As it happened: Nine witnesses set to give evidence on day six of the hearings

Musician Deborah Conway said she regards anti-Zionism as a “genocidal impulse” and that she had lost several performance bookings because of backlash to her views.

“ I think it’s really important to say that I support Israel’s right to exist. I don’t support all of the Israeli government’s ways of prosecuting the war,” she said. “But, you know, we didn’t ask for America to be dismantled because it prosecuted the war in Afghanistan or Vietnam or Iraq badly … I think that idea of anti-Zionism is, in fact, a genocidal impulse,” she said.

Conway said she released a new album in August but many venues had cancelled her live performances.

“There were … venues that were targeted almost immediately that their advertising went up by pro-Palestinian supporters who made it their business to target those venues and to make sure that they knew that if they went ahead with it, there would be trouble. And so they pulled out,” she said.

Singer-songwriter Deborah Conway has told the royal commission she was on a Melbourne stage on October 7, 2023, performing with her husband when their daughter in Israel texted them to say she was hiding in a stairwell amid the attack on Israel.

Conway said she reacted with “just horror, just this extraordinary shock to my very core”.

She said the gathering at the Sydney Opera House after the attack “was a wake-up call”.

“The glee, the jubilation, these celebrations, or protests, or whatever you want to call them, that were taking place … I just thought, am I living in 2023 Australia, or is this 1933 Berlin?”

Rabbi Daniel Rabin from Melbourne’s Caulfield Shule said many members of his community had asked if they should leave Australia, amid rhetoric that he said branded any link to Israel or Zionism as inherently evil.

“I think the biggest shock to me was people asking me, genuinely, should they leave Australia? Is this the writing on the wall?” he told the commission.

Rabin said it reminded him of stories from Jewish ancestors in pre-Holocaust Europe who asked themselves similar questions. “And of course, we know the outcome. So to hear such questions is very confronting,” he said.

“Look, I’m an optimist by nature ... I’m not telling people they should leave.

Jewish saxophonist Joshua Moshe is telling the commission about the fallout from the leaking of a WhatsApp group for Jewish creatives he was part of in 2024, which led to the band he’d played with for seven years ejecting him from the group.

After the leak, a caller threatened the homewares shop Moshe ran with his wife in Melbourne, telling the pair to watch their backs, and sent a photo of their son taken from social media.

After reporting posts made about him and his family online to the police, an officer told Moshe they could investigate vandalism of their store and the threat involving his son, but not the other posts targeting Moshe because they didn’t “cross the line” into antisemitism.

“I said, ‘So, how are you defining antisemitism?’ Because, from my perspective, the word ‘Zionist’ or ‘Zio’ is being used here as a proxy, and ... it’s having an effect on Jewish Australians, and this has the potential to get much, much worse from here on out, and it’s having a serious impact on Jewish Australians lives,” he told the commission.