Dear Rabbi.  I constantly read and hear pronouncements from the so-called Jewish Council of Australia and I wonder: What is Jewish about them?  Could you enlighten me?   Thanks.  Alon P.

In three words: Next to nothing. Their sole platform appears to be to express their loathing of Zionism and their support of Palestinian rights to the land of Israel. (“Jewish Voice for Peace” is of similar ilk in the USA)

Louise Adler, an advisory-committee member, when asked about her Jewish values responded: “Well actually they’re humanist values!” Ohad Kozminsky, an executive member, maintains that “Israel was never a promised land for Jews” while steadfastly upholding the “imperative that we remember G-D’s role in securing our freedom from Egyptian slavery” – talk about cherry-picking from the Torah! – but that’s not to proclaim a Jewish value, it’s strictly in order that he can declare  “we Jews are not unique in our suffering; many other people have suffered at the hands of oppressors throughout the world, and many still do, not least the Palestinians“(bold print mine).

Inasmuch as Adler proclaims her humanist values and Kozminsky speaks about the suffering of many peoples, one might expect that they and fellow members of their Council would also be crying out against the millions oppressed in Syria, Iran, Yemen, Libya, Sudan, Burma, Congo, Nigeria, Mali, Afghanistan and among the Chinese Uyghurs. Burt no – not a peep!   I wonder why!

I was particularly interested in Kozminsky’s anti-nationalist rant that “the idea of a piece of land being for one group of people is wrong”. Yet that is what he is advocating for the land he calls Palestine!  Like all hard-Left ideologues, his application of that anti-nationalist dogma is confined to those Western nations he calls imperialists.  Of course, he has no issue with the Council’s maxim that Australia “always was and always will be Aboriginal land”. Talk about hypocrisy!

Sadly, for groups like the “Jewish Council of Australia”, any and every ideological inconsistency is justified so long as they can get across the message of their abhorrence of Jewish peoplehood and their espousal of Palestinian nationalism!

You ask what is Jewish about them.  Well, some of their leading figures will talk impassionedly of being descendants of Holocaust survivors. They aren’t Holocaust deniers – on the contrary they will proclaim the Holocaust as a pillar of their Jewish identity as that genocide was a product of Right-wing, not Left-wing, antisemitism. But execrably, they will then go on to use the Holocaust in order to liken Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian Arabs to the Nazis’ attempted extermination of our nation.  

 So, is there anything Jewish about the “Jewish Council of Australia”? I will answer in a typically Jewish way with another question: Is there anything Jewish about evincing an ideological position that endangers Jewish lives?

When Jews stand shoulder to shoulder with those who wish to “globalise the intifada”, they are calling for a second Holocaust!  And if – G-D forbid a million times – their hard-left and radical-Islamist comrades at arms are ever in a position to attempt to unleash such a horror, the “Jewish Council” Jews will feature on their hitlist just like every other Jew.

For a Jew to be militantly anti-Zionist today, as are “Jewish Council” members, there must exist somewhere within his or her psyche a pathological disconnect from his or her Jewish roots. I challenge any Jew who has embraced this self-hating ideology to prove to me otherwise. If any of you “Jewish Council”-ers are reading this, come take me on!

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)