Former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr

Go to Part 1.
Go to Part 2.
Go to Part 3.
Go to Part 4.

Bob Carr — Friend then Exasperated Foe of the Israel Lobby

In his memoir, Run for Your Life, published in 2018, former foreign minister Bob Carr outlined his journey of disillusionment with Israel and with its supporters in Australia. Carr’s first clash with Rubinstein and Leibler’s AIJAC was in 2003 when Sydney University’s Peace Foundation awarded its annual Sydney Peace Prize to veteran Palestinian activist and politician Hanan Ashwari, citing her commitment to human rights and the peace process in the Middle East. Rubinstein, outraged at the decision, claimed Ashwari was “an apologist for violence and terrorism,” and called on Carr (then Premier of New South Wales) to refuse to present the prize to Ashwari. Carr refused.

The City of Sydney, one of the sponsors of the prize, which came under fire from AIJAC, suddenly announced it would boycott the ceremony. Professor Stuart Rees, head of the Sydney Peace Foundation, was subjected to “severe pressure” including abusive phone calls over the Ashwari decision. Rees noted that threats were made to “our supporters to the effect that their interests might be affected if they pursue their association with the peace prize.”[1] Based on his experience as editor of The Age, Gawenda has “no doubt Rees and Carr were subjected to abusive phone calls from individuals who see anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel everywhere.”

Looking back on the Ashwari episode, Leibler regards the AIJAC’s militant approach that resulted in alienating the likes of Carr (hitherto a strong supporter of Jews and Israel) as a strategic mistake. He claims that, if AIJAC had its time again, it would not have been so concerned about Ashwari’s Peace Prize. “It was not that important. Sometimes, we have to know when silence is best. I think I have certainly learnt not to react to everything. And I think I have learnt to say things in a more measured way.”[2] When asked whether AIJAC’s actions turned friends (like Carr) into enemies, Leibler claimed “Making us responsible for our enemies is to blame Jews for anti-Semitism. I utterly reject that.”[3]

Recalling the hysterical reaction of organized Jewry to his presenting the Sydney Peace Prize to Ashwari in 2003, Carr writes:

The storm of criticism that then occurred was a shock … and an insight. Soon after my participation was announced, Jewish leaders launched an international campaign to force me to withdraw from the award. There were threats of funding being withdrawn from the University. … Letters of protest were dispatched about the awards going to a Palestinian, switchboards were set aflame with indignation.[4]

This incident underscored for Carr the power of the Israel Lobby in Australia to distort and control Australian foreign policy. Particularly egregious, in Carr’s view, was the influence exerted by the people who ran AIJAC — Leibler and Rubinstein in particular. Of the Lobby, Carr wrote:

The hold of the Israel Lobby over Australian politicians is based on two facts. First, the donations to political parties from the Jewish community leadership; second, paid trips to Israel extended to every Member of Parliament and journalists [i.e, Rambam Fellowships]. From the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) over 700 trips alone. … No other community, treats politicians as their poodles.[5]

One of those treated as a poodle, Carr implies, was Prime Minister Gillard, in whose Cabinet he served as Foreign Minister. Eight months after his appointment to this position, in November 2012, his relationship with Gillard became strained over a looming United Nations vote on a resolution to grant non-member status to Palestine. Carr supported voting in favor of the resolution, while Gillard was “adamant that Australia should vote against it.”[6] Carr lobbied colleagues in favor of the resolution and in the end, with a significant bloc of Labor MPs sympathetic to Carr’s stance, Gillard decided Australia would abstain from voting on the resolution.

Carr was convinced that Bruce Wolpe, Gillard’s Court Jew and “liaison with the Jewish community,” was Leibler’s spy in the Prime Minister’s Office. Carr shared this view with Leibler at a meeting at the ABL offices in Melbourne. According Leibler, Carr spent an hour “ranting and raving and yelling to the point that it could be heard all over the office.” Wolpe’s name got several mentions. Afterwards, “the two men hardly spoke to each other again and avoided each other as much as possible, such was the level of distrust between them.”[7]

Julia Gillard with Bruce Wolpe, “Leibler’s spy in the Prime Minister’s office”

In Diary of a Foreign Minister, published in 2014, Carr describes how the Israel Lobby made his life hell whenever he wanted to issue a statement on any issue involving Israel. He found it exasperating that he couldn’t even issue a “routine expression of concern about the spread of settlements” without aggressive push back from the Lobby. As she had done to Rudd when he was Foreign Minister, Gillard vetted — and sometimes vetoed — his statements on Israel and the Palestinians. Carr notes that some of his proposed statements “merely repeated government policy, for instance that the settlements were obstacles to peace.”[8] Gillard expressed surprise at Carr’s exasperation on these issues when surely Carr “must have known of the issues she had with Rudd about Middle East policy and that she was on good terms with Leibler.”[9]

Indeed, Carr knew at the time of his appointment that Gillard had been captured by organized Jewry. Critical to this capture was when, in 2001, while Shadow Health Minister, Gillard “first went to Israel in a group of Labor and Liberal politicians chosen for AIJAC’s Rambam Israel Fellowship.” The effect of this trip on Gillard was far from unique, with Carr noting how “the program has produced scores of politicians and journalists who are poodles of AIJAC.”[10] Due to such influence, both Rudd and Carr came to believe that the Israel Lobby was a malign force that “distorted Australia’s policies on the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and turned many politicians and journalists into the Lobby’s puppets, or, to use Carr’s word, ‘poodles.’”[11]

To gauge the propagandistic effectiveness of Rambam Fellowships, “participants are asked to provide feedback of their experience. Some are invited to a function to talk about what they saw, whom they spoke to, and the impact the visit had on them.”[12] Gillard first met Leibler at one of these debriefing sessions. Over subsequent years, “Leibler’s relationship with Gillard continued to grow. After Australia’s abstention in the vote in the United Nations, the two met. Gillard had come to appreciate Leibler’s keen sense of what was happening in politics and she appreciated his encouragement and concern for her.”[13] When asked whether she thought AIJAC, and Leibler in particular, were powerful, Gillard was unequivocal:

Look, yes in the sense that the Jewish community in Australia — the Melbourne community in particular, because I know it best — is well connected. Put it another way, the community has done a good job over many years of developing deep connections across both side of Australian politics. They therefore have the networks and the access to put a particular point of view.[14] 

In 2010, Gillard appointed Leibler to co-chair her Expert Panel on Constitutional Recognition of Indigenous Australians. In 2017 a proposal from the Expert Panel recommended that an Aboriginal advisory body be included in the Australian Constitution. Aboriginal activist Marcia Langton claimed that Leibler told her “that his own history, being Jewish, gave him a great understanding of the genocide of the indigenous people and you know, there’s no question that it did.”[15]

Leibler and the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison Governments

The power of AIJAC has not waned since Gillard’s tenure as Prime Minister. This reality is clear to Gawenda who notes the fact that “a meeting  between Prime Minister Scott Morrison and AIJAC’s three most senior leaders could be arranged not long after Morrison replaced Malcolm Turnbull as leader of the Australian government [in 2018] is evidence of an organization at the height of its influence.”[16] These leaders were Leibler, Rubinstein and Solomon Lew, the billionaire retailer and long-time funder of AIJAC. Rubinstein had proposed the meeting and was surprised how quickly Morrison responded. For Gawenda, Morrison’s swift response was “not really surprising.”

Although Leibler did not know Morrison well, he had met him several times when Morrison was Treasurer, and Leibler was close to Josh Frydenberg, the Liberal Party’s Deputy Leader and newly elected federal Treasurer, whom he had known for 20 years or more, since Frydenberg had worked as an advisor to John Howard. By the time Leibler and the delegation met with Morrison, Frydenberg had become the most senior Jewish politician in Australian history. There is little doubt that Frydenberg had briefed Morrison about a possible meeting with the AIJAC people. What’s more, Morrison would have been aware of Leibler’s connections in Canberra, probably remembering that his predecessor as Prime Minister [Malcolm Turnbull] had chosen Leibler to MC at the official lunch for Benjamin Netanyahu in Sydney in February 2017.[17]

The AIJAC leaders took a list of demands to the meeting with Morrison. Their top priority was for Australia to officially abandon its previous support for the Iran nuclear deal (a purely symbolic gesture given Australia was not a party to that agreement). The second priority was for Australia to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Three days after the meeting, Morrison announced that the government was examining the possibility of moving the Australian embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. At the media conference Morrison refused to say whether he had been briefed by Foreign Affairs or by his own department on the consequences of the embassy move. Clearly, the Morrison acted purely at the urging of the AIJAC triumvirate and his deputy leader Frydenberg “who made it clear that he favored its move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.” Frydenberg said he “would not comment on any meeting he might have had with the Prime Minister” in relation to this issue.[18] Before the 2019 federal election, Morrison announced his government was committed to moving the Australian embassy to West Jerusalem when the time was right.

