Mark Ruffalo and an Australian court decision reignite antisemitism debate

Khaled Al Khawaldeh

August 26, 2026

https://www.arabnews.com/node/2655917/world

DUBAI: Over the weekend, Mark Ruffalo, the American actor best known for his portrayal of the Hulk, made headlines worldwide with a post that pushed back against what he alleged was a smear campaign designed to paint him as an antisemite.

“The accusation that I am antisemitic is appalling and fundamentally dishonest. Criticizing the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract, or the executives who supply it is not the same as criticizing Jewish people,” Ruffalo said in a post on X which has since garnered over 800,000 likes.

Ruffalo’s statement came in response to an exchange between himself and Paramount Skydance which, in a statement on Saturday, had accused him of invoking “antisemitic tropes” in his criticism of its controversial merger with Warner Bros. Discovery which would see it take control of major media institutions including CNN.

Paramount Skydance is led by CEO David Ellison, and Oracle, the technology company, is run by Ellison’s father, Larry, which has supplied software to the Israel Defense Forces, Ministry of Defense, air force, government, and police for decades.

Shmulik Hauser, head of Oracle’s sales division, told Israeli news site Ynet last year that supporting Israel was in their “DNA” and Oracle executive vice-chair, Safra Catz, is on video describing the “really profoundly scary technology” it provided to Israel after the Oct. 7, 2023, events.

Ruffalo had implied in a string of posts over the last week that the merger had the potential of stifling editorial freedoms and potentially introducing Israeli bias into public American discourse.

“Scrutinizing the Ellisons, including Oracle’s business built on data, surveillance technology and government contracts, and the serious threat to editorial freedom and the loss of a livelihood for thousands of families, is fair and necessary,” Ruffalo said.

The accusations against Ruffalo are only the latest in a long spate of incidents which have seen anti-Israeli or anti-Zionist sentiment labelled as antisemitic often resulting in the censure, removal and deplatforming of individuals from employment, academic postings and positions of power.

In Australia there has been mounting pressure following a December 2025 terror attack on a Jewish celebration at Sydney’s famed Bondi beach that killed 15 people. The attack prompted the launch of a nationwide inquiry which has made calls for increasingly harsher and more constrictive measures to combat rising antisemitism.

According to Ramia Abdo Sultan, a senior Australian lawyer and executive member of the Australian Palestine Advocacy Network, this has been part of a concerted effort by parts of the Australian Israeli lobby to stifle criticism of Israel.

“They’re very much trying their utmost best to conflate any criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and hence extend the definition, the traditional definition of antisemitism,” Sultan told Arab News.

However, last week in Australia, a New South Wales supreme court judge drew a clear distinction between the two.

Justice Desmond Fagan ruled that condemning or cursing Israel represents political commentary directed at a government rather than hostility toward Jewish people, noting that Israel and the global Jewish community are distinct entities.

Furthermore, the court firmly rejected the notion that displaying political slogans in an area with a prominent Jewish population inherently converted them into antisemitic acts.

Fagan went on to sharply critique the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, describing its drafting as “inept” and disconnected from the everyday legal and common understanding of the term.

The IHRA working definition of antisemitism includes 11 illustrative examples, several of which address political criticism of Israel.

While widely adopted by governments and public bodies to identify anti-Jewish bias, it has drawn fierce criticism from legal scholars and human rights advocates who argue its broad phrasing conflates opposition to Israeli state policies with antisemitism.

“This particular judge made it very clear that criticism of Israel does not at all deem anything or anyone as antisemitic. And it sort of goes against the lobby’s attempts to stifle criticism,” Sultan said.

“I guess positive for the movement it’s come up even at a good time in light of the ridiculous circus of the royal commission (national inquiry).”

The judgement was passed down as part of a case that looked into political vandalism by Kurdish-Australian Mohommed Farhat, who had spray-painted several expletives about Israel onto cars in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.

It represented a rare rebuke of the increasing pressure applied by Australia’s national commission for antisemitism, led by its envoy in Australia, the Jewish lawyer Jillian Segal, which has been increasingly pushing for the definition to be utilized by institutions and public bodies.

“I think there’s a very clear, calculated effort by not only the antisemitism envoy, Jillian Segal, but also the lobby here to push as far as they can to integrate the IHRA definition across all government levels, including obviously the media and education institutions,” Sultan said.

“Even though governments and various institutions have already adopted the IHRA wording, it doesn’t actually change the meaning of a word ‘antisemitism,’ that’s been in use for over a century really.”

Sultan said that despite what appeared to be a win, the battle against censorship was ongoing. She said she was currently petitioning against the removal of a book from a public library in Sydney. 

The book "How to Sell a Genocide" by American media analyst Adam Johnson which looks into the media's complicity in helping downplay and whitewash Israel's crimes in Gaza was temporarily removed from the shelves of Waverley Library in the city's east under formal review. Sultan described it as another example of censorship. 

The case of Ruffalo and the current legal battles in Australia show the consistent reverberation of a debate that has exploded across Western countries since October 2023.

Famed Jewish writer, Peter Beinart, has argued that this widening definition of antisemitism has become politically consequential because it can shift attention away from the substance of criticism of Israel and toward the identity or motives of the critic.

He says the issue is not whether antisemitism exists or should be confronted, but whether the term is being stretched so far that it risks shielding a state and its leaders from the kind of scrutiny normally applied to governments, militaries and powerful institutions.

Beinart has warned that the conflation of Jewish identity with the actions of the Israeli state can be damaging in two directions at once.

It can delegitimize Palestinian advocacy by treating opposition to Israeli policy as hostility to Jews, while also implying that Jewish people collectively bear responsibility for decisions made by a government many of them may not support.

“Antisemitism isn’t wrong because it is wrong to denigrate and dehumanise Jews. Antisemitism is wrong because it is wrong to denigrate and dehumanise anyone,” he wrote in an opinion piece published in The Guardian in March 2019.

“Which means, ultimately, that any effort to fight antisemitism that contributes to the denigration and dehumanisation of Palestinians is no fight against antisemitism at all.”