The Lattouf Affair and the Jewish Critics of Israel-in-Gaza

Once again I offer my congratulations to Nick Feik for his recent analysis of the Lattouf Affair and the other similar cases of the cowardly capitulation of key cultural institutions in Australia when faced with the threats of one or another Zionist lobby.

Because I am Jewish it is easier for me than Nick to comment on one issue: the level and the nature of the abuse Jews in particular can anticipate if they criticize the policy of collective punishment practised in Gaza by the government and armed forces of Israel following the vicious Hamas atrocity of October 7, 2023. Indeed it appears that the more terrible the behaviour of Israel, the more disordered the defamation of Jewish critics becomes.

Two days ago, the Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz, published a report that quoted several Israeli soldiers currently serving in Gaza who revealed that they had received orders authorising the shooting of Palestinians gathered near one of the four food distribution points (for two million people!) established recently by the Israeli-American, Orwellian-named, “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation”. The current food distribution death toll now exceeds four hundred. The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called the report a "blood libel", an echo of the long history of anti-semitism, of the "most moral” army in history, an echo taken from Jewish theological self-understanding, of the mission to spread justice in the world for which God had chosen the Jews.

This kind of abuse also happens here. On February 8, Mark Leibler AC, probably the most powerful behind-the-scenes pro-Israel lobbyist in Australia, published the following tweet (for which he has recently been obliged to offer a mealy-mouthed supposed apology): "Nothing, but nothing, is worse than those Jews who level totally unfounded allegations of genocide and ethnic cleansing against the State of Israel. They are repulsive and revolting human beings. Their relatives who were murdered by the Nazis--the role model for Hamas--will undoubtedly be turning in their graves. Their avowed anti-Zionism is clearly no more than a cover for the reality that they are vicious antisemites." Apparently, for Leibler, Jewish critics of Israel in Gaza are morally beneath even the architects of the Holocaust, Hitler and Himmler.

It is grimly amusing to recall that the author of the overwhelmingly positive biography of Mark Leibler, Michael Gawenda, began his own autobiography, My Life as a Jew, with a lengthy introduction where he revealed why he had broken a thirty-year friendship with Louise Adler, the head of Monash University Publishing. The reason was that she had commissioned the ABC’s John Lyons to write a book about the kinds of bullying from Zionist lobbyists that editors and senior journalists in Australia faced if they dared to write reports about Israel's treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank. Such treatment has reached its climax in Israel's policy of daily slaughter and slow starvation in Gaza in the twenty months since the Hamas atrocity of October 7 2023. A recent careful report published in Ha’aretz put the death toll not at the 56,000, whose names have been published by the Hamas Health Ministry Gaza in chronological order, beginning at birth, but at 100,000. One might call the policy “one hundred eyes for an eye; one hundred teeth for a tooth.”

Thanks to Antoinette Lattouf's courage and the recently published 180 page judgment of Justice Darryl Rangiar of the Federal Court, all Australians can now see in detail for the first time the standard modus operandi of the Zionist lobbies, the support reliably offered them by The Australian, and the cowardice—the “panic” in the words of Justice Rangiar—in the face of these attacks shown by the leaders of the ABC.

Robert Manne AO, FASSA. Emeritus Professor of Politics and Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow, La Trobe University. His most recent book is A Political Memoir: Intellectual Combat in the Cold War and the Culture Wars.