Justice Desmond Fagan. Image: NSW Supreme Court
The Israel lobby wrote itself a dictionary. Governments adopted it, regulators enforced it and police made arrests under it. Then it met a judge who required evidence, and it collapsed in an afternoon. Andrew Brown on the Fagan judgement.
Justice Desmond Fagan’s decision in State of New South Wales v Farhat wrecks the architecture designed by Jillian Segal, adopted by Anthony Albanese and enforced across Australia.
Australians have been instructed that hostility towards Israel is hostility towards Jews. The lobby never won that argument. It changed the dictionary instead.
Albanese supplied the imprimatur. Chris Minns supplied the muscle. David Crisafulli criminalised protest slogans. Peter Malinauskas carried the doctrine into the South Australian parliament.
Different parties. Different states. The same obedient genuflection.
The vandal who wasn’t an antisemite
Mohommed Farhat was a vandal for hire. He caused more than $110,000 in damage, torched a vehicle and painted “Fuk Israel” across Woollahra. Fagan found he was recruited and did not know what some slogans meant. Yet the State wanted him branded an antisemite and shackled with 55 terrorism supervision restrictions.
Fagan refused. His judgment is an autopsy of how propaganda becomes administrative fact. Police, prosecutors, the Crown Solicitor and the Director of Public Prosecutions repeated an unexamined claim until repetition replaced proof. The label was false and “injustice to the defendant” followed.
Then he turned to the definition. The IHRA formulation promoted by Segal and embraced by Canberra was, he found, “verbose and imprecise” and “detached from the reality of common usage”. Promoting it sought to change the settled meaning of “a word that has been in use in the English language for 150 years” and to “graft” onto the community’s abhorrence of antisemitism”a parasitic rejection of protest against Israel”.
Fagan cited Pew polling showing 74 per cent of Australians unfavourable towards Israel, rising to 79 per cent this year, and inferred a “humanitarian reaction to Israel’s genocide of the Gazans”. A definition that tars four in five Australians is not detecting hatred.
It is outlawing majority opinion.
Antisemitism, Fagan said, is simply “hostility to Jews for their Jewishness”. It is real, repugnant and must be confronted. Israel is a foreign state. Zionism is a political ideology. Neither is entitled to immunity from condemnation.
Protecting Jewish Australians is essential. Protecting a foreign government from criticism is not.
The lobbyist who wrote the law
Segal became special envoy after leading the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, whose published mission includes defending Israel, encouraging Zionism and lobbying governments for positions favourable to Israel.
The referee was recruited from one team’s front office.
She may hold those views. She may not launder them through the Commonwealth and receive them back as law. Albanese outsourced the dictionary to a protagonist, then adopted her every recommendation despite warnings from Jewish and civil liberties groups that it would punish lawful advocacy for Palestine.
Not consultation. Capitulation, formalised in a press release.
The government’s response commits the Commonwealth, states and territories to implementing Segal’s program. National machinery of compliance, and the premiers queued up to install it.
Minns, Crisafulli, Malinauskas
Minns expanded police powers and created new speech offences. Crisafulli criminalised two protest slogans, with two years in prison where words might reasonably cause somebody to feel menaced, harassed or offended.
Offended. The decay of liberal democracy, compressed into one word.
Malinauskas backed IHRA through the South Australian parliament, then pressed Adelaide Writers’ Week to dump Palestinian Australian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah. David Gonski, whose name once meant needs based schooling, now fronts an Antisemitism Education Taskforce with Segal at his side.
The Australian Public Service Commission says IHRA applies in federal workplaces. AHPRA adopted it across sixteen professions and more than 960,000 practitioners. A reference tool held over a doctor’s registration is not a dictionary but a threat to a livelihood. Fear is the cheapest police force ever deployed.
Executive policy cannot rewrite ordinary language. A circular cannot create law. Parliament never enacted IHRA, so the court gave it no force. Not a High Court ruling, but a preview.
Eighteen police, one shirt
I have been the test case.
On 3 November 2024, NSW Police arrested me at Bondi for wearing “Fuck Israel, Fuck Zionism”. I threatened nobody and damaged nothing. I was handcuffed, held six hours, fingerprinted and DNA tested by force over my objection.
Three charges followed, with bail conditions that ran more than a year. At one point I was banned from the eastern suburbs. My home in Surry Hills sat 400 metres from the boundary. One wrong walk meant arrest and up to twelve months in a cell awaiting a hearing. For a shirt.
All three charges collapsed in December 2025 once my lawyers raised the implied freedom of political communication.
On 6 April this year, as many as eighteen officers surrounded me at Bondi over the same shirt, among them Odin squad taskforce officers and two senior officers from area command. Overhead, a drone and a helicopter. On standby, an ambulance and two caged wagons.
Odin is a tactical unit for crowd management, high visibility policing and high risk operations. The high risk operation that morning was a shirt. I took it off. They arrested the shirt. A penalty notice arrived a week later.
Fagan has not decided my remaining matter, but he has demolished its pretence. He found the sprayed “Fuk Israel” was “crude political expression of contempt” for a foreign state, not hatred of Jews. If those words stayed political when painted during a crime spree, they cannot become Jew hatred worn peacefully on cotton.
The obscenity was never the shirt. It was the state power assembled around it.
Segal supplied the language. Albanese supplied the authority. Gonski took the classroom, AHPRA the professions, Minns the handcuffs, Crisafulli the statute book, Malinauskas the parliament and the festival stage.
Justice Fagan supplied something none of them could survive: the law.
Editor’s Note: the NSW Government is considering appealing Justice Fagan’s decision.
Andrew Brown is a Sydney businessman in the health products sector, former Deputy Mayor of Mosman and Palestine peace activist
