Loewenstein’s claims cannot go unchallenged
Israel critic Antony Loewenstein cast himself out of the Jewish community.
Being Jewish and critical of Israel doesn’t make you an outcast. I know.
Just shy of seven years ago I gritted my teeth and committed to not writing about Israel or the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Why? The Labor-leaning John Curtin Research Centre I co-founded contained a variety of people with a variety of views on said subjects. We were and remain focused on domestic issues, notably economic and social justice, and climate policy, and rarely make forays into foreign affairs or overseas conflicts.
We did not wish for our think tank – with a Jewish executive director (myself), and several Jewish board members – to be pigeonholed as pro-Israel or Zionist lobbyists.
Keeping shtum mattered not one jot as it happened. I wrote a blog for The Monthly magazine on the Turnbull government’s 2017 budget. One ALP member responded by calling me a “f***ing Zionist” on social media. I am a Labor Zionist and I am affiliated with the Zionist arm associated with my stream of Reform Judaism. How on earth did Zionism pertain to a piece of highly budget commentary? I gritted my teeth.
Later, I met a senior left-wing trade unionist seeking support for our think tank. “Sorry, it’s regarded as ‘too Jewish’” was the gobsmacking response. I gritted my teeth. One fanatical ex-ALP member terms us the John Curtin Zionist Centre in his ongoing personal attacks on myself and our team. What stung most was the lack of any consequences from said offenders, or an apology. Still I gritted my teeth.
I am compelled to break my silence. Why? Last week’s Good Weekend feature by Antony Loewenstein, “Being Jewish and critical of Israel can make you an outcast. I should know”. I have proudly contributed for 15 years to The Age and Sydney Morning Herald – and have no intention of ceasing to contribute. But Loewenstein’s claims cannot go unchallenged, loathe as I am to feed his book promotion.
First things first, Loewenstein and I have similar Ashkenazi Jewish backgrounds and both of our families suffered before, during and after the Holocaust – driven out of Hitler’s Nazi Germany, murdered if they remained during the Second World War or left traumatised. No Jew should be calling Loewenstein “a Nazi collaborator” and various other terms like “terror supporter” or “antisemite”. It’s wrong and counterproductive.
Nonetheless, this much is clear: Loewenstein ostentatiously cast himself out of the Jewish community and has spent the last two decades pleading victimhood.
It’s his right to be an anti-Zionist, and to be critical of Israeli actions past and present, but not to assert three positions: that the Jewish community is a homogeneous political entity, that Jews are partly responsible for antisemitism and that the State of Israel is irredeemable.
It is patently false to suggest that Israeli government actions have “paralleled [South African] apartheid-like policies”, even if there may be some superficial similarities. Arab Israeli/Palestinian Israeli citizens have the same legal rights as Jews in Green Line Israel – notwithstanding glaring inequality, racism from elements of the Jewish population and aspects of structural discrimination. An “apartheid Israel” wouldn’t allow voting rights for its Arab population. It would not countenance the existence of political parties (holding seats in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset) such as the Islamist United Arab List party, commonly referred to by its Hebrew acronym Ra’am, which was a member of the coalition government that emerged after the defeat of Israel’s Likud Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in the 2021 elections. In 2022, Palestinian Muslim Judge Khaled Kabub was appointed to Israel’s Supreme Court. Some kind of apartheid!
Loewenstein claims that a paragraph of his criticism of Israel will be “enough to cause conniptions among many Jews”. It did anger many Jews, including left-wing types. Yet he is mistaken. Here is me writing in The Age in 2014 as war raged between Israel and the racist, misogynistic and homophobic Islamist thugs Hamas who control Gaza, and committed to Israel’s destruction: “I deplore the rightwards shift of the nation’s political culture. I mourn the collapse of Labor Zionism. The Occupation is wrong. Full stop. The West Bank settlements are a cancer eating away at Israel’s democratic soul.”
I wasn’t ostracised by anyone in Melbourne or Australia’s Jewish community. No one unfriended me. On the contrary, I received praise across Jewry’s political spectrum. I don’t – and will not ever – hide my views on the discrimination against streams of non-Orthodox Judaism (from Reform/Progressive to Masorti) in Israel, the failure to build an egalitarian space (where men and women can pray together) at the Kotel (Western Wall), and prejudice against minority Jews such as Ethiopians and others.
This is signal evidence refuting Loewenstein’s claim to uncritical groupthink. Australian synagogues, including mine (previously Loewenstein’s), and other forms of communal life contain a multitude of perspectives on Israel. The progressive Zionist youth group my children attend doesn’t force-feed them Israeli hasbarah.
Loewenstein does not know this because he isn’t privy to what transpires inside the community. He implicitly asserts that he and a minority of Jews are unshakeably “right” about Israel and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and the rest of the community are bigoted fools. Pursuing such a strategy, no wonder he’s an outcast. And it doesn’t help the Palestinians one iota.
He also has nothing positive to say about Israel or Israelis, not one single word. No mention of the hundreds of thousands of Israelis currently protesting Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition government, courageously standing up for Israeli democracy by opposing his government’s plans to neuter the powers of the Supreme Court, or those who work closely with Palestinians to seek meaningful peace. There is no mention of Israel’s innovative “start-up nation” economy, its environmental achievements, or the protection of LGBTQI rights which are non-existent in the Middle East, and more besides.
Loewenstein fails to inform readers that his anti-Zionism would result in the implementation of a binational, Arab-dominated one state – that is, the end of Israel or bloody civil war – and not the widely accepted two-state solution. The most shocking passage, however, was this: “As a Jew, I see it as my duty to speak out … Yes, antisemitism is a real and growing threat, but combating it requires an understanding of how unqualified Jewish support for Israeli behaviour sometimes contributes to it.”
In other words, Jews are responsible for antisemitism, despite the cute deployment of the adverb “sometimes”. Imagine writing on a domestic issue, this: “Yes, anti-Indigenous racism is a real and growing threat, but combating it requires an understanding of how unqualified Indigenous support for Indigenous constitutional recognition sometimes contributes to it.” One would be rightly cast out from polite society.
Ironically, Loewenstein’s piece appeared just as the Gaza-based Islamic Jihad paramilitary group rained down rockets at Israeli civilian targets (and misfired rockets killing innocent Gazans). There is no justification for these unprovoked terrorist attacks which constitute crimes against humanity. Then again neither Islamic Jihad nor Hamas nor the Lebanese-based Iran-backed terror organisation, Hezbollah, are mentioned in Loewenstein’s diatribe against Israel. In his piece and elsewhere there is zero empathy extended to the legitimate security concerns of Israeli Jews and terror victims.
This is precisely why he is regarded with “eternal embarrassment”, not simply, as he writes, by one of the pillars of Judaism in this country, the distinguished scholar, author and Loewenstein’s former teacher, Rabbi John Levi, but a majority of Australian Jewry. Rabbi Levi is scarcely a right-wing reactionary and is not prone to hyperbole.
A chip the size of Mount Sinai burdens Loewenstein’s shoulder. As the festival of Shavuot hastens, commemorating the giving of Torah by God to the outcast Israelites at Sinai, he ought to attend a tikkun leil Shavuot session to ponder his self-outcasting.
Nick Dyrenfurth is executive director of the John Curtin Research Centre and author of 12 books, including Boycotting Israel is Wrong: the progressive path to peace between Palestinians and Israelis (with Philip Mendes, 2015), and a member of Temple Beth Israel. These are his personal views.
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