Jewish leaders join condemnation of Shoebridge

Jewish communal leaders have joined Labor MP Josh Burns in condemning new Greens leader David Shoebridge. Asked how the Greens would mend their relationship with the Jewish community, Shoebridge had praised only those Jews who share his views on Gaza.

Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) co-CEO Peter Wertheim said Jews who backed the Greens were a small and shrinking group, and that many had already come home.

“Since October 7, 2023, we have already welcomed many Jewish refugees from the Greens back into the fold, and we look forward to welcoming back the remainder,” he said.

Wertheim said Jews had long faced pressure to live by other people’s expectations.

“Throughout our history, Jews have been under all kinds of pressure to define ourselves and live our lives according to other people’s expectations, which have been a thinly disguised veneer for other people’s interests. The price of being true to ourselves, and true to our faith, of living life according to our own lights, has often been painfully high,” he said.

“So it is hardly surprising that in every era there have been small numbers of Jews who have succumbed to the pressure by turning against their own people. In our own time, the ever-diminishing number of Jewish Australians who are prepared to dance to the Greens’ tune are among this tiny group.

“We do not hate them: we pity them. In due time they will come face to face with the conditional nature of the Greens’ acceptance of them, and the savage hatred that will follow any failure to meet the Greens’ conditions.”

The Greens party room in Sydney elected Shoebridge leader on Wednesday, after Larissa Waters stepped down due to illness. He defeated Senators Mehreen Faruqi and Sarah Hanson-Young, and Victorian Senator Steph Hodgins-May was elected deputy.

At his first press conference as leader, Shoebridge said the Greens had strong ties to Jews who share the party’s views on Gaza.

“We have really strong connections with much of the Australian Jewish community here, working alongside Jewish Australians who are fighting a genocide, who are speaking up for core values that they hold dear, and we will continue to champion their voices, to be solid allies with them,” he said.

He also called on journalists to “listen to these powerful, principled voices coming from the progressive Jewish Australian community, platform their voices like we do, listen to their cries for justice, like we do.”

Speaking in Footscray, in Melbourne’s west, on Thursday, Burns said he wished Shoebridge and Hodgins-May well, but described the senator’s answer as “pretty shocking”.

“The Jewish community should not be put into categories of good and bad based on their views of what is happening in the Middle East. That is not progressive leadership, that’s prejudice,” Burns said.

“He is now in a leadership position, and having public statements like that actually will send chills up the spines of many people in the Jewish community.”

Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Committee (AIJAC) executive director Dr Colin Rubenstein agreed with Burns, but said Shoebridge’s track record made the comments unsurprising.

“Even in the wake of Bondi and the wave of hate our community has experienced over the past three years, Senator Shoebridge makes it clear that the only members of the Jewish community he has any regard for are the tiny fringe who agree with his extremist views on Israel,” he said.

Rubenstein rejected the genocide claim outright. He said Israel had been fighting a war of self-defence against Hamas.

“His apparent division of Jews into the supposedly virtuous minority and the majority, whom he implicitly accuses of supporting genocide, alongside his repetition of the genocide libel, irresponsibly damages social cohesion in this country,” he said.

He also dismissed Shoebridge’s appeal to the media.

“The reality is that Jews with these fringe views already receive prominence in much of the media far beyond what is warranted by their numbers or their misconceived messages.”

In June, ECAJ criticised Shoebridge after he appeared on a podcast whose host claims Zionists are responsible for paedophilia, human trafficking and organ trafficking.