Community standing post Passover 2008

Pesach 2008 marks another high point of integration and political standing for Australia's 120,000 Jews; 0.6% of our national population.

From the Australian Jewish view, the transition from the pro-Israel Howard government to the new pro - Israel Labor government of Kevin Rudd has been almost seamless. This continues the non partisan position of successive Australian governments, much to the chagrin of the dwindling bunch of Israel detractors. As Mr Rudd pointed out in his speech, ALP support of Israel began with Dr Evatt's leverage of the establishment of the Jewish State in the UN partition vote.

In the week former foreign minister Alexander Downer, received an international award for his support for Israel, our new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, together with my friend the Deputy PM, Julia Gillard, led eight ministers on an intensive session with 50 plus leading Jewish Australians in a pre - 2020 summit in Sydney.

The previous conservative governments support for Israel at key symbolic votes at the UN, has been followed by the new government in March being the first Western government to move a resolution celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Jewish State. And didn't our Australian Jewish communities enemies nearly choke. Bile flowed from SMH hater Alan Ramsay, Julia Irwin and her Liberal alter ego Sussan Ley fumed. Best of all, unintentionally comic Anthony Lowenstein in his Lilliputian fury to attack Rudd, published an incomprehensible, visually ugly, advertisement in, "The Australian," on the day of the unanimous pro Israel vote. One of the side effects of the extremists attempt to rain on the parade of the Prime Minister and the Australian Jewish community was that they scared off 300 of the 350 innocents that Lowenstein and his co campaigner Louise Adler inveigled into signing the initial so called "Independent Jewish Voices".

Honestly if a political schlamazal (actively clumsy) like Anthony Lowenstein did not exist; no Zionist Federation could invent him. He reminds me of the former Palestinian representative Ali Kazak, who the Arabists in DFAT, I believe, were trying to replace for at least a decade because serious Arabists wanted a more convincing advocate. Some serious Palestinian representatives might start to believe Lowenstein is a Mossad plant he's so counter productive to their interests. (In cold war spy talk he would be called an "Agent of Disintegration"!).
There are 3 serious issues that count for the vast bulk of Jewish Australians:

• Government support and friendship for Israel;
• Fair funding for Jewish Day School movement, in which some 70 - 80% of Jewish kids are enrolled
• Equal participation of Australian Jews as individuals and with full recognition, celebration of our ethnic, cultural/religious rights.

Our Jewish schools, which affect every student, parent and grand parent of those attending, continue to attract strong commonwealth funding, equally with all other non government schools. This too is a serious political common interest of nearly all Jewish Australians. It gives me special nachas to know that a further thirty six million of anomalous and security funding will be coming to the Jewish schools over the next four years, beginning at the Budget. Any objective observer looking at Australia and the Australian Jewish community in 2008 would have to say things are in fine fettle. In the hilarious communist mumbo jumbo currently being revived by the Chinese communists, as soviet oligarch Leonid Brezhnev would say," the correlation of forces is inexorably moving in our direction".

Perhaps my view is a little too rosy if one considers the persistent paean of hatred from the Fairfax Middle East correspondent Ed O Loughlin, (soon to be replaced), who so distorts the public imagination from the pages of our "quality" press, for our fellow Australians. He must think people are as uninformed as him, with his laughable attack on me, AJN (29 February 2008), which was so easily demolished by Tzvi Fleischer. Any first year media student who compared O'Loughlin's jaundiced views with even critical newspapers like the New York Times or Washington Post would realise I had an unanswerable case against him.(Just go online any day and compare his disgraceful distortions with the context even if critical of the NYT's main Jerusalem based correspondent Isabel Kershner).


Kevin Rudd & Israeli Ambassador Yuval Rotem

It was respectful and dignifying for the Prime Minister and eight leading ministers to spend time with the fifty five prominent Australians who couldn't be at the 2020 summit because they were all proudly at Seder .They were not being 'insular' as Lowenstein's cohort, Louise Adler alleged in the Sunday Age, 6 April. Somehow I think that Kevin Rudd and all the other intelligent, moderate and those more politically savvy than Adler - (ministers like Nicola Roxon, Julia Gillard and Mark Dreyfus) take the views of Stephen Lowy, Professor Kirsner and Robert Goot, far more seriously than they do Lowenstein and the fifty holdouts left in IAJV

So Alan Ramsay fumes impotently about "America's satellite in the Middle East" SMH 12 April, while Irwin and Ley steam about Australia's national parliament celebrating Israel's 60th; and while 'splittists,' such as Anthony Lowenstein publishes the worst possible, items both aesthetically and in substance.

On the summit I was sitting like nearly all Jews happily, naturally, and with great joy, at a Seder. I will be singing "Dayenu" and "Chad Gadya" at the Elwood Shule communal Seder, laughing to myself that Amalek (the communities enemies) have been brought so low.

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