Australia’s current Treasurer Josh Frydenberg (front left)

Gawenda observes there “is little doubt that Leibler and AIJAC push on open doors when it comes to having access to the Prime Minister and senior ministers in his government.” This has been the case for many years now: at an AIJAC function held at the offices of ABL in 2013, then Prime Minister Tony Abbott was asked what his position was on some aspect of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. “Oh, my position is whatever Mark and Colin’s position is,” he answered.[19]

Chair of the United Jewish Appeal

By the early 1990s, Isi and Mark Leibler had become senior leaders not only of Australian Jewry, but also in the organizations of world Jewry. Isi had served numerous terms as President of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and was co-chairman of the World Jewish Congress. Mark had been president of Zionist Federation of Australia for a decade, and was a Jewish leader with “unmatched political contacts in Canberra and a record of getting things done.” By the late 1990s, in addition to his chairmanship of AIJAC, he was president of the United Jewish Appeal.

The United Jewish Appeal determines how money raised in diaspora communities will be spent on projects in Israel and, increasingly, in diaspora Jewish communities, especially the six-million-strong community in the United States. For more than 25 years, Leibler has flown to Israel for meetings of Keren Hayesod, the Israel-based institution that governs United Israel Appeal (UIA) organizations that operate worldwide except in the United States, and of the Jewish Agency for Israel. The Jewish Agency, with an annual budget of around $US400 million (mainly raised by American Jewish organizations) is the most financially powerful Jewish organization in the world.

Increasingly, it funds “projects in the diaspora that are designed to bolster Jewish identity and connection to Israel in communities where assimilation looms large and where there is evidence of weakening ties to Israel. It funds the Birthright programs that send young Jews on organized tours to Israel and around 1,800 shlichim, the young Israeli emissaries sent to diaspora communities to work in schools, universities and Zionist youth groups in order to promote the migration of young Jews to Israel. The Jewish Agency also funds diaspora Zionist organizations such as ZFA.[20]

In Leibler’s six years as President of the United Jewish Appeal from 1995 to 2001, its Australian affiliates raised around $200 million. In some years they sent more money to Karen Hayesod than equivalents in Canada (which has a Jewish population three times larger than Australia) and more than any Jewish community in Europe (including France). These fundraising results gave Leibler significant influence and power in international Zionist organizations.

Under Australian law, donations to charities that run programs in developing nations were tax-deductible. Despite the fact Israel is a wealthy country, Leibler “with his expertise in tax law, managed to win an exemption for the UIA.” UIA’s tax-deductible status was threaten in 1998 when Israel was officially classified as a First World country. In response:

Leibler went to see [then] Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and told him that despite Israel’s First-World status, the funds raised by the UIA were going to refugee resettlement in Israel and to Jews living in difficult circumstances in Eastern Europe, Ethiopia and the Balkans. Downer was convinced and shepherded through amendments to the Income Tax Assessment Act that allowed UIA to retain its tax deductibility and, therefore, its position as the world’s biggest fundraiser for Israel outside the United States. This achievement helped ensure Leibler’s standing as one of the world’s outstanding Zionist leaders.[21] 

Leibler’s networking and connections with senior Australian and Israeli politicians, together with the very large donations of wealthy Australian Jews to the UIA, gave him great clout in world Jewry. It has long been clear to Leibler that “there would never be a mass Aliyah from the prosperous and increasingly assimilated Jewish communities of the West,” and that “donating to Israel was a way to express support and even love for the country.”[22]

Leibler’s successor as chairman of the Jewish Agency, Natan Sharanksy, who held the position from 2009 to 2018, changed Leibler’s strategic focus, shifting away from projects in Israel to “projects that strengthened Jewish identity, particularly in the United States,” which become a “first-order priority” for the Agency.[23]  Sharansky’s successor, former Israeli politician, Isaac Herzog, reaffirmed this focus on the “American Jewish community, so large and powerful, but so vulnerable, at least in terms of Jewish continuity.”[24] Regarding Australian Jewry, by contrast, Herzog noted there was “no other community like it in the world. So united, so strongly Zionist.”[25]

Contemporary Demographics of Australian Jewry

Australian Jews are overwhelming middle to upper class, with surveys finding 78 per cent of Australian Jews were “comfortable or better.” Around one-in-five Australian Jews had an annual personal income of $104,000 or more, compared to 7 per cent of the general population. Australian Jews mostly live in the middle-class or upper-middle-class suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney. The socioeconomic profile of Australian Jews is reflected in voting patterns. Around half vote for the Liberal Party, as opposed to the Labor and other minor parties. The Liberal Party gives them the neo-liberal economic policies (including tax cuts) that benefit them financially, while also being more enthusiastically pro-Zionist than the Labor Party. The Liberal Party is also fully on board with the mass immigration and multiculturalism that comprise the central pillars of the Jewish ethno-political strategy for the West. Disputes within Australian Jewry over the last several decades (many involving Isi Leibler) have not been about this agenda, according to Gawenda, “but about tactics and personal status, about who speaks for the community and, above all, about who has access to prime ministers and senior government ministers.”[26]

While equally wealthy, American Jewry, a community three or four generations older than Australian Jewry, is more assimilated with higher rates of intermarriage — a trend which, according to Gawenda, threatens the world’s largest Jewish community. The intermarriage rate in Australia is less than half that of the United States, with rates among Orthodox Jews close to zero.

This trend has been bolstered over the last few decades by the arrival, since the end of apartheid, of over 15,000 South African Jews in Australia. These Jews “are the world’s most educated émigrés, 70.8 per cent at tertiary level, the most well-heeled, the most cosmopolitan in the way they travel, the only migrant group capable of spending time and money coming on visits before selecting their relocation spots.”[27] They are also among the most ethnocentric Jews in the world, with Tatz noting how their mentality is encapsulated in “daily pontification about the Jewish-goyishe divide” and in his grandfather’s refrain that “The worst of ours are better than the best of theirs.”[28] Even other Australian Jews have been taken aback by the insularity of these newcomers, how “socially, spatially, culturally, religiously, they huddle in enclaves of their own creation.” “Marrying out” for these intensely parochial Jews means marrying a non-South African Jewish spouse.

Tatz ascribes this hyper-ethnocentric mentality to the fact “the shtetl remains engraved in their immigrant souls.” From the time of the mass Jewish exodus from Lithuania to South Africa in the early twentieth century, these Jews were, he notes, “saturated” with the notion of separateness. He also attributes their extreme ingroup preference to “the specter of anti-Semitism, the dark shadow of rejection by an anti-Semitic and intolerant world.” It is only among themselves, he maintains, that they can “relax at least for a while — laugh, cry, be brash, busy, creative, funny and not worry about what the goyim think.”[29] The reputation of South African Jews in Australia took a significant hit in 2009 when the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Barry Tannenbaum, a South African Jewish immigrant, had scammed investors out of $1.5 billion in a Ponzi scheme that was likened to Bernie Madoff’s crime in the United States.[30]

Given this infusion of South African Jews, and the high fertility rates of existing groups of Orthodox Jews, Markus predicts the proportion of Australian Jews “who are ultra-Orthodox or Modern Orthodox will increase, and the community might become even more conservative.”[31] Unlike in America, Reform Jews, even today, represent only a small minority of Australia’s Jewish population.

