Nazi salutes, lost friendships and a warning turned suspension

The Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion opened its fourth block of public hearings in Melbourne on Monday 13 July 2026, taking evidence from four academics and students under pseudonyms about campus antisemitism and university responses to it The Guardian. Commissioner Virginia Bell is leading the inquiry, which now moves through its second month of hearings after opening its Sydney block in early May.

The most striking testimony came from a UNSW tutor and PhD candidate given the pseudonym ACJ, who told the commission that four students performed Nazi salutes toward him during a 2024 business class for international students The Guardian. ACJ said his grandparents survived the Holocaust and that Nazis murdered a large proportion of his extended family. He told his supervisors about the incident, described it as a crime, and said he intended to report it to police. UNSW's initial response was a formal warning; the students were suspended only after a NSW Police investigation was opened, according to his evidence.

That escalation path — warning first, suspension only after police involvement — is likely to draw scrutiny from the commission as it compiles a record of how institutions handled reported incidents versus how they were eventually forced to respond. The gap between an internal disciplinary process and an external criminal one is precisely the terrain this inquiry was established to map.

A second witness, given the pseudonym Liat and identified as a student at the Australian National University, testified that she lost the majority of her non-Jewish friends after the 7 October 2023 attack and was called a "baby killer" and "genocide supporter" by students associated with ANU's pro-Palestine encampment The Guardian. Michael Gencher, executive director of StandWithUs Australia, gave corroborating evidence, telling the commission he personally witnessed Jewish students called "baby killers" at a university campus cafe in mid-2024. A postgraduate Jewish and Israeli student in Melbourne, given the pseudonym ACL, testified that she decided for the first time after 7 October 2023 not to wear her Magen David on campus.

Gencher also told the commission there had been a significant increase in university responsiveness to antisemitism allegations since the Bondi massacre in December, though he said some Jewish students have stopped attending campuses altogether because they no longer feel safe. That split finding — improved institutional responsiveness alongside continued student attrition from physical campuses — captures the central tension the commission has to resolve: whether policy change at the administrative level is translating into a changed experience for the people it's meant to protect.

The inquiry itself was established on 9 January 2026 in response to the Bondi terrorist attack of 14 December 2025, which targeted a Jewish celebration asc.royalcommission.gov.au. Submissions opened 24 February and closed 14 June, drawing more than 20,000 submissions — a volume that speaks to the breadth of testimony the commission now has to work through as it moves between capital cities. In its wake, federal parliament amended the Criminal Code to impose mandatory jail terms for making a Nazi salute 9News Melbourne, a legislative response that gives the ACJ testimony added weight: the conduct he described predates the mandatory sentencing regime it likely helped inspire.

The commission's hearing schedule has not been without friction. Witnesses who gave evidence in earlier blocks were subsequently subjected to antisemitic attacks, prompting a referral to the Australian Federal Police and resulting in criminal charges; a NSW man has been charged over allegedly sending offensive emails to a witness The Guardian. That such retaliation has occurred against people testifying under a Royal Commission's protections raises its own procedural questions about witness security going forward, and it is presumably part of why so many witnesses in the Melbourne block — ACJ, Liat, ACL among them — are appearing under pseudonyms rather than in open testimony.

National Legal Aid has since stood up the Royal Commission Legal Assistance Service, a dedicated national service to support people engaging with the inquiry, an infrastructure response to both the volume of submissions and the evident risks some witnesses face in coming forward National Legal Aid.

Procedurally, the commission has kept a brisk cadence: Sydney hearings ran through Day 6 on 6 July and Day 7 on 7 July, paused on 8 July, and resumed 9 July before the Melbourne block opened on the 13th and runs through 17 July. A sixth hearing block returns to Sydney from 28 to 31 July, suggesting the commission intends to alternate between the two cities as it builds out its evidentiary record across universities, community organisations and individual witnesses before reporting.

What emerges so far from the Melbourne evidence is less a single narrative than several overlapping ones: criminal conduct in classrooms, social isolation on campus, and an uneven institutional response that appears to have hardened only under external pressure — police, media, or the commission itself. How the commission weighs those threads, and what recommendations follow, will likely shape the next phase of university policy on hate speech and physical safety well beyond the hearings themselves.