How defending Israel can shield its radical right

Radical Zionism does not need every defender to endorse its programme. It also benefits when people who reject its rhetoric argue against consequences for its leaders. The Australian dispute over sanctions on Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir exposes that gap: disapproval in words, protection in the policy being urged.

In June 2025, Australia and four partner governments announced measures against two Israeli ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, citing their incitement of violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. AIJAC opposed the measures the next day. Its executive director, Colin Rubenstein, called many of the ministers' statements “insupportable” and acknowledged settler violence. He opposed the sanctions anyway.^[1][2]

Alex Ryvchin, of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, took a similar line. The Nightly quoted him on 11 June saying, “We dislike these two politicians”. He argued that sanctioning them would not advance peace and could undermine US-led efforts to end the Gaza war. SBS's published transcript from the time records him urging allies to put pressure on Hamas and prioritise the release of hostages, rather than sanction the two men.^[3][4]

Neither man endorsed Ben-Gvir or Smotrich. Both nevertheless argued against Australia's targeted sanctions on them. That is the protection at issue: an explicit public argument to spare radical-right ministers a consequence while disavowing their politics. The argument failed to stop the sanctions. Its political direction was clear.

Rubenstein cast the measures as an escalation in deteriorating relations with Israel, driven by anti-Israel activists and marked by double standards. The governments involved had framed them differently. Their statement paired support for Israel's security and condemnation of Hamas with action against two individuals.^[1][2] Treating a penalty on two ministers as mistreatment of Israel blurs the line between the country's safety and the interests of particular officeholders.

The complaint about double standards raises a fair point about consistency, since comparable conduct should face comparable scrutiny. But inconsistency elsewhere does not answer the case against these two men. Anyone opposing the sanctions still has to deal with the conduct cited, whether the response was proportionate, and what they would have done instead.

Sanctions are the most direct case, but accountability can be narrowed in other ways. An allegation can be dismissed before its evidence is examined. Critics can lose the platforms from which they press for action. Responsibility for civilian harm can be steered away from the decisions of the state. These are different interventions by different organisations, and nothing here shows they were coordinated. This essay looks at selected statements and requests made between November 2023 and August 2025. It does not measure how common such positions are, whether they succeeded, or whether the speakers still hold them.

Where the radical-right connection is direct

Smotrich's 2017 Decisive Plan shows what is at stake. It proposes exclusive Jewish national self-determination west of the Jordan and settlement expansion to extinguish the prospect of a Palestinian state. Palestinians would give up their national aspirations or receive help to emigrate. Its treatment of individual rights and conditional citizenship sits inside that rejection of equal national claims.^[5]

Here, radical Zionism means programmes of this kind: territorial supremacy and the denial of Palestinian national self-determination or political equality. The term does not describe Jewish identity, Israeli nationality or concern for the safety of Israeli civilians.

The sanctions dispute is where advocacy bears directly on radical-right politicians. The debates over genocide and civilian harm involve a wider set of state actors. They bear on the same question of accountability, but they cannot be used to pin Smotrich's programme on everyone who disputes an allegation against Israel.

Disagreement is legitimate; dismissal needs an argument

Contesting a genocide finding is different from treating the allegation as unworthy of examination. Amnesty International published its genocide conclusion in December 2024. B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel reached theirs in July 2025, and a UN commission of inquiry followed in September 2025. These are investigative assessments. None is a final ICJ ruling.^[6][7][8]

The legal question is genuinely contested. In January 2024, Israel told the court that its military objectives, its protective measures and the context of officials' statements contradicted genocidal intent. Judge Georg Nolte was not persuaded, on the material then before him, that the military operation as such had plausibly been shown to pursue that intent. He nonetheless supported provisional measures because of the risk to protected rights. Both positions predate the later investigations. They are reasons to test the evidence, not answers to findings that had yet to be published.^[9][10]

That is the background to Alex Ryvchin's evidence to a NSW parliamentary inquiry in June 2025. Asked about posters and the reporting of antisemitic incidents, he described a genocide accusation as “extreme, ignorant” and “devoid of truth”. By then Amnesty's report and the ICJ's provisional measures were public. The exchange was not a full examination of the genocide evidence, and should not be read as one. Even so, his answer presented rejection as settled and offered no evidentiary rebuttal.^[11][12][6]

The objection is to that formulation. It is not to his right to disagree with Amnesty, and it is not a suggestion that he knowingly said anything false. In the same testimony he said a genocide accusation was not inherently antisemitic, affirmed that criticism of Israeli policy is legitimate, and named Smotrich and Ben-Gvir as politicians he had criticised.^[11] That record rules out portraying him as someone who forbids all criticism or shares their programme.