Preventing his own children and grandchildren from marrying non-Jews was a first order priority for Mark Leibler, and Gawenda notes “how important it was for him that his children, and now his grandchildren, married Jews. He can be pretty sure that his family, his children and grandchildren will be committed Jews, committed to their Judaism and to the sort of religious Zionism in which three generations of the Leibler family have played such as prominent role.”[32] Each of his children “have followed in their parents’ footsteps: each married a Jew; none has weakened his commitment to Zionism and to the continuity of the Jewish people; none has ever doubted that they would.”[33] Leibler’s son Yehuda has Australian, American and Israeli citizenship — but sees himself unequivocally as an Israeli. “When he thought about Australia,” notes Gawenda, “he thought about his family and the Jewish community. The fact that he was a citizen of Australia, or of America, did not mean much to him.”[34]

The Leibler Dynasty Continues

In 2018, Mark Leibler’s son Jeremy, a partner at ABL, was elected president of the Zionist Federation of Australia. Meanwhile Colin Rubinstein’s son, Paul, ABL’s managing partner in Sydney, is the New South Wales chairman of AIJAC and is touted as a likely successor to Mark Leibler as AIJAC’s national chairman. Gawenda claims the next generation of Jewish leaders will face daunting challenges which include “the rise of anti-Semitism around the world, including in Australia.”[35]

Prime Minister Scott Morrison being presented with the Jerusalem Prize by Jeremy Leibler (current president of the Zionist Federation of Australia)

Mark Leibler is more sanguine than his brother Isi about the future of Jews in the diaspora. Nevertheless, he thinks Jews are far less safe in some diaspora communities, including the United States, than he thought possible a decade or two ago:

Anti-Semitism has been on the increase for three decades and has accelerated in the past few years. Who could imagine even a few years ago that a major party in Britain would be led by an anti-Semite or, at least, by someone who has made numerous anti-Semitic remarks and has tolerated the growing number of anti-Semites in his party? I still can’t believe it, that Jeremy Corbyn was the leader of the British Labor Party and could well have been Prime Minister. … But as far as grassroots anti-Semitism is concerned, it’s probably worse in France than in England. In America, there has undoubtedly been an alarming increase in violent extreme anti-Semitism from the left and right. What is happening there was unimaginable a few years ago.[36]

As a rabid Zionist, Leibler is particularly concerned about growing anti-Zionism on university campuses in the United States. He insists this “so-called anti-Zionism invariably traffics in anti-Semitic canards about the money power of Jews for instance.” The irony of his making these remarks as the leader of Australia’s wealthiest, most politically well-connected and powerful ethnic group seems to have escaped Leibler. Leibler believes Islamist anti-Semitism, encouraged and supported by the far left, poses a bigger threat to Australian Jews than right-wing anti-Semites.

Mark Leibler’s brother Isi had also expressed concern at the growing threat of Islamist anti-Semitism. In an article for the Jerusalem Post entitled “European Meltdown Threatens Jews,” he lamented the negative impact of large-scale Muslim immigration to Europe on Jewish communities there. He notes that: “With the indigenous population shrinking and the Muslim birthrate alarmingly high, unless the flow of migrants is stemmed, there is every possibility that by the end of the century the foundations of European civilization will be destroyed.” Through “dramatically destabilizing the social cohesion and security of countries harboring them,” Muslim migrants have led to Diaspora Jewish communities “suffering severe trauma as they experience the erosion of the acceptance and security they have enjoyed over the past half-century.” What makes this all the more concerning for the elder Leibler is the fact this influx of Muslims is, to a great extent, the direct result of Jewish ethnic activism.

Yet ironically, many liberal Jews are at the forefront of campaigns to open the door to widespread immigration of Muslim “refugees” and even make ridiculous bleeding-heart analogies to the plight of Jews during the Holocaust. In so doing, they are facilitating the entry of hordes of embittered anti-Semites who have been brought up to consider Jews as the “offspring of apes and pigs.”

For Leibler, flooding Europe with these “hordes” is regrettable, not primarily because, if the trend continues, “by the end of the century the foundations of European civilization will be destroyed,” but because the end result will be that Jews in Europe are increasingly forced to “live in societies where horrific terrorist attacks against their schools, synagogues, museums and supermarkets have necessitated military or armed guards to provide security.”

Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott with Isi Leibler

The mass importation of Muslims into Europe also presents a danger to Jews, according to Isi Leibler, in fueling the rise of the far-right. He notes that activist Jews, in advocating and facilitating the influx of Muslims into Europe, inevitably “enrage many of their neighbors who loathe these ‘refugees’ and fear that this flood of immigration will destroy their way of life.” The result has been “the meteoric rise of radical right-wing movements in all European countries — Jobbik in Hungary and the Golden Dawn in Greece [which] are outright anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi movements.” Despite nationalist leaders like Marine Le Pen having “vigorously condemned and disassociated her party from its former anti-Semitism,” Leibler insists the rank and file members of parties like the National Front that notionally “support Israel” remain “unreconstructed traditional anti-Semites.”

Leibler is part of the distinct (though growing) minority of activist Jews who regard the Jewish strategy of transforming Europe through mass Muslim immigration as “bad for the Jews.” In 2010 he voiced his strong support for non-White immigration and multiculturalism for Australia while rejecting these policies for Israel.  He thus accepts it to be in the interests of Jews to dilute and weaken the identity of the majority European-derived nations in which many live. For Leibler, however, this non-White diversification strategy for is only good for Jews providing “hordes of embittered anti-Semites” from Muslim nations aren’t the primary means of achieving it.

A silver lining of the rapidly-accelerating destruction of Europe for Isi Leibler is that, unlike vulnerable Europeans, Jews can always flee to an ethnically-homogeneous “Jewish state” that provides “a haven for all Jews.” As an ultra-Zionist he naturally hopes that, as European societies become increasingly violence-plagued, dysfunctional and inhospitable to Jews, “many will leave and join us in Israel and participate in the historic renaissance of our people.”[37] As a result of Jewish activism, millions of White people are also increasingly fearful of their or their children’s future. Unlike Jews, however, they don’t have the option of fleeing to the relative safety of an ethnostate.

Brenton Sanderson is the author of Battle Lines: Essays on Western Culture, Jewish Influence and Anti-Semitism, available here and here.

---

[1] Michael Gawenda, The Powerbroker: Mark Leibler, An Australian Jewish Life (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2020), 259.

[2] Ibid., 260.

[3] Ibid., 260.

[4] Bob Carr, Run For Your Life (Melbourne: MUP, 2018), 177.

[5] Ibid., 178.

[6] Gawenda, The Powerbroker, 279.

[7] Ibid., 280.

[8] Bob Carr, Diary of a Foreign Minister (Sydney: NewSouth, 2014), 388.

[9] Gawenda, The Powerbroker, 283-84.

[10] Ibid., 285.

[11] Ibid., 3.

[12] Ibid., 285.

[13] Ibid., 286.

[14] Ibid., 286.

[15] Ibid., 208.

[16] Ibid., 335.

[17] Ibid., 336-37.

[18] Ibid., 338.

[19] Ibid., 341.

[20] Ibid., 310-11.

[21] Ibid., 313.

[22] Ibid., 316; 315.

[23] Ibid., 317.

[24] Ibid., 320.

[25] Ibid., 319.

[26] Ibid., 75-76.

[27] Colin Tatz, Human Rights and Human Wrongs: A Life Confronting Racism (Clayton, Victoria; Monash University Publishing, 2015), 350.

[28] Ibid., 16.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Nick O’Malley & Thomas Graham, “Exposed: the Sydney man accused of $1.5 billion scam, The Sydney Morning Herald, June 13, 2009. https://www.smh.com.au/national/exposed-the-sydney-man-accused-of-15-billion-scam-20090612-c640.html

[31] Gawenda, The Powerbroker, 329.

[32] Ibid., 334.

[33] Ibid., 360.

[34] Ibid., 352.

[35] Ibid., 335.

[36] Ibid., 356-57.

[37] Isi Leibler, “European meltdown threatens Jews,” The Jerusalem Post, December 20, 2026. https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/European-meltdown-threatens-Jews-476004

Mark Leibler in the early 1990s

Go to Part 1.
Go to Part 2.

