AJA calls for Carr’s expulsion from Labor over posts

The Australian Jewish Association (AJA) has called on Labor to expel former foreign minister Bob Carr unless he withdraws and apologises for social media posts accusing Jewish organisations of supporting what is according to him a genocide in Gaza.

In a thread posted on X on Thursday morning, Carr referred to AIJAC, the AJA “and the rest of ‘The Lobby'”, writing that their “support of the genocide in Gaza” had resulted in “79 per cent of Australians holding a negative view of Israel”.

In a subsequent post he described those organisations as extremists, writing that not a word had been raised by them in defence of children in Gaza being denied access to vaccines, nor any hint of condemnation of what he called the persecution of Palestinian families by settlers and the IDF in the West Bank.

The posts formed part of a wider thread on US foreign policy, in which Carr also criticised the Trump administration’s engagement with Hamas and North Korea, and Australian foreign policy institutions including ASPI and the United States Studies Centre.

AJA president Robert Gregory said the comments were disgraceful, defamatory and dangerous. “He has taken Australian Jewish organisations with very different views and identities, lumped us together as ‘The Lobby’, and accused us collectively of supporting genocide,” Gregory said.

“This is precisely the kind of rhetoric that Australian Jews have been warning about. The suggestion that Jewish organisations form some sinister, monolithic ‘Lobby’ exercising political influence draws on an ugly and longstanding antisemitic trope.

“Australia is experiencing an unprecedented antisemitism crisis. Australian Jews have been threatened, assaulted and murdered. In that environment, a former Premier and Foreign Minister should understand the potential consequences of publicly demonising Jewish organisations in this way. His rhetoric risks further inflaming hostility towards Australian Jews and putting our safety at risk.”

Gregory said the genocide accusation was a grotesque slur, noting that members of the AJA, like many Australian Jews, lost family in the Holocaust.

“Many of my family members were murdered in a genocide and my grandmother survived Auschwitz as a 16-year-old girl,” he said. “More recently, AJA members, including my friends and the rabbi who performed my wedding, were murdered at Bondi. The AJA has received several death threats recently. I don’t want to see more of my friends or members of our organisation killed because of ugly lies.”

Gregory said Carr must immediately withdraw the comments and apologise, and that if he refused, the Labor Party should expel him. “Someone who uses this kind of rhetoric against Jewish Australians should have no place in a mainstream political party,” he said. “Labor cannot credibly claim to be fighting antisemitism while tolerating this from one of the most prominent figures in its own history.”

Carr was NSW premier from 1995 to 2005 and foreign minister in the Gillard and Rudd governments from 2012 to 2013.