What his answer lacked was reasons. Audiences were told the allegation was false without being shown why. He was entitled to reject it. What the answer did not do was engage with the evidence that had made it a serious allegation. Public debate can weigh competing explanations while the court case continues. A categorical dismissal asks the audience to skip that step.

From disputing evidence to restricting platforms

In November 2023, ECAJ wrote to the journalists' union, MEAA. The letter was signed jointly by Daniel Aghion, Peter Wertheim and Ryvchin. It objected to journalists stating that credible allegations of Israeli crimes existed, pointing to the absence of definitive determinations and objecting to what it treated as conclusive criminal judgments.^[13]

A credible allegation is not the same as established guilt. If journalists must wait for the second before reporting the first, scrutiny arrives only after the process it should inform. The letter asked for a meeting to change the union's framing. It did not seek a reporting ban. It also predates the ICJ measures and the later investigations, and should be judged against what was known when it was written.

ECAJ's April 2024 statement on university encampments asked for more. It called for the encampments to be dismantled and reported contact with education ministers and vice-chancellors. It cited intimidation, harassment, racial vilification and support for terrorism, while also affirming free and respectful exchange.^[14]

Those allegations concern whether Jewish students can study and move around campus safely, and universities have to investigate and respond to them. The dispute is over the remedy. Dismantling an encampment removes a collective platform, including whatever lawful expression takes place there. The test should be what misconduct is established, who committed it, and why a narrower response would not work. The statement shows ECAJ advocating removal. It does not show that the demand caused any university decision, or that Ryvchin personally wrote it.

Arguing with critics is part of political debate. Asking whoever controls a platform to shut it down goes further. Where lawful criticism would be removed along with misconduct, the breadth of the demand is the problem.

Civilian suffering and the direction of scrutiny

Ryvchin's comments on civilian harm show a narrower version of the same move. On 30 May 2025, SBS reported him opposing calls for Australia to threaten sanctions on Israel over the Gaza aid blockade. He acknowledged the suffering and said international pressure should be directed at Hamas to surrender. The report did not specify the proposed sanctions, and the exchange came before the June measures against Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. A year earlier, in ABC's account of the Nuseirat hostage rescue, he called the civilian casualties tragic and said they would have been avoided if possible.^[15][16] Both statements put Hamas's choices, and the asserted necessity of Israeli force, at the centre of the explanation.

Hamas's conduct is part of the story. It does not answer every question about Israeli decisions, precautions or restrictions on aid. Ryvchin has also been reported supporting an end to the war and the resumption of aid deliveries.^[17] The point concerns what these explanations bring forward and what they leave in the background. It is not a claim that he is indifferent to suffering, or a complete account of his views.

Protection without endorsement

The evidence supports different conclusions at different levels. AIJAC and Ryvchin opposed a specific consequence for two named radical-right ministers. ECAJ sought to change journalists' framing and to remove protest platforms. Ryvchin rejected a genocide accusation outright while defending the legitimacy of some criticism of Israel. None of this requires treating the organisations as interchangeable or assigning them a shared private purpose.

These interventions work at different points in the argument: whether ministers should face consequences, whether allegations deserve examination, and whether critics should retain a platform. The course AIJAC and Ryvchin urged would have spared two radical-right ministers targeted sanctions. ECAJ's encampment demand sought to remove a collective protest platform. Where lawful opposition to radical Zionist policies would be removed with it, those policies gain protection from public pressure.

The genocide dispute sits at a further remove. It concerns Israel's conduct as a state, and rejecting the allegation is neither a defence of Smotrich's programme nor evidence that a speaker shares it. A categorical dismissal can still narrow the accountability that applies to the state and its ministers alike, which is why it calls for reasons rather than a verdict on motives. The direct case remains the sanctions dispute. There, an argument made in the language of peace, hostages and double standards, by people who said they disliked the ministers, still asked Australia to spare them. That is how advocacy can protect radical Zionist policies without promoting their programme.

Ryvchin's criticism of the far right belongs in the record. So does his opposition to sanctions on its ministers. Disapproval cannot be the end of the assessment when the proposed policy would protect the people being disapproved of. Defending Israeli civilians and Jewish Australians is necessary. Turning that defence into a reason to spare ministers consequences, or to remove lawful criticism along with a protest platform, gives radical Zionist policies political cover, whatever the advocate intends. The test is what the advocacy asks Australia to excuse, prevent or silence.