Having Their Cake and Eating It Too – The Dual Citizenship Campaign

By the mid-1980s Mark Leibler had established the Zionist Federation of Australia as “a political lobbying powerhouse.” The organization was centrally involving in ensuring 7,000 Australian Jews who had made Aliyah to Israel retained their Australian citizenship. Under the Citizenship Act, Australians could not become citizens of another country without giving up their Australian citizenship, as Rupert Murdoch had done to become an American citizen. Under Israel’s Law of Return, Jews who settled in Israel automatically became Israeli citizens – meaning they had implicitly renounced their Australian citizenship. This was not enforced by Australian authorities prior to 1986. That year, however, the Labor government introduced legislation to amend the Citizenship Act to clarify the prohibition on dual citizenship. The bill prompted Immigration Department officials to rule that those who had settled In Israel before 1981 and become Israeli citizens would have their Australian citizenship revoked and passports cancelled. So too would Australian Jews who had arrived after 1981 and been granted permanent residency by Israel.

Among Australian Jews there was outrage and panic, and the “ZFA was inundated with demands for help. Contrary to what Australian immigration officials had always told them, not only would adult Australians in Israel lose their citizenship, but so too would their children who had been born in Israel.”[1] These Jews, noted Gawenda, who Leibler and the ZFA regarded as a Zionist success story, wanted to have their cake and eat it too. This situation might have “raised the old charge of dual loyalties, a long-standing anti-Semitic trope in which Jews are a sort of fifth column, with greater loyalty to their fellow Jews than to the country in which they live and are citizens. Here were Jews committed to Israel, living and raising children there, even serving in the Israeli army, and yet determined to hang on to their Australian citizenship.”[2]

Leibler coordinated an intensive lobbying campaign to have Jews granted a special exemption to the dual citizenship laws. A “sense of urgency” gripped Leibler during this campaign; he “was a man possessed, furiously working on this issue, and sometimes furious when he didn’t get his way, as, for instance, when an Immigration Department official refused to see the logic and force of the case Leibler was putting to him.”[3] In his notes, Leibler recalled that “The conversation was very heated and I was quite abusive.” Leibler was adamant “this problem would have to be resolved even if it meant I had to go and see the Prime Minister for the second time that day.” Leibler had met with Bob Hawke earlier that day as part of a delegation organized by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.

Leibler insisted on seeing [then immigration minister] Chris Hurford who “interrupted a lengthy meeting with a rather important lobby to see me.”[4] Hurford caved in to Leibler’s demands/threats and, in April 1986, with Opposition support, announced amendments to the government’s proposed citizenship legislation that restored the citizenship of all the Australian Jews living in Israel. Leibler’s victory was complete.[5] In 2002, the Howard government made dual citizenship legal, “in recognition of Australia’s diversity and multiculturalism.”[6]

Courting Paul Keating and John Howard

When Paul Keating successfully challenged Prime Minister Hawke for the leadership of the Labor Party in 1991, there was consternation among the ranks of Jewish activist organizations. At the time “there was a wave of grief through some sections of the Jewish community at Hawke’s departure,” and Jewish leaders “effusively praised the former prime minister.” Bob Hawke was “particularly close to the Jewish community” and, in particular, to influential Jews like Isi Leibler, multicultural activist Walter Lippmann, and wealthy businessmen like Eddie Kornhauser and Peter Abeles. All “had direct access to the prime minister.”[7] Bronwyn Hinz noted the far-reaching social policy implications of Walter Lippmann’s close association with Hawke:

In the 1980s, the ECCV [Ethnic Communities Council of Victoria] worked closely with Prime Minister Bob Hawke, a personal friend of ECCV founding Chairperson Walter Lippmann. As the representative of Melbourne’s most ethnically diverse electorate, Hawke was especially cognizant of the value of close connections with the peak council, its activists and member groups, accepting most invitations to their functions, and providing Lippmann and other ECCV activists with direct access to his office. In the first year of the Hawke government, the ECCV’s lobbying culminated in the reduction of citizenship waiting period to two years, the replacement of the term alien with “non‐citizen” in the 1983 Migration Act, and an increase of the refugee intake.[8] 

Leslie Caplan, president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, lamented Hawke’s political demise, describing him as a man of “extraordinary ability, intellect, compassion and charm who had a special relationship with the Jewish community.” Mark Leibler, then president of the ZFA, likewise extolled Hawke as “a giant among men, a great prime minister, a close friend of the Jewish people and a constant supporter of the security and integrity of Israel.”[9]  While making this public statement, he had been busy behind the scenes courting Hawke’s successor. After Paul Keating’s first unsuccessful challenge to Hawke, Leibler had sent him the following handwritten letter:

Dear Paul,

Strange isn’t it that the loser on the votes emerges looking very much the winner in all other respects, But then perhaps not surprising at all!

Congratulations on the performance. I look forward in anticipation to the Second Act – its final and successful completion.

Wish you much luck

With best wishes

One of your many admirers

Mark

Keating wrote back, thanking Leibler for his note, and for his “words of encouragement and support.”[10] Sniffing the changing political winds, Leibler carefully positioned himself as Keating’s Court Jew. Keating’s defeat of Hawke left the field open for Mark Leibler to assume a position hitherto occupied by other Jewish leaders like his brother Isi, “Almost all of whom had developed a relationship with Hawke, whom they considered the community’s and Israel’s greatest friend in the Labor government.” Given Isi’s particularly close relationship to Hawke, and the latter’s defeat “was particularly hard for Isi to handle” and “with Hawke gone his contacts in and access to the government were severely diminished. He had no real relationship with Keating, and developing one would be difficult, given his well-known closeness to Hawke. His brother Mark was really the only Jewish leader with a significant relationship with the new prime minister.”[11]

Former Prime Minister Paul Keating in the United States in 1993

In an article in the Australian Jewish News from the time of Keating’s successful challenge to Hawke, Leibler declared that he was confident that “In light of my contacts with Paul Keating over many years … there is no reason to believe that there will be any shifts in government policy which would be adverse to the interests and concerns of the Australian Jewish community.”[12] This signaled to other Jewish leaders, including his brother, that he was uniquely placed “to make the case to Keating on any issue that concerned the Jewish community.”[13]

One such issue emerged early in Keating’s tenure as Prime Minister. There was widespread concern, even alarm, among organized Jewry regarding Keating’s foreign minister Gareth Evans’ stance towards the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Gawenda notes that “Many Jews had been alarmed by the Scud missiles that Saddam Hussein had rained down on Israel during the Gulf War [in 1991] and by the sight of Israelis wearing gas masks out of fear that the missiles would be armed with poison gas.” The PLO had organized demonstrations in support of Saddam Hussein, and many Western nations had, as a result, cut contact with the PLO.

A year after the end of war, Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans decided the Australian government should restore contact with the PLO. Keating, who had little personal interest in the conflict between the Israel and the Palestinians, publicly supported this decision. A month after the announcement, Evans visited a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank and criticized the expansion of illegal settlements by the Israelis. Evans even expressed support for United Nations Resolution 194, passed at the end of the 1948 war, which called for the right of return of Palestinians who had fled or been forced out of their homes (i.e., ethnically cleansed) by the war. Mark Leibler was “enraged” at Evans’ stance, which, interpreted one way, could result in the return of all Palestinians and their descendants which “would have meant the end of Israel as a Jewish state.”[14] Hitherto, both major political parties in Australia had followed the United States position on the resolution: that it only allowed for a token number of Palestinians to return in the event of a peace settlements, thus preserving the Jewish demographic supermajority in Israel.

Leibler met Evans on his return to Australia and “according to people with knowledge of the meeting, Leibler and Evans exchanged views in a very robust fashion. Insults were exchanged.”[15] Jewish Labor MPs joined Leibler in attacking Evans, with former Whitlam and Hawke government minister Barry Cohen telling The Australian the foreign minister’s stance risked the loss of political donations from wealthy Jews, and that Australian Jewry had always been a source of ideological and financial support for the ALP, noting, “That [support] will be weakened whenever a government appears to be antagonistic towards the state of Israel.”[16] The bad optics of Cohen’s open threats troubled some Jews at the time, including Leibler. While fiercely critical of Evans, Leibler was adamant “Jewish leaders should not make any [public] threats about donations to political parties or threaten to urge the Jewish community to vote against the government because of its policies in the Middle East.”[17]

Leibler’s next gambit was to invite Keating to speak at the ZFA’s biennial conference in 1992. In his speech, while not repudiating Evans’ views, Keating focused on “the ALP’s historic commitment to Israel and emphasized his government’s unwavering commitment to Israel’s security.”[18] Shortly after Keating’s speech, Evans’ stance on Israel and the Palestinians suddenly became irrelevant. Yitzhak Rabin led the Israeli Labor Party to victory in the 1992 general election. Many senior Keating government figures had ties to the Israel’s Labor Party and personally knew Rabin and members of his government like Shimon Peres. The result was that “criticism of Israel’s settlement policies was significantly toned down.”  This was particularly so after the Oslo Accords between Rabin and Yasser Arafat were signed on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993.

