Ossip cross-examination draws criticism as Bell defends ‘procedural fairness’

The cross-examination of outgoing NSW Jewish Board of Deputies president David Ossip by lawyers for two Palestinian advocacy groups has drawn criticism from political leaders and community figures, while Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion Commissioner Virginia Bell has defended the questioning on the grounds of procedural fairness.

Ossip gave evidence on Tuesday about the Jewish community being advised to avoid Sydney’s CBD on the evening of October 9, 2023, when a pro-Palestinian rally moved through the city to the Opera House. The commission had granted limited leave to lawyers representing the Palestine Action Group (PAG) and the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN) to put questions to him.

Cross-examining for APAN, Ragni Mathur SC probed Ossip’s evidence on PAG’s decision to hold a protest in Sydney on October 7, 2023. Ossip described news of the protest proceeding while the Hamas attack was still unfolding as “pretty shocking”, and said its timing was “profoundly” insensitive. Pressed on whether Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and Australia had also suffered psychological trauma, Ossip, describing himself as “a proud Zionist”, agreed, and said he felt empathy for innocent Palestinians who had suffered. But he maintained that helping organise a rally “at a time when such grievous acts of violence were being committed against Israeli civilians … showed a lack of sensitivity”.

Under later cross-examination by Palestine Action Group counsel Dominic Toomey SC, Ossip stood by his description of the Opera House protest as “a scene of international disgrace and infamy”. Toomey put to Ossip that Israeli airstrikes on Gaza had begun on the evening of October 7 and that the Israeli prime minister had declared war that night, questioning whether the rally could be divorced from those events. Ossip rejected the premise. “This is a Royal Commission on antisemitism … I’m a bit confused as to why we’re getting caught up in the minutia of the timeline of a foreign military operation,” he said.

NSW Premier Chris Minns said the line of questioning was “disappointing”. “The idea that the focus shifted from antisemitism in Australia to testing a witness on foreign policy by the lawyers representing the Palestine Action Group and the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network is disappointing and doesn’t reflect the purpose of these hearings,” he told News24.

Liberal senator James Paterson called on the commission to apologise to Ossip, saying cross-examining “an Australian Jew about the actions of the Israeli government is an abuse of the process”. Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-CEO Alex Ryvchin said the groups had “normalised egregious lies of genocide and child-killing”, while Michael Britvan, whose daughter Matilda was the youngest victim of the Bondi massacre, said he struggled to understand why the groups could use the commission “to ask questions that shift the focus away from the antisemitism that led to it”.

Bell addressed the matter on Wednesday morning. She said Mathur had been granted only limited leave, confined to a single paragraph of Ossip’s statement in which he expressed an opinion about the conduct of the State of Israel in the period immediately after the October 7 attack, and had sought to challenge the factual basis for that opinion. “She was granted leave to do that because procedural fairness, a concept familiar to lawyers but perhaps not more widely understood, demanded it,” Bell said.

The commissioner also revealed that Mathur had received “a series of truly abusive, Islamophobic emails” after a media interview in which a prominent Jewish community member said counsel had “endeavoured to hijack the Royal Commission” through “clickbait theatrics and gratuitous slurs against Israel”. Bell rejected that characterisation, saying Mathur had appeared for an organisation whose interests were directly affected because its representatives had been the subject of trenchant criticism.

She drew a parallel between the abuse of counsel and the antisemitic attacks directed at Jewish witnesses. “Counsel appearing for groups before this Royal Commission should no more be the subject of Islamophobic or other attacks than should members of the Jewish community who’ve come before and given evidence and who have been subjected to vile antisemitic attacks,” she said. “It doesn’t reflect well on those who make either antisemitic or Islamophobic attacks on the interests that they seek to promote.”