Australia/Israel Review

With antisemitism on the rise in Australia since October 7, 2023, many of those who oppose the right of the Jewish state to exist have been seizing any opportunity to carry out their propaganda war on Israel, often by ignoring facts and promoting lies.

One telling example is the reaction to the Dural caravan hoax. On Jan. 19, police found a caravan in the town of Dural, NSW filled with explosive materials, an antisemitic document and a list of possible targets within the local Jewish community. The incident was initially labelled by NSW Premier Chris Minns as “terrorism”. It was later revealed by police that it was a hoax plot by criminal gangs, with no intention to carry out an actual terror attack. Instead, the intent was to trade information about the explosive caravan for favourable plea bargains, as well as to divert police resources.

The same gangs were also behind a series of other antisemitic incidents in the state, carried out for the same purpose – though it is notable that the reputed head of the gang in question, Sayit Erhan Akca (who is laying low overseas), has made antisemitic social media posts in the past.

 Australia’s Jewish leaders have stressed that the caravan threat being a hoax does not diminish the crisis of antisemitism on our shores, or the loss of safety and security experienced by the local Jewish community.

Yet, as AIJAC’s Bren Carlill noted in last month’s edition, a Greens candidate used the hoax to flip the narrative against Jews, implying that the caravan was an example of “Zionists” lying to justify killing.

The Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN) was also quick to attack leading politicians and “pro-Israel organisations [who] rushed to politically motivated conclusions, implying connections between these fabricated incidents and the movement for justice for Palestine, as well as those protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza.”

Others in Australia’s anti-Israel camp jumped on the hoax wagon to use the Dural incident as a platform for spreading antisemitic tropes and other lies. For example, activist Tom Tanuki argued (April 21) in Independent Australia that the incident proved that there was no genuine antisemitism problem in Australia and both Labor and the Coalition were complicit in hiding the truth about what happened for political reasons. Worse, according to Tanuki, “Both mainstream political parties essentially co-signed [ECAJ co-CEO Alex] Ryvchin’s fascist policy recommendations by attending the Sky News event” (referring to that news channel’s Antisemitism Summit held in February).

“Liberal and Labor were both so eager to seize on a narrative about the insidious rise of unchecked antisemitism in this country that they took whatever bullshit was fed to them and used it,” said Tanuki.

Tanuki suggested that the major political parties used the hoax for their ‘evil’ legal steps against antisemitism and extremism despite somehow knowing in advance that the Dural incident was fake. “The drug dealer [behind the caravan hoax] gave them what they were evidently desperate for, and they used what they were given to dismantle protest rights and threaten civil liberties, despite being highly likely to have known the circumstances fed to them would soon be discredited.”

Yet Tanuki’s fantasies were small fish compared to the whale-sized examples of insanity featured in the Australian Muslim Times (AMUST) – a media outlet with a long and ugly record of promoting extremism, antisemitism and conspiracies for decades, as documented in these pages previously.

In his piece, “How Australian politicians and media were duped by criminal elements in a manufactured anti-Semitism crisis” (March 15), regular AMUST columnist Mohamed Ainullah openly advanced a baseless conspiracy theory that, contrary to what the police said about criminal gangs, “possibly Israeli intelligence [is behind the hoax] to further garner support for Israel.”

Without presenting any proof for his claims, Ainullah noted that “While no definitive foreign entity has been named, speculation has turned towards Israeli intelligence or affiliated networks. Historically, intelligence agencies have been known to engage in covert operations to sway public opinion and policy. If Israeli operatives were indeed involved, the motivation could have been to push Australia towards harsher legislation under the guise of protecting Jewish communities while also deepening political alignments beneficial to Israel.”

Ainullah finished his ‘analysis’ with a warning that “The real threat is not just terrorism – but the deliberate engineering of crises to serve hidden agendas.”