Rabin was assassinated in November 1995 by Yigal Amir, a radical Zionist opposed to the Oslo process. Keating attended Rabin’s funeral and, three months later, was defeated in a landslide by John Howard at the 1996 election. Despite Keating’s defeat, Leibler continued to cultivate a close relationship with Keating. Meanwhile, Zionist activists in the United States and Australia were secretly happy to see Rabin disappear from the scene. As Gawenda notes:

Shortly after he was elected, Rabin told American Jewish leaders, including AIPAC officials, that they needed to modify their lobbying for Israel. That was code for his view that their lobbying was counter-productive and that Israel was perfectly capable of developing its own relations with Congress and the President without their interventions. Rabin’s message was a stunning repudiation of the work of AIPAC. An Israeli prime minister was telling the most influential Jewish lobby group – perhaps the most influential lobby group in Washington – to back off, that he did not need their help.[19] 

Following a meeting with Rabin in Israel, Isi Leibler had reported back to the Australian Jewish media that Rabin had asked him to inform Jewish organizations in Australia (including the ZFA) that they should “drop the quasi-diplomatic role they have adopted in Australian-Jewish affairs of state.”[20] Instead, government-to-government relations should be left to the Israeli embassy in Canberra, and Jewish organizations should focus on trade with Israel and fighting anti-Semitism. For Mark Leibler, Rabin’s remarks (as reported by his brother) “were a repudiation of his life’s work, of the years he had spent building up his political contacts in Canberra so that he could put the best case for Israel to whatever government was in power.”[21]

Paul Keating was ideologically predisposed to embrace the agendas of organized Jewry in Australia. A Cultural Marxist and economic neoliberal, Keating harbored with a deep-seated animus toward the traditional Australian nation, and was a strong proponent of Australia’s economic and demographic integration into Asia. In an interview for The Powerbroker, Keating explained that he “believed in a cosmopolitan Australia” and was bemused why some “Jewish people ever vote for someone like [former Prime Minister John] Howard.” This was especially so given Howard’s putative support for some of the positions of Pauline Hanson in the mid-1990s – part of his successful attempt to steal votes from her then politically-ascendant party.[22]

Howard’s faux White Nationalism was utterly cynical and strategic, and he later oversaw the biggest expansion in non-White immigration in Australian history. His government created the Section 457 Visa for temporary workers – a visa program designed to be uncapped and totally driven by the putative needs of the Australian labor market. The 457 Visa led to a massive increase in cheap non-White labor brought into the country. It was also the Howard government that, from the early 2000s, encouraged overseas students to apply for permanent residence after completing their courses in Australia. The inevitable result was an explosion in overseas student enrolments, and by 2017–18 overseas students had become the largest contributor to Australia’s very high level of Net Overseas Migration (NOM) which numbered 271,700 people in 2019.

Howard also presided over Australia’s shameful involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and probably even exceeded Bob Hawke in his fawning philo-Semitism and subservience to Israel. Dan Goldberg, the editor of the National Jewish News, observed in 2006 that:

From his first encounter with Jews, as a nineteen-year-old at the Sydney law firm of Myer Rosenblum, Howard has, especially over the last decade, cemented his alliance with the Jews, and has arguably eclipsed even the great Bob Hawke as the most pro-Israel prime minister in Australian history. Most of his empathy is a function of his foreign policy, pivoted on the US alliance, which translates in the Middle East arena to unequivocal support for Israel, regardless of which prime minister is in power in Jerusalem. Of course, Australia’s role in the war in Iraq was no doubt seen by most Australian Jews as yet another significant milestone in the long history of relations between Canberra and Jerusalem. 

It is no coincidence therefore that Howard has received major awards from three Jewish community organisations in the last couple of years. It is also no coincidence that he speaks regularly to Jewish audiences, and that he is closely allied with a clutch of Jewish powerbrokers. … Understandably, most Jews were in favour of eliminating Saddam Hussein and his regime if only because he bankrolled families of Palestinian suicide bombers to the tune of US$25,000 each, not to mention the fact that it would neutralise the threat to Israel’s eastern flank. The fact that Australian SAS forces took out Saddam’s stockpile of Scuds aimed at Tel Aviv in the early hours of the war only augmented the bond between Canberra and Jerusalem.[23]

 Despite Howard’s cynical willingness to appeal (like Donald Trump) to implicit White interests to win elections, Leibler retains “a huge amount of respect and affection for Howard, who was unshakeable in his support for the Jewish community and Israel.”[27] For Gawenda, Howard’s government was “probably the most pro-Israel government in a long time.”[28] Howard himself spoke of his “long association with the Jewish community of Australia of which I am unapologetically proud.”[29]

In 2000, Prime Minister John Howard asked Mark Leibler to become a director of the newly established body called Reconciliation Australia to promote the welfare of Australia’s Aborigines. Leibler accepted, and speaking on behalf of Australian Jews, claimed: “We’ve suffered 2,000 years of persecution and we understand what it is to be the underdog and to suffer from disadvantage.”

Former Prime Minister John Howard (second from right): leader of “probably the most pro-Israel government in a long time.” 

Seemingly oblivious of all this, Keating claims to be bewildered why “the Jewish community here could ever vote for the Coalition whilst Howard-type views abounded. … So I got a bit short with [the Jewish community], still am I suppose. I tell them that ‘the one party that would actually stick with you through thick and thin on the question of identity, your identity, is the Labor Party.” Moreover, it was Labor governments, he insisted, “who helped you make all the money.”[30]

It has been a longstanding strategy of wealthy Jewish businessmen and activists to cultivate relationships with prime ministers on both sides of politics: in the words of Mark Leibler: “John Howard certainly, and Bob Hawke of course, and yes, Paul Keating, and so too Malcolm Turnbull.”[31] Wealthy Jewish businessmen and Jewish activists often coordinate their lobbying efforts. Leibler notes how he could reliably “call one of these business people who I knew had a close relationship with politicians on both sides of politics. I would ring up and explain that there was a problem and that they needed to sit down with the PM and explain the problem. They would always be very helpful doing that.” While these Jewish tycoons often weren’t comfortable issuing public statements, they “had the sort of relationships with prime ministers and foreign ministers too, that allowed them to intervene.”[32] When asked whether this level of access was a unique situation for a Jewish community of such a small size (Australia’s 120,000 Jews make up less than half of one percent of the Australian population), Leibler’s response was unambiguous: “The answer is, yes.”[33]

Leibler’s Campaign against Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party and the Extension of the Racial Vilification Act

Mark Leibler played a key role in the Jewish attack on Pauline Hanson and her “exclusionary form of nationalism” in the 1990s. Andrew Markus notes how Hanson’s “campaign evoked widespread condemnation within the Jewish community and calls for mobilisation to challenge the growing influence of her movement. Concern was at its peak following the success of One Nation in the 1998 Queensland election, which opened the prospect of a One Nation dominated Senate.”[34] In response to Hanson, more than thirty Jewish organizations signed a statement denouncing “racism,” and supporting the formation of a new Jewish activist front group called “People for Racial Equality.” Jewish organizations that vehemently opposed Hanson included the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council led by its chairman Mark Leibler. The “People for Racial Equality” campaign aggressively targeted political parties and politicians, demanding they put One Nation last on their “how to vote cards,” as well as individual voters, urging them all to put One Nation last under Australia’s system of preferential voting.

