My name appears at the top of a list in a document the Israeli government released earlier this month in order to draw false associations between the Bondi Beach shooting and online criticism of Israel and its atrocities.
The PowerPoint document, released by Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, is titled “Delegitimization and Antisemitism in Australia — A Snapshot October — December 2025,” and its claims have been cited by Israeli media outlets like Ynet News.
Page five of the document is titled “Actors: Key generators of anti-Semitism and delegitimization in Australia,” where the name Caitlin Johnstone is listed at the top of a column titled “Active influencers and content creators” which is ranked by number of followers. Page seven describes me as an “Anti-Western blogger, promoting conspiracies and complete delegitimization of Israel.”
This word “delegitimization” appears throughout the document, which I personally find funny. They knew the “antisemitism” claim couldn’t stand on its own, so they had to tack on this weird extra complaint about people “delegitimizing” the state of Israel — as though that’s a bad thing. I’ll always deny harboring any hatred toward Jews or Judaism, but I’ll happily admit to trying to delegitimize a genocidal apartheid state that cannot exist without nonstop violence and abuse.
The document attempts to make the argument that in the two months leading up to the Bondi attack there was an epidemic of antisemitic “hate speech” online, absurdly insinuating that those of us who were criticizing Israel and its abuses during that time incited two ISIS guys to commit an act of terrorism. Like ISIS were just a bunch of cuddly wuddly snuggle bears until some Australian influencers tweeted mean things about Israel.
Page 14 of the document is captioned “Examples of recent hate speech in the two months leading up to the attack: Selected anti-Semitic tweets on X: Caitlin Johnstone,” and it consists of two tweets. You can tell whoever collected them was just doing advanced searches for specific keywords from the people on their list because the word “Jewish” is highlighted in one of their screenshotted tweets, which means they had to scroll past the many tweets I’ve made over the years which would contradict the antisemitism narrative they’re trying to build.
The first tweet is from August 6 of this year, and it features a screenshot from journalist Owen Jones noting that just 6.7 percent of Israeli Jews surveyed had told pollsters that they are “very troubled” by reports of starvation and suffering in Gaza. I captioned the screenshot as follows:
“Poll after poll after poll shows that Jewish Israelis are horrible people who are quantifiably much more cruel and immoral than pretty much any other population. At a certain point you have to stop thinking the polls might be mistaken and see that the only real mistake is Israel.”
Note that I didn’t say “Jews” but “Jewish Israelis”. Poll after poll after poll shows that Israeli Jews are indeed horrible people who hold sociopathic attitudes toward Palestinians, because that’s what happens when you’re the privileged group in an apartheid state. White South Africans were horrible people during South African apartheid too. You can’t have apartheid without indoctrinating your public to see the disempowered groups as less than the empowered group. It doesn’t say anything about Jews or Judaism that this is the case; that’s just how apartheid works.
The second tweet is from October 6 of this year, and it reads as follows:
“Someone who is truly and sincerely worried about a rise in antisemitism will oppose the mass slaughter of children under the Star of David banner by a state which claims to represent all Jews while Jewish billionaires buy up media to silence criticism of that state and Jewish oligarchs openly purchase the president of the world’s most powerful government to ensure the facilitation of that state’s atrocities.”
I guess this one might look antisemitic if you didn’t know that every single part of it is completely true. Israel has indeed been mass slaughtering children and does indeed have a Star of David on its flag. Israel is indeed claiming to represent all Jews when it argues that criticism of Israel is hateful toward everyone who is Jewish. Larry Ellison’s family has indeed been buying up media platforms like CBS where virulent Zionist Bari Weiss has been put in command, and purchasing control of TikTok after Congress forced its sale to stomp out criticism of Israel. President Donald Trump has indeed repeatedly admitted to being controlled by megadonor Miriam Adelson, the world’s richest Israeli. These dynamics are indeed likely to feed into antisemitism in a very real way. I didn’t create those dynamics. Zionists did.
This is the Israeli government’s best argument that Australians like myself incited the Bondi attack. I tweeted about genocide and apartheid and it violently radicalized a father and son in Sydney, who then apparently invented some kind of time machine and traveled back to 2019 to join ISIS. That’s their strongest case.
If you’ve been wondering why I’ve been writing so much about the Bondi Beach shooting, this is why. It’s being used to justify an aggressive assault on freedom of speech and assembly in Australia, and that assault is happening at the forceful urging of the Australian Israel lobby and the Israeli government, which is now going so far as to compile official public lists of Australians whom it deems guilty of dangerous wrongthink.
Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism also put together a full-page profile on me and my work back in September in a release titled “Antisemitism & Anti-Zionism in Australia Key Influencers, Incidents, Groups, & Trends”, which I’ll just copy and paste here because it makes me look awesome:
Caitlin Johnstone, an Australian independent journalist and political commentator. Her writings frequently describe Israel as a “genocidal apartheid state” and a “settler-colonialist project” that perpetuates systemic violence and oppression. She argues that Israel’s actions are not isolated incidents but part of a broader strategy to maintain dominance over Palestinians.
On her social media platforms, Caitlin Johnstone frequently shares strongly anti-Israeli content in the context of the ongoing war in Gaza, while largely omitting criticism of Hamas. In a post dated April 15, 2025, she dismissed concerns about Israelis feeling unsafe, suggesting instead that their discomfort stems from a sense of guilt over what she described as the “genocide” in Gaza.
In an Instagram post dated April 7, 2025 Johnstone appeared to indirectly justify the October 7 Hamas attack, stating that “Hamas succeeded in exposing the true face of the empire.” She went on to highlight alleged Israeli actions in Gaza since the attack, while omitting any acknowledgment of the massacre carried out by Hamas.
The profile also includes some banger tweets I made like “Being a liberal Israel supporter these days probably feels like being a defense attorney for an accused murderer who won’t shut up about how much he loves murdering.”
I’m not going to lie, I do regard all this attention I’m getting from Israel as a compliment. Winding up at the top of an Israeli list of enemies is certainly more of an assurance that I’m doing the right thing than winning some shitty western “journalism” award like a Pulitzer would ever be.
But I’m also not going to act like miss tough girl and pretend it doesn’t creep me the hell out at the same time to have this murderous ethnostate keeping an eye on me. Israel is so intensely creepy.
Anyway, with that I guess I’ll just use this opportunity to remind everyone that I am an entirely crowd-funded writer, so if you enjoy seeing me piss off the Israeli government you can always toss a few coins in my hat to help fund my little operation here. Also a friendly reminder that the best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list, which will always be 100 percent free regardless of whether or not you become a paying patron.
Thanks for traveling along on this bizarre adventure with me.
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