AMUST: Israel “plays double” with Nazis

Also entering the fray was Bilal Cleland, a regular contributor to the publication – and a serial Israel-hater who cynically claimed in the past that “Muslims are not and have never been anti-semitic” despite himself spreading blatantly antisemitic tropes. In his “Zionists’ alliance with Nazis and White Supremacists” (March 29), Cleland mentioned a few cases where former Nazi officers were recruited post-WWII to work for Israeli intelligence, such as Walter Rauff – who very briefly worked for Israel whilst in Syria – and Otto Skorzeny, who was recruited for the Israeli Mossad in the 1960s for a short period. Cleland listed those isolated cases as “proof” that “This sort of hand-holding between the Zionist movement and some very questionable characters is not new”, and “While many Jewish organisations hunted down war criminals for decades, we find Israel playing double [games].” In fact, double agents and unsavoury bedfellows are not at all an unusual phenomenon in the fickle world of espionage, but a few examples of briefly working with former low-level Nazis in no way proves Israel has aligned itself with the Nazis, as Cleland argued.

A later AMUST piece by Cleland, “The American West to Gaza: Devastation and Dispossession” (April 26), was another example of how Cleland tries to distort history in service of his hateful agenda.

Out of a population of more than 10 million Israelis as of 2025, fewer than 150,000 people immigrated to Israel from the US since 1948. Yet, Cleland attributed to this small group an almost mystical power, stating that “The Israelis, many of whom come from the USA, appear to have brought with them the colonial prejudices of their homeland.” Zionists, said Cleland, are the same as the Europeans who colonised the American continent since the 16th century because “All European colonists… like the Zionist colonists of Israel, lacked respect for the indigenous inhabitants of the land.”

Later in the article, Cleland accused Israel’s Prime Minister of “adopting” the model of the mistreatment and massacres of native Americans by the hand of the Europeans. “We should consider whether the pattern of the American genocide, provided the blueprint for Netanyahu,” says Cleland.

After claiming that Adolf Hitler was influenced by what happened in the US to Native Americans, Cleland writes, “We see in the opening of the American West, lebensraum to the East, and now the eradication of Palestinians, colonial expansion, dispossession of the indigenous inhabitants followed by genocide as part of a pattern.”

Justifying hate towards Jews who support Israel

The icing on the AMUST cake is served in a piece titled “When silence becomes complicity: On Zionism, fear, and speaking the unspeakable” by Shayne Chester (April 26). The main theme of the author is that “Anti-Semitism has been monetised, criminalised, and weaponised. This isn’t a fringe conspiracy theory. It is a calculated strategy – one that has proven effective in silencing criticism of Israel, chilling political debate, and protecting a settler-colonial state as it commits atrocities in real time.”

Exemplifying ignorance about Zionism, Chester muses that “To ask why so many Jews support Zionism, even in its most militarised and supremacist forms, is labelled hate.”

And within a sentence, antisemitism pops up in some of its most noticeable forms – such as comparing Israel to the Nazis, and pinning all real and perceived actions and policies of Israel’s government on “the Jews”. However, Chester insists that doing so “is not hate. That is accountability. To say it is antisemitic to ask why someone supports ethnic cleansing is like saying it is Teutophobic [Anti-German sentiment] to criticise Nazis… Zionism is not Judaism.”

The article accuses Jews backing Israel in its war in Gaza, ignited by Hamas’ murderous attack on October 7, 2023, of being complicit in the most heinous crimes.

“[W]ho are the Jews supporting the starvation of children, the rape and torture of detainees, the demolition of homes over people’s heads? How did they come to believe that Jewish safety depends on Palestinian erasure?”

Chester points fingers at prominent Australian Jewish figures like Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-CEO Alex Ryvchin, “the Leiblers” (meaning the prominent Jewish Australian Zionist family of Mark, Jeremy and others) and AIJAC’s own Executive Director Colin Rubenstein for “play[ing] their part [in supporting Israel’s aforementioned ‘crimes’]. Their media saturation campaigns repeated one line: ‘My people [the Jews] are afraid.’”

Yet it is simply a fact that most Jewish people in Australia are worried, and with good reason. Following the Hamas terror attack on October 7, they are facing an unprecedented wave of antisemitism, vitriol and hate. Revelations that one apparently particularly scary antisemitic plot was a hoax do nothing to undermine this reality. Moreover, AMUST is playing its part in feeding this avalanche of extremism and radicalisation – as it has done for many years.

Dr Ran Porat is an AIJAC Research Associate. He is also a Research Associate at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University and a Research Fellow at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at the Reichman University in Herzliya.