In an effort to shame and intimidate Hanson’s supporters, the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission doxed 2000 people associated with the One Nation Party. The list was published with Mark Leibler’s consent in AIJAC’s Australia/Israel Review under the headline “Gotcha! One Nation’s Secret Membership List.”[35] In keeping with the tactics of organized Jewry throughout the Western world, the attempt by Hanson and her supporters to ensure that White Australians retained demographic, political and cultural control of Australia was represented as racist, immoral, and indicative of psychiatric disorder. Central to the Jewish response to One Nation, notes Markus, “was repugnance at public expressions of bigotry and a sense that while the focus of the Hanson movement was not on Australian Jews, it would not be long before they were targeted.”[36]

The rivalry between the Leibler brothers over who had the right to speak on behalf of Australian Jewry was often fierce. One catalyst for a rift between the two brothers was when Mark Leibler and a delegation of ZFA officials met with the Keating government’s immigration minister Nick Bolkus when the government was considering the introduction of “racial vilification legislation” into the federal parliament. Mark Leibler’s Zionist Federation of Australia made a virtually identical submission to the government as Isi Leibler’s Executive Council of Australian Jewry. Gawenda notes that “Both organizations had long advocated for such legislation; both urged the government to include criminal sanctions for extreme forms of racial vilification.”[37]

The Racial Hatred Act was passed in 1995, adding to the Racial Discrimination Act of 1975 (itself a direct result of Jewish activism) the totalitarian Section 18C, which made it unlawful to offend, insult and humiliate or intimidate a person or group on the basis of color, race or ethnic origin. The 1995 legislation was a victory for Leibler and his communications director Helene Teichmann who had organized the meetings of leaders of ethnic communities that had “led to a unified position on the need for racial vilification legislation.”[38] It was clear to immigration minister Bolkus that “Leibler had been more active than any other Jewish leader in the campaign for the proposed extension of the Racial Discrimination Act.”[39]

Conservative commentator Andrew Bolt later fell afoul of Section 18C for some columns he had written questioning the ethnicity of light-skinned “Aboriginal” activists. Bolt, hitherto a Zionist shill and sycophant of organized Jewry, was stunned when his appeal to Mark Leibler to support the elimination of Section 18C was flatly declined. Gawenda observes that “Bolt seemed unaware that Leibler had played an important role in getting the 1995 legislation passed and would never support the repeal of Section 18C, not even to support Bolt, who had always seen himself as a strong supporter of Israel, unlike the left-wingers who opposed any change to 18C.”

Journalist Andrew Bolt: jilted paramour of organized Jewry

A frustrated Andrew Bolt predicted that Jewish leaders would ultimately regret opposing changes to the Act, noting that: “The Jewish leaders now should look very, very deeply into their souls at what they have helped wrought and ask themselves, are you seriously safer now as a result?” Bolt’s reasoning is that under Section 18C Australian Jews will in future be precluded from criticizing the beliefs and actions of a growing and increasingly militant Australian Islamic community which will be increasingly hostile to Israel and the interests of Australian Jews.

Bolt fails to mention the only reason there are any Muslims in Australia at all (with all their myriad problems and social dysfunctions) is because Jewish activism succeeded in ending the White Australia policy and establishing multiculturalism as the basis for social policy. As the Jewish academic Dan Goldberg proudly acknowledges: “In addition to their activism on Aboriginal issues, Jews were instrumental in leading the crusade against the White Australia policy, a series of laws from 1901 to 1973 that restricted non-White immigration to Australia.”[40] As throughout the West, it is clear that the Jewish fear and loathing of White Australia trumps any concern about the anti-Semitic tendencies of the non-White immigrants that are being imported into the nation.

In 2014, the then Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott abandoned an election pledge to repeal Section 18C after coming under sustained attack from Jewish activist organizations. Gawenda observed at the time how “the repeal of section 18C was vigorously opposed by the leadership of virtually every ethnic community in the country. But it would be fair to say – without wishing to give succor to those who reckon the Jews are too powerful – that Jewish community leaders have played a crucial role in organizing the opposition to any potential change to the RDA. It is the opposition of the Jewish communal leaders that had been of major concern to [then Attorney General] Brandis and, to a significant extent, Tony Abbott.”[41]

Thanks to Australia’s Jewish-led demographic revolution and legislation like Section 18C, the Jewish lawyer and activist Ruth Barson is now confident that “the chances of the Holocaust occurring in Australia today are remote,” but cautions that history shows Jews are never truly safe, and consequently, “we should have no tolerance for even the shadows of racism and xenophobia. These are dangerous in any guise.”[42] Dvir Abramovich, chairman of the Anti-Defamation Commission (Australia’s version of the ADL), contends that “The horrors of the Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers – but with hateful words of incitement and contempt, and with the demonizing of anyone who was deemed unworthy by the Nazis.” Accordingly, in addition to supporting the prosecution of “hate speech” through Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, he insists “it’s time that compulsory teaching about the Holocaust is introduced in all Australian schools, to not only develop an understanding of the dangerous ramifications of racism and prejudice, but to heighten awareness of the value of diversity, religious freedom, acceptance and pluralism.”

In early 2020, the Victorian government acceded to Abramovich’s demands and study of the Holocaust became mandatory in Victorian schools. Leibler’s friend and ABL client John Gandel will fund the development of new teaching resources which will be based on existing resources from Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial and lesson plans produced by the World Holocaust Memorial Centre in Jerusalem. Holocaust “education” has been compulsory in New South Wales schools since 2012.

In the 1990s, Mark Leibler successfully lobbied the Keating government immigration minister Nick Bolkus to have British historian David Irving banned from entering Australia. He reiterated the views of his brother Isi, then Executive Council of Australian Jewry President, who had described Irving as “a beer hall rabble-rouser and hero to the German neo-Nazis.” Both urged the government to follow the example of Canada and deny Irving entry into Australia. These overtures were successful and Irving was banned for being “likely to become involved in activities disruptive to the Australian community or a group within the Australian community” and for not being “of good character.” The entry ban was imposed despite Irving’s daughter residing in Australia.

Brenton Sanderson is the author of Battle Lines: Essays on Western Culture, Jewish Influence and Anti-Semitism, available here and here.

Go to Part 4.

---

[1] Michael Gawenda, The Powerbroker: Mark Leibler, An Australian Jewish Life (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2020), 127-28.

[2] Ibid., 128.

[3] Ibid., 129

[4] Ibid., 130

[5] Ibid., 131

[6] Ibid., 128

[7] James Jupp, From White Australia to Woomera – The Story of Australian Immigration (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 46-47.

[8] Bronwyn Hinz, “Ethnic associations, networks and the construction of Australian multiculturalism,” Paper presented at the Canadian Political Science Association Annual Conference, Corcordia University, Montreal, 1‐3 June, 2010, 9-10. http://www.bronwynhinz.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/Hinz-2010-Australian-multiculturalism-paper-for-CPSA-v4.pdf

[9] Gawenda, The Powerbroker, 149.

[10] Ibid., 147.

[11] Ibid., 150.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid., 152.

[15] Ibid., 153.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid., 154.

[18] Ibid., 155.

[19] Ibid., 174.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid., 175.

[22] Ibid., 143.

[23] Dan Goldberg “After 9/11: The Psyche of Australian Jews,” In: New Under the Sun – Jewish Australians on Religion, Politics & Culture, Ed. Michael Fagenblat, Melanie Landau & Nathan Wolski (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2006) 146-47 & 149.

[27] Gawenda, The Powerbroker, 146.

[28] Ibid., 199.

[29] Ibid., 200.

[30] Ibid., 144.

[31] Ibid., 145.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Ibid., 146.

[34] Andrew Markus, “Multiculturalism and the Jews,” In: New Under the Sun – Jewish Australians on Religion, Politics & Culture, Ed. Michael Fagenblat, Melanie Landau & Nathan Wolski (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2006), 99.

[35] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth‑Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Westport, CT: Praeger, Revised Paperback edition, 2001), 303.

[36] Markus, “Multiculturalism and the Jews,” 99-100.

[37] Ibid., 178.

[38] Ibid., 179.

[39] Ibid., 180.

[40] Dan Goldberg, “Jews key to Aboriginal reconciliation,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, February 2, 2008.

