Editorial, November 19, 2010

Changing of the guard

ROBERT Goot, who will step down from the presidency of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) at next week’s annual conference, will leave an indelible stamp of reform on the 65-year-old national Jewish umbrella organisation.

The Sydney lawyer will be remembered for several milestones during his three-year term, including the organisation’s successful entreaties to federal government not to attend the kangaroo court human-rights conference in Geneva, dubbed “Durban II”; combating anti-Semitism in cyberspace; effectively espousing the case to state and federal governments for preserving shechitah; campaigning for the Holocaust to be included as a mandatory element of secondary school history studies; and successfully prosecuting Holocaust denier Fredrick Toben.

Under Goot, the ECAJ also forged ahead with the fight against discrediting Israel from within the Australian trade union movement, guiding the development of the World Jewish Congress strategy against delegitimising the Jewish State, and working towards reversing a call by the National Council of Churches to consider a boycott of Israel.

But perhaps his most abiding legacy will be the restructuring of the ECAJ into a professional force that has become the known address of the national Jewish community — for politicians, the media, academia and other sectors.

The most visible result of the revamp was the appointment of Peter Wertheim as the ECAJ’s executive director, at the helm of what is now a permanent, Sydney-based executive that does not follow the traditional three-year rotation of the presidency between Sydney and Melbourne. A permanent base allows the ECAJ to build an infrastructure that can deal with a multitude of ongoing issues that face the organisation on a daily basis.

Establishing the ECAJ’s pre-eminence was not a straightforward matter, as there have long been grey areas in which other organisations have assumed, sometimes justifiably, that they can speak for the Jewish community — and it took a face-off with another respected group early in Goot’s term to establish who should rightly represent the entire community on various issues.

With the presidency returning to Melbourne for 2010-13, we look forward to a new era under presidential nominee Dr Danny Lamm, who has just completed an impressive eight-year run as president of the Zionist Council of Victoria. Dr Lamm’s acumen as a manager and visionary in his former capacity will stand him in good stead as he takes up the cudgels. On behalf of the community, we wish him every success.

Bush brought to book

REGARDLESS of what you thought about former US President George W Bush while he was president, from a Jewish and Israeli perspective, his memoirs leave a lot to be happy about.

While the former president did not always agree with the actions and decisions coming from Jerusalem, the memoirs show that he always respected, and even admired, them. Importantly, the book dispels two classic mischaracterisations of the US-Israel relationship — firstly, Israel as a weak vassal state, controlled by the US as its proxy in the Middle East; secondly, Washington under Israel’s Svengali-like sway, squarely under the thumb of influential Jews and the Israel lobby. In the world according to Bush, however, Israel is neither. Sure, it’s an independent democracy and an important US ally, but it’s also just another country among all the nations of the world.

The same goes for American Jewry, which is hardly referenced in the book — a memorable reference to murdered journalist Daniel Pearl’s Jewish martyrdom notwithstanding. It’s not that Jews were not part of Bush’s Americana. It’s that they were integrated to the point where he felt there was no need to discuss them apart from other Americans. Upstanding citizens, yes. Overly influential or deserving of special treatment? No.

There is something reassuring when reading Bush’s take on some of the biggest stories of the last decade — whether we’re talking about September 11, the Iraq war or the Wall Street meltdown — that it’s not always about us. Yet the reason it’s reassuring is because anti-Semitic elements have blamed Jews or Israel for instigating each of these traumatic events. Bush’s memoirs are not likely to change any minds among anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists, but it probably won’t give them more grist for their mill either.

Was the Bush presidency good for the Jews? While there is no clear answer, it’s true that domestic social justice issues important to American Jewish voters do not feature prominently in Bush’s memoirs, nor were they a priority during his presidency.

Which brings us to a reason that Bush’s memoirs should be welcomed by even his biggest Jewish critics: they are another reminder that his presidency is over.