00:00According to a report that was published by Tel Aviv University, Australia and Italy are the two
00:06countries that have seen the most significant rise in anti-Semitic attacks in the course of
00:122024. And I'm just wondering why you think those two countries would stand out?
00:20Well, they don't. So if you look at the TSAT report for 2025, which is the
00:26terrorism situation and trend report, none of those would mention terrorism in those countries.
00:32Indeed, in Italy, the greatest terrorist threat or manifestation in terms of those which are
00:37terrorists, either completed fail the foil, are left-wing or anarchist attacks. So again,
00:45you have to separate the extremism and hate crime from terrorism. They can be different things,
00:51as I've said. And there is no very little evidence of terrorist attacks against Jewish targets.
00:58That's not to say there hasn't been an exponential rise, both in anti-Semitism, which there has in
01:04Europe, and in terms of anti-Islam, which again, there also have been. And so a lot of these threats
01:10that you've mentioned in these countries have been shaped by developments beyond both the EU border
01:15and the Australian border. And of course, the most predominant one is what has been going on
01:20in Gaza and how that has shaped the violent extremism narrative.
01:24Right. And we've heard, in fact, in the last 24 hours, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
01:29accusing the Australian government of, quote, pouring oil on the fire of anti-Semitism. And there he's
01:35referring to Canberra's decision to recognise Palestinian statehood that happened back in August.
01:40What's the logic here? Do you think that Prime Minister Netanyahu is getting at?
01:45I think the logic he's getting at is that the recognising the Palestinian state seems to have
01:51been premature. So, for example, if you take a view which is different than that, for example,
01:57the Singaporean authorities, that they will only recognise a Palestinian state when three things
02:04pertain. Firstly, when there's an effective government. Secondly, when they accept the right
02:10of Israel to exist. And thirdly, they renounce violence. Now, in this case, at a very tactical
02:16level of the attack in Sydney, the protagonists didn't accept the right of Jewish people to exist.
02:24And neither, of course, did they go on a pathway of renouncing terrorism because this was absolutely
02:29a terrorist act. So the Singaporean model seems to me to be what most countries should have gone to
02:35rather than ploughing in before we've got something durable. And we're not even into Phase 2 of the
02:42Gaza ceasefire yet. We're still in Phase 1. We hope that Phase 2 might happen in early 2026.
02:50But it's not a done deal that we'll get to Phase 3 by any means in the same way that we didn't get
02:55past Phase 1 in the same time last year at the end of 2024.
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