[41] Michael Gawenda, “The real reason Abbott broke his promise on Section 18C,” The Australian, August 6, 2014. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/business-spectator/the-real-reason-abbott-broke-his-promise-on-section-18c/news-story/bc977f7be04dc1dab8eb1db52a5707ed

[42] Ruth Barson, “Holocaust remembrance teaches lessons for humanity,” The Sydney Morning Herald, January 26, 2016. https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/holocaust-remembrance-teaches-lessons-on-human-rights-20160126-gmdy21.html

 

Mark Leibler

In writing about the pivotal Jewish role in Australia’s demographic revolution (triggered by the liberalization of immigration laws and institutionalization of multiculturalism), I have had regular occasion to mention the name “Leibler.” Among Jewish leaders in Australia in recent decades, none have enjoyed greater prominence than brothers Isi and Mark Leibler. I had long intended to devote an entire essay to the Leiblers and their impact on Australian politics and society, and was recently prompted to do so by the publication of the book The Powerbroker: Mark Leibler, An Australian Jewish Life by the Jewish journalist Michael Gawenda. After sampling some excerpts, I ordered the book and powered through it in a couple of days. While already familiar with the most of its contents, the biography contains some fascinating (and surprisingly revealing) material.

Gawenda’s stated reason for writing The Powerbroker is strangely paradoxical. He claims to have been impelled to write about Australia’s most powerful and politically well-connected Jewish leader by the rise of anti-Semitism in Australia and elsewhere. “The time was right,” he claims. “Anti-Semitism of the right and the left was on the rise. … For the first time, I had a growing sense of foreboding about the future of the Jews. I wondered whether that time after the Holocaust – the time in which Leibler and I grew up and lived most our lives, when anti-Semitism was totally unacceptable and anti-Semites were given no oxygen, no legitimacy – was over.”[1] Gawenda’s bizarre response to this alleged phenomenon was to pen a work confirming the veracity of various anti-Semitic “tropes” and “canards.” The Powerbroker unashamedly affirms the extraordinary power, wealth and political influence of organized Jewry in Australia – and its most prominent leader. For Gawenda:

Leibler’s life is a story about Jews and power. Making that connection is fraught with risks, for it is one that has been made throughout history by anti-Semites and by those who think Jews somehow have an almost magical ability to influence and change – always for self-interest and for the worst – the course of history. Questions about Jewish power have consumed Jew-haters, and their answers have led to discrimination and hatred and, sometimes, to unspeakable, historically unprecedented violence. But just because anti-Semites believe the Jews have power does not mean it is untrue. Leibler’s story cannot be told without an examination of the way he has developed and used power and influence.[2]

Gawenda’s willingness to openly discuss the extraordinary power and influence of Jews in Australia, despite this endeavor being “fraught with risks,” troubled one reviewer of The Powerbroker, the Jewish academic Phillip Mendes, who warned that “This narrative may excite some conspiracy theorists on the far left and right who believe that Jews per se control finance.”[3] Mendes falsely claimed in his review that 30 percent of Australian Jews live in poverty.

Gawenda’s first interactions with his biographical subject were when, as editor of The Age newspaper in Melbourne in the 1990s, the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), the lobby group then (and still) chaired by Leibler, contacted him “regularly to complain rather robustly about the newspaper’s coverage of the Middle East.”[4] Gawenda did not always need AIJAC’s “robust” advice to sway the newspaper’s coverage of the Middle East in his own ethnic interests. As editor he censored political cartoons critical of Israel, a practice that prompted one observer to demand he openly declare his Jewish ethnicity. Gawenda found this deeply offensive, with its suggestion that “a Jew writing about another Jew was somehow problematic. And it could only be considered problematic if you thought that Jews stuck together, that their first loyalty was always to each other, that Jews, in other words, had dual and even conflicting loyalties. For Jews, this is an association with a long and bloody history, and it has, no doubt, been leveled at Mark Leibler.”[5]

Michael Gawenda

Gawenda identifies as a child of “Holocaust survivors” despite the fact his parents sat out World War Two in the far-east of Russia. They were, he claims, part of “the influx of more than 20,000 Holocaust survivors [to Australia] after the war, more of whom settled in Australia proportionately than in any other country other than Israel.”[6] The father of his biographical subject arrived in Australia just prior to World War Two. An Orthodox religious Zionist and diamond dealer from Antwerp who arrived in 1938 on a business trip, Abraham Leibler was prompted to stay by the situation in Europe, and was joined by his wife Rachel and firstborn son Isi in Melbourne later that year. At that time, there were then no obstacles for Jews leaving Belgium to sell their property and take their wealth with them. Isi Leibler’s younger brother, Mark, was later born in Melbourne in 1943.

Abraham set up his diamond business in Melbourne at the time when, under the influence of the White Australia policy, Australia was one of the Whitest countries in the world with the non-European population, other than Aborigines, being measured at around 0.25 per cent of the total. The population was predominantly of Anglo-Celtic origin and Australians of the other European ethnicities were thoroughly assimilated into the Anglo-Australian mainstream. Apart from the Protestant-Catholic sectarian divide, Australia was a culturally-cohesive nation devoid of significant social tensions. Reflecting on this, Gawenda sourly observes that “In those days the word ‘diversity’ pertained only to plant and animal species, not to human beings, and the word ‘multicultural’ was still many decades away from being a description of Australian society.”[7] Gawenda’s own ethnic group would play a pivotal role in that social transformation.

Abraham Leibler arrived in an Australia that was “was monocultural and before the arrival of hundreds of thousands of migrants from Europe in the 1950s, ethnically homogeneous.”[8] Even this post-War influx of some 200,000 European migrants to Australia did not, however, greatly change things. Northern European migrants were prioritized and expected to assimilate into the general Australia community as quickly as possible (which they did). Moreover, throughout the 1950s more migrants continued to arrive in Australia from Britain than from any other place.

At the time of Abraham Leibler’s arrival in 1938, the Australian Jewish population were predominantly “Anglo Jews” – the descendants of German Jews who arrived in Australia during the gold rushes of the mid to late-nineteenth century. These Jews were well integrated into the political and administrative structure of the colonies and gained social acceptance through adoption of British customs and displays of loyalty to the British Empire. Sir John Monash (1865–1931), for example, became a general in the Australian army and was, according to Goldberg, “the only Jew in the modern era outside Israel (with the exception of Trotsky) to lead an army.”[9] Sir Isaac Isaacs (1855–1948) became Australia’s first native-born Governor-General. In Australia under the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, these highly-assimilated Anglo-Jews were regarded as “White,” while Jews of Middle-Eastern origin were regarded as Asian and therefore barred from entry.

Alongside these culturally-assimilated Anglo Jews was a smaller group of Eastern European Jews noted for their ferocious ethnocentrism and political radicalism. These Jews arrived as refugees from Tsarist Russia from 1880 to 1914, and from Poland after 1918. The numbers arriving with each of these waves were, however, comparatively small and Australian Jewry remained a tiny isolated outpost of world Jewry until the 1930s.[10] In this decade, Australia accepted an influx of 7,000 Jews as refugees under the Australian government’s quota for Jews fleeing National Socialist Germany. Gawenda notes how these new Jews, and the post-war Jewish influx of “Holocaust survivors” from Eastern Europe, “were radically different to the Anglo Jews. They spoke mainly Yiddish and were steeped in Yiddish culture and traditions. Critically, they did not define their Jewishness narrowly, as a matter of religious adherence. Many were Zionists who believed in Jewish nationhood.”[11]

Many were also avowed communists who created and supported a communist front group called the Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism. Formed during the war, this organization became a major force in Australian Jewish community politics, with its leaders and members being overwhelmingly “either communists or fellow travelers.”[12] From these politically radical Eastern European Jewish migrants emerged one of the Soviet Union’s most successful spy rings. In his book Traitors and Spies: Espionage and Corruption in Hugh Places in Australia, 1901–-50, former intelligence officer John Fahey describes how “respected Jewish businessmen” Jack Skolnik, Hirsch Munz and Solomon Kosky “established themselves as what I believe is probably the most successful spy ring that’s ever operated in Australia. I have no doubt they stole vast amounts of information.”[13] This trio passed on valuable military and political secrets to Moscow, undetected, from government offices in Melbourne from the late 1920s right through to the 1950s.

