Israel are no longer treated as members of a minority community with legitimate fears, but as representatives of oppression.

For some people, upon internalising these ideas, hostility to Zionists and Israel starts feeling less like prejudice and more like virtue. People who would otherwise be insulted by accusations of antisemitism begin discriminating against Jews in the name of hating Israel.

This is the tangled thread the royal commission is trying to unravel.

There is an easy way to cut this Gordian’s knot: by hitting the history books.

It is Jews who are indigenous to the land. Jewish identity emerged there one and a half millennia before anything resembling Palestinian, Arab or Muslim identity arrived in it. Jewish religion, language, national memory and civilisation were formed there. The Kingdom of Israel predated Christianity by a thousand years (and Christianity wouldn’t exist or make sense without it). Jews have, without break, always lived in the Land of Israel.

Arab Muslim armies colonised the area in the 7th century. Palestinians today have legitimate national claims, but no one should deny that they speak a foreign language, that most adhere to a foreign religion, and that they descend overwhelmingly from foreign colonists. Palestinian culture has zero connection to the extinct cultures that pre-date Jewish civilisation. It was the British that dragged the term ‘Palestine’ out of antiquity, not Arabs. The claim that Jews are foreign colonisers while Palestinians are indigenous is not history. It is myth.

As recently as a couple of decades ago, in a more religious Australia, the concept of Jewish indigeneity was absorbed by osmosis in Sunday School lessons. For the Jewish community, Jewish indigeneity was so self-evident that it did not need to be explained. But as Australia became less religiously Christian, that awareness diminished, and the Jewish community failed to adequately respond to growing historical ignorance and increasingly accepted claims about Palestinian indigeneity.

The story spread because it was useful. It gave anti-Israel activists a way to recast the Israeli–Palestinian dispute in the moral language of the age: indigenous versus colonial, oppressed versus oppressor, victim versus villain.

That ideology has a name: antizionism.

Criticism of Israel and antizionism are not the same thing. A person can oppose settlements, criticise Israeli governments and policies, condemn a military action or support the creation of a Palestinian state without being antizionist. Antizionism is not opposition to Israeli policy. It’s opposition to Israel.

Because antizionism presents itself through the language of justice, anti-racism and decolonisation, it allows people to think they are opposing oppression even when they are oppressing Jews.

That is how antisemitism became respectable again.

Like other ideologies (think: socialism, Islamism, environmentalism), antizionism provides a lens through which adherents interpret the world and judge the opinions of others. But that same lens allows us to understand their perspectives and their moral inversions.

When Hamas murders, rapes and kidnaps its way through southern Israel, rather than condemn it, antizionists blamed the victims. When gay Palestinians flee to Israel for safety, antizionists dismiss this as ‘pinkwashing’. They also smear Jewish expressions of fear as attempts to silence criticism of Israel. In an age of competing victimhoods, Palestine proudly wears the crown and, because of this, antizionists, will never, ever, hold Palestinians responsible for their actions; it’s always someone else’s fault.

Hardcore antizionists are fairly few in number, but they are strong in academia, and they have succeeded in providing the lens through which many casual observers understand the dispute. The general public might know little about Jewish history, less about the Arab conquest and nothing about the evolution of Palestinian national identity, but many have swallowed the lie that Palestinians are indigenous and Jews are not. This lie, and the misunderstandings that flow from it, is a key reason why Jews in Australia face discrimination today.

Australia didn’t need a royal commission to understand how this happened; it just needed to listen to the Jewish community.