Inside the fiery meeting that would define the government’s relationship with Israel

The temperature plunged when Penny Wong walked into the room.

The Foreign Minister was meeting with leaders from the Australian Jewish community ahead of Labor’s national conference last August, and she wasn’t happy. The representatives – two each from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the Zionist Federation of Australia and the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council – had just held a friendly meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, a powerbroker in Labor’s Right faction and solid supporter of Israel.

They came out feeling relieved. “The message was: I’ve got your back,” one member of the delegation recalls.

The meeting with Wong at Parliament House was less pleasant.

“So how’s this going to go?” Wong said tersely as the meeting began, according to sources familiar with the encounter not authorised to speak publicly. “How long will it take you to leak this meeting?”

Australian Jewish leaders say Penny Wong was angry when they met at Parliament House.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Wong’s ire was directed at Joel Burnie, executive manager of the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC). Blasting him in front of the delegation, Wong accused Burnie of leaking details to the media about her chief of staff Tom Mooney’s discussions with Jewish leaders ahead of the government’s decision to no longer recognise west Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Almost a year had passed since Labor’s chaotic reversal on west Jerusalem – initially revealed via a change to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade website – but Wong had neither forgiven nor forgotten.

“It was very tense,” one participant recalls of the meeting.

“She was so angry. We walked out shocked,” says another.

The fiery meeting in Parliament House, which has not been reported until now, was just a taste of the hostility that would come to define the government’s relationship with Israel and parts of the Australian Jewish community.

Like a pot of water simmering on a stove, the Australia-Israel relationship has become increasingly heated over the past year. That tension boiled over last Saturday when Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used a social media post to essentially blame the Albanese government for the Adass Israel synagogue arson attack in Melbourne and accuse Labor of adopting “extreme anti-Israel” positions at the United Nations.

Australia had long been one of Israel’s most reliable international supporters; now it was being singled out for scathing criticism.

“It is no secret that the relationship between the Jewish community and the government is more strained than it has ever been,” says Zionist Federation of Australia president Jeremy Leibler, who is regarded as having strong connections with the government.

Colin Rubenstein, from the more conservative AIJAC, says: “The relationship is probably the worst it’s ever been by some distance.”

Albanese’s response to the surge in antisemitism has come under fierce scrutiny, with accusations that he should have moved faster to visit the Adass Israel synagogue and establish a national antisemitism law enforcement taskforce. Wong, meanwhile, is widely seen as the driving force behind Australia’s changing stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict at the United Nations. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton this week called on Albanese to “rein in” his foreign minister, promoting the view she is calling the shots on foreign policy.

When Labor came to power, pro-Israel groups believed Wong was someone they could work with – even if they would sometimes disagree. Yes, she was from the Labor Left and had backed inserting support for Palestinian recognition into Labor’s national platform. But she was a pragmatist who had worked to build ties with the Jewish community. In 2014, she travelled on an AIJAC study tour of Israel and the Palestinian territories. In a speech to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry a year later she highlighted Labor’s “long-standing and enduring” ties to Israel, which go back to Labor foreign minister Doc Evatt’s key role in the UN Partition Plan that created the Jewish state.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visits Adass Israel synagogue in Melbourne on Tuesday.Credit: Justin McManus

Despite the tense meeting ahead of last year’s Labor national conference, Jewish leaders credited Wong for blocking a left-wing push to put a deadline on Australian recognition of a Palestinian state. The deliberately vague existing wording – that recognition would be an “important priority” for Labor – remained. The outcome was “positive, given the circumstances”, Rubenstein said.

Two months later, Hamas terrorists stormed from Gaza into Israel, launching a killing spree that led to an estimated 1200 deaths. Israel responded by launching a ferocious war on the militant group that has killed almost 45,000 people in Gaza and continues more than a year later. The high civilian casualty toll sparked major pro-Palestine marches in cities around the world and renewed attention on the idea of a two-state solution. The International Criminal Court also issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu to face war crimes charges over the way Israel has conducted the war. In Australia, antisemitic incidents have skyrocketed, with Jewish Australians facing threats for the actions of a government on the other side of the world. The government has responded by appointing special envoys for antisemitism and Islamophobia this year.

Since the government dramatically backed a ceasefire in Gaza last December, it has become common for Australia to vote against Israel in high-profile UN votes. Previously, merely abstaining was seen as a major break with Israel. The shift is significant: when Australia backed a UN motion last week calling for Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza as soon as possible it was overturning a position it had maintained since 2001.

“We don’t always get everything we want,” a spokeswoman for Wong said. “But if, on balance, we believe the resolution will contribute to peace and a two-state solution, we will vote for it.”

