Move to mend frosty relationship
Prime Minister Albanese told reporters the Attorney-General is "an appropriate person to visit Israel" and that he will spend about a week in the country.
Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus will visit Israel in an attempt to mend the worsening relationship between the two countries, but federal Liberal MP Julian Leeser said the move will not change the underlying failure of the government, “which is the weak leadership of Anthony Albanese and hard-left policies of Penny Wong”.
Prime Minister Albanese told reporters the Attorney-General is “an appropriate person to visit Israel” and that he will spend about a week in the country.
Dreyfus was scheduled to travel to Israel for the one-year anniversary of the October 7, 2023, terrorist attacks, but cancelled when Iran launched a missile attack. The trip would be the first by a cabinet minister since Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong visited Israel last January, but failed to travel to the south of the country to see the aftermath of the attacks.
Leeser slammed the Albanese government’s decision to send Dreyfus, who he accused of being an “impediment to addressing antisemitism in this country”.
“In sending Mark Dreyfus, the Prime Minister thinks he is sending someone respected by the Jewish community to pour oil on troubled waters. He is not,” said Leeser.
“Dreyfus’s silence on Israel is deeply felt across the Jewish community. Not only has he remained in Labor’s cabinet and gone along with every anti-Israel policy of the Albanese government, but as the minister responsible for royal commissions, the AFP and the Human Rights Commission, he has been an impediment to addressing antisemitism in this country.
“He has done nothing to clean up the Jew hatred at the AHRC. He has opposed the judicial inquiry into antisemitism on campus recommended by his own special envoy on antisemitism and, for more than a year, he failed to direct the resources of AFP or the AHRC to deal with the unprecedented antisemitism in this country.
“By sending Dreyfus to Israel, the Prime Minister is not sending a champion of the Jewish community. He is simply replacing one apologist for this appalling government with another.”
The relationship between Australia and Israel has deteriorated since October 7 with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calling the burning of the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne late last year an “abhorrent act of antisemitism” and connected it to the “extreme anti-Israel position of the Labor government in Australia”.
It came soon after Australia’s ambassador to Israel was summoned for a dressing down over the Australian government’s decision to deny former Israeli justice minister Ayelet Shaked a visa on grounds she could threaten social cohesion.
Co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry Alex Ryvchin said Wong’s refusal to visit the sites of the October 7 atrocities during her visit to Israel “shattered” the relationship between the two countries.
“Since that time we’ve seen visa issues with Israelis unable to come to Australia and we’ve seen an increasingly hostile stance taken by Australia in international forums against Israel,” he said.
“So this is a positive step from the Attorney-General and from the government, but the actions that follow are far more important than this trip alone.”
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