The Anglo Jews feared the intense ethnocentrism and political radicalism of these new Jewish arrivals would provoke an increase in anti-Semitism — and their fears were not without foundation. The new migrants had the effect of making the Anglo-Jews more visible as a group through their association with the new European Jews. They also provoked hostility from significant sections of the Australian community, who (correctly) sensed that these psychologically-intense and politically-radical newcomers posed an existential threat. The Anglo-Jewish leadership feared these new Jews, who were “Zionists of the most visceral kind,” would provoke the charge of dual loyalty recurrently made regularly against Jews in Europe: that Jews were only loyal to each other and not to the countries in which they lived. Gawenda observes that:

Sometimes the dual loyalties charge was expressed as an accusation that Jews were a fifth column of traitors hidden in the population. Hitler famously ranted about the Jewish stab-in-the-back of the German people during World War I. It was, however, a relatively new concept in Australia, where, until the arrival of the refugee Jews in the 1930s, Australia’s Anglo Jews had, in the main, done everything they could to avoid being accused of such a terrible thing. After the establishment of Israel, the dual loyalties’ charge morphed into a charge that Jews were more loyal to Israel than to countries where they lived and often had lived for generations.[14]

The battle between the established Anglo-Jewish community and the newcomers from Central and Eastern Europe was essentially a battle between proponents of cultural assimilation and proponents of Jewish separatism. The new Jewish migrants were “not about to ‘complete Hitler’s work,’ as many of them put it, by assimilating.”[15] Even when in Europe they had considered themselves Jews first and foremost. “They were well-versed in Jewish scholarship, often deeply religious and in many cases, passionately Zionist,” notes the Australian-Jewish historian Suzanne Rutland.[16] The new Jews, through the activism of community leaders like Walter Lippmann (who arrived in Australia in 1938), were to be pivotal to entrenching cultural pluralism and “multiculturalism” as official Australian government policy from the 1970s.

Lippmann resented the expectation to assimilate into the Anglo-Australian mainstream. In his advocacy of the multiculturalism in Australia, he tore a page out of the writings of the pioneering Jewish-American multiculturalist Horace Kallen. Lippmann believed Jewish immigrants had left one type of oppression behind only to be subjected to another – the Australian expectation to assimilate. Kallen described the corresponding expectation in the early twentieth-century United States as “the Americanization hysteria” or the “Americanization psychosis.”[17] The multiculturalism espoused by Lippmann, which ultimately became the basis for social policy in Australia, implied “a rejection not only of the attempts to promote an amalgam of cultures but also of any assumptions of Anglo-Saxon superiority and the necessary conformity to English-oriented cultural patterns.”[18]

The Leiblers, as Orthodox Jews and Zionists, openly flouted the expectation to assimilate and lived in a completely Jewish milieu sealed off from the surrounding Australian society. This stance was intensified by their involvement with Mizrachi, a religious Zionist organization that functioned like a self-contained community, with its own synagogues, day schools and youth movement, Bnei Akiva – named after Rabbi Akiva, a rabbinical authority on Judaism’s major texts, who was executed by the Romans after the failed Jewish revolt against Roman rule in AD 66.

The Leiblers were far from alone in their determination to resist assimilation and promote Jewish genetic and cultural separation from the general Australian community. A group of businessmen and activists raised money to establish a Jewish day school in 1949, Mount Scopus College, in Melbourne – which eventually grew into the largest Jewish day school in Australia and one of the biggest in the world. Mark Leibler attended the college, which catered to “a wide range of parents, from the Orthodox to those who wanted their children to go to a Jewish school in order to minimize the chances of their ‘marrying out.’” These parents were most concerned about “maximizing the chances of their children getting good Year 12 exam scores and marrying other Jews.”[19] Such was the insularity of the Mark Leibler’s upbringing and early life in Melbourne that he observed: “I don’t think I had any non-Jewish friends. I was basically mixing with Jews all the time.”[20]

Despite this, reflecting back on his time as a student at Mount Scopus, Leibler thought the school had not done enough to foster a “deep sense of their Jewish identity, a knowledge of and love for Judaism as bulwarks against assimilation and intermarriage.” He believed Australian Jewish children needed “schools with clear ideologies that fostered their particular kind of Jewish identity.” He later supported and sent all of his children to Yavneh College – a Zionist and Modern Orthodox school absolutely committed to producing “Jews secure in their Jewishness, knowledgeable about and able to practice Judaism with an unshakable commitment to Israel.”[21]

Mount Scopus College: not doing enough to foster a “deep sense of their Jewish identity, a knowledge of and love for Judaism as bulwarks against assimilation and intermarriage”

Mark Leibler first interacted with non-Jews when he studied law at the University of Melbourne. Even there, he was, however, taught and mentored by several Jewish academics including Zelman Cowen, the Dean of Law who helped get him into the Masters program at Yale. Jewish ethnic networking also played an inevitable role in determining where Leibler launched his legal career: he did his articles at the law firm of Arnold Bloch in 1966, whose eponymous owner was “a family friend and Jewish community leader who had known Mark since he was a boy.”[22] Leibler subsequently joined the firm and was quickly made an associate. Within a decade and a half, many of the firm’s mostly Jewish clients were among Australia’s richest people. One of Bloch’s first clients in the 1950s was John Gandel, the now billionaire property developer and leading funder of Jewish causes.

In the decade to 1957, the Australian Jewish community had almost doubled in size, from about 32,000 to more than 55,000 with the vast majority living in Sydney and Melbourne. By 1957, the new Jewish migrants from Central and Eastern Europe outnumbered the Anglo Jews and had taken over the leadership of all Jewish organizations. It was out of this group that Isi and Mark Leibler emerged as leaders in the 1960s and 1970s. Mark focused his leadership ambitions on the Australian Zionist organizations – the State Zionist Council of Victoria and the national Zionist Federation of Australia, which was affiliated to the World Zionist Organization. His brother Isi had already risen to become president of Victorian Jewish Board of Deputies and an internationally recognized leader of the campaign to allow Soviet Jews to migrate to Israel. His activism is said to have been strongly shaped by “the Holocaust” which was always “uppermost in Isi Leibler’s mind.”[23]

Since the late 1990s, when Isi settled in Israel, Mark Leibler has been recognized as “Australia’s most influential and powerful Jewish leader, and has become increasingly influential in international Jewry.”[24] The Jerusalem Post accorded him the status of one of the world’s 50 most influential Jews – a leader of Jews both in Australia and around the world. Gawenda notes that while Leibler “is not well known to most Australians,” his influence “far exceeds his public profile” and he is “regularly sought out by powerful people in all walks of life.”[25] Ultimately, this power and influence is “built on the strength of the 120,000 in Australia’s Jewish community.”[26] In the subsequent parts of this essay, I explore Mark Leibler’s impact on Australian politics and society.

Brenton Sanderson is the author of Battle Lines: Essays on Western Culture, Jewish Influence and Anti-Semitism, available here and here.

Go to Part 2 of 5.

---

[1] Michael Gawenda, The Powerbroker: Mark Leibler, An Australian Jewish Life (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2020), 6.

[2] Ibid., 11-12.

[3] Philip Mendes, “The many sides of Mark Leibler,” The Sydney Morning Herald, September 11. https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/the-many-sides-of-mark-leibler-20200903-p55s5a.html

[4] Gawenda, The Powerbroker, 9.

[5] Ibid., 10.

[6] Ibid., 7.

[7] Ibid., 16.

[8] Ibid., 20.

[9] Dan Goldberg “After 9/11: The Psyche of Australian Jews,” In: New Under the Sun – Jewish Australians on Religion, Politics & Culture, Ed. Michael Fagenblat, Melanie Landau & Nathan Wolski (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2006) 140-152, 151.

[10] Suzanne Rutland, The Jews in Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 22.

[11] Gawenda, The Powerbroker, 18.

[12] Ibid., 24.

[13] Jen Kelly, “How three Melbourne businessmen became one of the Soviets’ most successful spy rings, Herald-Sun, October 9.

[14] Gawenda, The Powerbroker, 21.

[15] Ibid., 36.

[16] Rutland, The Jews in Australia, 77

[17] Horace Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States (New York: Arno Press, 1924; reprint 1970), 165; 167.

[18] http://www.immi.gov.au/media/publications/multicultural/confer/06/speech29a.htm

[19] Gawenda, The Powerbroker, 81.

[20] Ibid., 33.

[21] Ibid., 81.

[22] Ibid., 48.

[23] Ibid., 23.

[24] Ibid., 4.

[25] Ibid., 2.

[26] Ibid., 4.