The interim report of the antisemitism royal commission in Australia, led by Virginia Bell and delivered to Governor-General Sam Mostyn, was always going to be closely scrutinised. Its fourteen recommendations are careful, institutional, and deliberately restrained. Yet in that restraint sits a glaring omission.

The report catalogues the symptoms of antisemitism while avoiding one of its most uncomfortable drivers: the convergence of radical Islamist ideology and hard-left Marxist political activism at their extremes.

This is about what happens at the ideological edges, where movements that would otherwise be in conflict find common cause in hostility toward Jewish identity, Jewish sovereignty, and the state of Israel.

Ordinarily, these ideologies do not align. History makes that clear. The Iranian Revolution brought together Islamists, liberals, and socialists in a shared effort to overthrow the Shah. But once the regime consolidated power, it turned ruthlessly on its former allies. Leftist groups that had helped usher in the revolution were among the first to be purged, imprisoned, and executed. This was never an alliance of values—only of convenience.

Today, that convergence has re-emerged in a different form. Radical Islamist rhetoric and segments of activist politics shaped by rigid binaries of oppressor and oppressed intersect around a shared narrative in which Israel is cast as uniquely illegitimate and Jews as symbols of power rather than a people with a history. In that framing, antisemitism is not recognized as hatred; it is reframed as resistance.

That convergence also produces contradictions that would once have seemed irreconcilable. Movements grounded in identity politics and LGBTQ rights have, in some cases, found themselves aligned rhetorically with........

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