Australia/Israel Review
A week – and fifty years
Dec 17, 2024 | Sam Lipski
I begin with a plea to readers. Please forgive me for quoting Lenin. But I couldn’t help noticing that commentators and analysts were citing Valdimir Ilyich. That happened quite a few times during the days in December when I began writing these brief reflections.
Said Lenin: “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.”
The pundits using the Lenin quote were reacting to the tectonic shifts in the Middle East.
In just a few days Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime in Syria had collapsed, “gradually then suddenly”; the Hayat Tahrir a-Sham rebels had taken control; the Iranians and Russians had scuttled out of Damascus. In 48 hours of air and naval strikes, the IDF had destroyed most of Syria’s weapons stockpiles.
Definitely “a week when decades happened.”
It’s also been a week when Australia’s Jews and the burgeoning antisemitism in this country shared the headlines with the historic events in Israel and the Middle East. As they’ve done so often since October 7.
The world changed on that date. Not just for Israel and the Jews. And not just for what remains of Western civilisation. So much has happened since, with Israel at the centre of it all, it may seem odd to choose just one week to comment about.
I admit it. Seemingly very odd. But then I’d argue that it hasn’t been just another such week.
The firebombing of the Adass Israel Synagogue on December 6 in Melbourne made sure it wasn’t. For once “unprecedented” – that overused word – was applied correctly. The deliberate torching of a house of worship – with people inside – was a terrorist act without precedent, even among the thousands of antisemitic incidents since the orgy of Jew-hatred by pro-Hamas demonstrators at the Sydney Opera House on Oct. 9, 2023.
Yet, more than a year later, by Dec. 6, 2024, and with Israel still at war, Jews were undoubtedly shocked, appalled and frightened by the synagogue arson. But it was telling that, as so many community leaders pointed out, we were not surprised. Antisemitism had been repeatedly, even routinely, manifest in the incessant street protests and marches by pro-Hamas and pro-Hezbollah supporters. Jew hatred had been incited regularly by Islamist preachers. Even violence against Jews and Jewish property – especially in Melbourne and Sydney – had become “normalised” in Australia. We were no longer surprised.
Nor were we surprised when the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center warned international Jewish travellers that Australia was not safe for them to visit. The Center cited two reasons for its travel alert: the Australian Government’s failure “to protect Jewish communities…from Islamists and other extremists” and Australia’s “anti-Israel” stance at the UN.
Although Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, clearly acting under widespread pressure after the synagogue firebombing, announced a dedicated police and intelligence task force to tackle antisemitism, it was rightly adjudged as “too little too late.”
Then, just to round off a week “when decades happened”, Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong, in the 2024 Hawke Lecture, doubled down on her obsession with criticising Israel. By bracketing Israel’s existential fight for survival with China and Russia’s outrages against international norms, and insisting that it was not antisemitic to do so, she deservedly earned the robust response and condemnation from Jewish and non-Jewish quarters.
AIJAC decried her “moral relativism” and “factual confusion”.
And in the Australian (11/12/24) Anthony Bergin, a Senior Fellow at Strategic Analysis Australia, and Mike Kelly, a former Labor minister, wrote: “Australia’s domestic antisemitic escalation and foreign policy vilification of the Jewish state aren’t coincidental but interdependent.”
For me, that sentence summarises and encapsulates AIJAC’s mission today and into the future. Israel’s destiny and the sustainability of a vibrant Jewish community in Australia are inextricably linked. They have been since May 14, 1948, and the reborn independent Jewish state of Israel.
AIJAC, as one of the Jewish community’s national agencies, embodies that view in its title. It is at one and the same time the “Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council.”
Perhaps I can clarify that statement a bit further by going back to AIJAC’s beginnings.
When AIJAC invited me to contribute to this 50th anniversary edition of the Review, I asked for a copy of what I’d written for the 25th anniversary. For one thing, I wanted to avoid repeating myself. But I also wanted to recall what had changed in Australia’s relationship with Israel, and how those changes affected the way Jews were seen and saw themselves in Australian society today.
Reflecting on the beginnings in 1974, barely a year after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when the veteran Zionist leaders, Isador Magid and Robert Zablud, employed me to start Australia-Israel Publications (AIP), AIJAC’s precursor, I wrote about “the driving force” that led to its establishment.
“(It) was as much the growing discomfort and anxiety of Australian Jews at what was happening to their sense of security in this country, as it was their undoubted concern for Israel’s security in the international arena.”
The constant theme I saw in AIJAC’s first 25 years was “the all-important psychological link between the local Jewish condition and Israel’s standing.”
At the risk of doing the very thing I wanted to avoid, namely repeating myself, I also wrote: “Israel was as unprepared on the propaganda and information fronts as it had been on its security borders” (in the Yom Kippur War). And I continued: “In all the key citadels of the West’s ‘hearts and minds’ the Palestinians now emerged as the victims, and the Israelis as the recalcitrant occupiers.”
It would be simplistic – worse, it would be factually wrong – to suggest that “the more things change the more they stay the same.” For Australian Jews since October 7, these past 14 months have been “the worst of times” and not, as I wrote in these pages, using those very words, about the Yom Kippur War’s aftermath 25 years ago.
Yes, I know that antisemitism has surged to unprecedented levels around the world since October 7. In that hardly comforting sense, Australia’s Jews are not alone. I can agree that other Jewish communities, especially in Europe, face far more depressing and uncertain futures. And I can also agree with the American Jewish writer, Bari Weiss, and so many others who have suggested that it was probably a delusion to imagine that Jews in the Western democracies could go on as if “immune from history” and antisemitism. “It is a moment,” Weiss has reminded American Jews, “in which the realities reserved for Jews of other times and other places are now, all of a sudden very much our own.”
But for all my life, I believed Australia was, well, “different”.
As the son of immigrants who came here nearly 100 years ago, and who really believed that Australia was the goldeneh medineh, the golden country, the haven, the true “peaceable kingdom”, I know those were articles of faith for so many Australian Jews.
As a Jew born in Australia, educated here, and with Australian children and grandchildren; as someone widely involved in this country’s public life and in community service for six decades; and as a lifelong Zionist since my youth movement days, it has been a profound sadness to see and experience what has happened here.
But then I remember where I was on October 7. In a hotel in Tel Aviv when the sirens began sounding, as we were encouraged to go the air-raid shelters on the 17th floor. With my family, we had come to Israel for a family celebration. That Shabbat Simchat Torah morning all celebration was forgotten.
In the week that followed, while my wife and I stayed on, I wrote to a friend in Australia as follows: “What a terrible, heartbreaking, soul-destroying time to be here. But what a privilege to be with the heroic people of Israel. They will fight back in their righteous anger. They shall overcome. We Australian Jews, and all Australians who care about freedom and value life, shall overcome.”
This is the hope, despite all that’s happened, that will sustain Australia’s Jews for the next 50 years and beyond.
Nationally renowned Australian journalist, writer and commentator Sam Lipski served as founding editor of the Australia/Israel Review from 1974 to 1982.
Tags: AIJAC, Australia, Australian Jewish Community, Israel