The despicable truth about the ‘pro-Palestinian’ protests against Herzog in Australia

This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.

It’s not remotely surprising that President Isaac Herzog’s visit to Australia is being met with protests by “pro-Palestinian” activists falsely alleging Israeli genocide in Gaza.

After all, “pro-Palestinian” activists in Australia, and pretty much everywhere else on the planet, have been demonstrating against Israel’s resort to war from almost immediately after Hamas invaded southern Israel from a Jew-free Gaza Strip, massacred some 1,200 people amid unspeakable brutality, abducted 251 to Gaza, and vowed to keep on killing Israelis until the world’s only Jewish-majority state is destroyed.

These are not demonstrations regarding Israel’s prosecution of the war, or focused on the pro-annexation policies of a hawkish Israeli government, by activists genuinely concerned for the well-being of non-terrorist Palestinians and noncombatants in any and all conflict zones.

Rather, these are concerted protests transparently designed to demonize and delegitimize Israel and Israel alone, in its entirety and its essence — to render Israel a pariah state with which no decent country should interact in any field, to deny it not only the right to defend itself but the weaponry and practical capacity to defend itself, and thus to aid Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime in their declared mission to wipe us out.

So the demonstrations against Herzog’s visit are anything but surprising. But they are particularly revealing, horrifying and despicable.

Twenty-seven months of orchestrated global activism have relentlessly spread a narrative in which the Jewish state, uniquely, can do no right, and calculatedly created a bedrock of empathy and support for regimes, terrorist groups, and individuals who seek to murder and maim Israelis and Jews wherever we are found.

And in that deliberately created climate of murderous hostility, in Sydney, Australia, on December 14, 2025, father and son Islamic extremists Sajid and Naveed Akram massacred 15 people at a Hanukkah party on Bondi Beach.

This was not a case of direct cause and effect. Naveed had links to a pro-Islamic State network in Australia dating back to 2019.

But you might have wanted to believe that the deadly and terribly predictable turn of events in Australia would have given the country’s “pro-Palestinian” activists pause.

You might have wanted to hope that, if there were to be demonstrations to coincide with Herzog’s visit, they would have been held to demand that the Australian government take more effective measures to protect the Australian Jewish community, that it take more effective measures to tackle the ongoing stream of antisemitic attacks, that it take more effective measures to prevent the dissemination of hate materials online.

In truth, you would not have expected anything of the kind. We all know better than to be so naive. But that’s what should have been happening on Herzog’s visit.

For that matter, those “pro-Palestinian” activists who purport to care for innocent lives, in the Middle East and beyond, should also have been out on the streets demonstrating on behalf of the people of Iran, who have been risking their lives — and losing them in the thousands if not the tens of thousands — to try to bring down their repressive, misogynistic, warmongering Islamic death cult leadership.

These were innocent people ruthlessly massacred by their own oppressive government, to widespread international indifference.

But, of course, in Australia as pretty much everywhere else on the planet, the “pro-Palestinian” activists are not actually “pro” freedom for Palestinians, or Iranians or anybody else, nor “pro” the right to live peaceably, in safety, under humane leadership.

They claim to be opposing ostensible genocide by the Jewish state. In fact, they are seeking to enable the destruction of the Jewish state, and championing the mass murder of Jews — even, if not especially, as it has been unfolding in their own country.