Australia ‘a significant problem’
Israeli scholar Amos Nadan warns rising antisemitism and foreign influence have made Australia a concern.
Australia has become “a significant problem” for the Jewish world, a senior Israeli Middle East scholar has warned.
Amos Nadan, a historian at Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Centre for Middle Eastern and African Studies, delivered six talks in Sydney and Melbourne recently, along with several individual and group briefings, organised by the Australian Friends of Tel Aviv University (AFTAU).
Nadan said Israelis paid far more attention to the United States and Britain than to Australia, citing time zones and travel patterns. “I don’t think that Australia is on the radar,” he said. But he said that was changing.
“I think that the rise of antisemitism here and the influence of Qatari money and terrorist money in your universities, in the media … it’s significant.”
He argued that much Western coverage of the war originated with Hamas, moved to Al Jazeera and was then picked up abroad, with Al Jazeera treated as a legitimate journalistic source.
The slogans heard at Australian rallies, he said, were Hamas positions rather than those of the Palestinian Authority, “which talks about two states, so the people using these slogans are passing this off as a Palestinian agenda when it isn’t”.
He said Arab media had shifted during the war from portraying Israel as weak, echoing Hezbollah’s description of a country built on a spider’s web, to fearing a “Greater Israel” bent on conquering the region.
Israeli politicians suggesting that Gazan refugees could move to Egypt, or that Jordan should form part of Israel, he said, had been taken seriously across the Arab world.
He said he told colleagues in Arab countries: “We have a problem that our Israeli leaders in many cases don’t understand the Arab world. But your problem is much bigger, because you totally don’t understand Israel.”
Nadan was dismissive of sanctions. “Economic sanctions do not work to achieve what they aim to achieve,” he said.
Pressure on Iran, or threatened European measures against Israel over the planned E1 development east of Jerusalem, would not force policy change, he said, because populations blamed the sender rather than their own leaders.
“To think that economic sanctions by themselves would sort everything … it’s a bit weird,” he said.
Australian Friends of Tel Aviv University CEO David Solomon said Nadan had been “extremely well received”, with audiences consistently reporting that the context he gave was “incredibly valuable” and that he was “very thought provoking”.