Amin Saikal, an expert on Middle East politics at the Australian National University, credits Wong for moving Australia into the international mainstream. He points out that 156 other countries – including Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Japan – also supported last week’s resolution.“I don’t think the government has done anything extraordinary,” he says. “You cannot have a two-state solution if you only recognise one side of the conflict.”

Penny Wong visited a Palestinian refugee clinic in Jordan while visiting the Middle East, but did not go to the site of the October 7 attacks.Credit:

Government sources say Wong has tried to steer a careful middle path, avoiding “extreme” policy demands from either side of the debate, including cutting off diplomatic ties with Israel. Many Jewish leaders, however, feel that Wong has become increasingly fixated on Israel as the war in Gaza has continued. Some believe her rhetoric noticeably hardened when Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom was killed in an Israeli drone strike in April.

In a major speech this week in honour of late prime minister Bob Hawke, Wong said Australia expects Israel – like Russia and China – to comply with international law. AIJAC and the Executive Council of Australian Jewry were apoplectic that Wong would link democratic Israel to two authoritarian regimes. The timing of the speech, just three days after the synagogue arson attack, struck some as gratuitous. “The embers were still burning, and she is sticking the boot into Israel,” one Jewish community leader fumed.

Several Jewish community leaders have still not forgiven Wong for declining to visit the October 7 massacre site during a January trip to Israel. Others disparage her efforts to accelerate momentum for a Palestinian state, accusing her of failing to hold the Palestinians accountable for a lack of progress. “She is not the reincarnation of Henry Kissinger,” one community leader scoffs.

The breakdown in relations is personal, not just political. Leaders from two of the nation’s three most prominent pro-Israel groups say they feel increasingly shut out by Wong’s office on foreign policy issues. It’s a change from past Coalition and Labor governments, when they were listened to – and usually got their way. These groups are far more vocal than the Israeli embassy in Canberra, with ambassador Amir Maimon making only rare public interventions.

“Successive governments have in the past consulted our community prior to adopting positions on foreign policy and other issues that affect the Jewish community,” says Alex Ryvchin, co-chief executive of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.

“This government has recently adopted a practice of having a staffer inform us, often at short notice, of a decision, including on critical matters such as on changing the government’s votes at the United Nations and updated travel advisories to Israel … We regard this process as most unsatisfactory.”

The co-chief executive of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, Alex Ryvchin.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

AIJAC’s Rubenstein says that engagement between Wong’s office and his group has “lessened significantly” since October 7 last year and that the government “no longer appears interested in what our community has to say on these issues”.

Leibler does not complain about a lack of consultation, but is critical of the outcomes. “The government’s response in the aftermath of October 7 was strong and principled, but [over time] we have seen a departure from principled foreign policy at the expense of an important ally, and a failure to meaningfully address the explosion of extremism in Australia.”

A spokesperson for Wong says the government understands “what a deeply distressing time this is for Australia’s Jewish community”.

“Government ministers engage regularly with the full spectrum of Jewish community advocacy groups, as we do with many other community groups,” the spokesperson said.

Australia’s changing stance at the UN has been noted by Israel’s critics, as well as supporters. The Palestinian Authority’s top representative in Australia, Izzat Abdulhadi, this week expressed “deep appreciation” for “the positive trajectory of the Australian government”. Bilal Rauf, the long-time spokesperson for the Australian National Imams Council, said: “It appears to be part of a gradual shift in response to Israel’s intransigent behaviour and disavowal of international law and legal institutions.”

Former Labor foreign minister Bob Carr, a staunch advocate of Palestinian recognition, says: “Netanyahu leads a government packed with ethnonationalists and settlers. What is a social democratic Labor government supposed to do?”

In Israel, it’s not just Australia’s UN voting record that has antagonised the Netanyahu government. The decision not to grant former justice minister Ayelet Shaked a visa to travel to Australia last month hit a particularly sharp nerve. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar called in Australia’s ambassador to Israel, Ralph King, for an official reprimand, accusing Australia of succumbing to “baseless blood libels spread by the pro-Palestinian lobby in Australia”.

Mark Sofer, who served as Israel’s ambassador to Australia from 2017 to 2020, says the visa rejection was “perplexing and counterproductive”.

It allowed critics to argue that the Albanese government was “not well disposed to Israel”, he says.

“Even for those of us who disagree with Shaked’s politics, she is not at all extreme right, a rabble-rouser or a troublemaker,” Sofer says from his home in Jerusalem.

In the lead-up to Shaked’s planned visit to Australia for a conference, the head of the nation’s biggest pro-Palestine lobby group, Nasser Mashni, met with Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke to argue against her being allowed to visit Australia. His group, the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN), also provided Burke’s office with a dossier containing her most problematic statements.

Burke later said he declined her visa application because she posed a risk to social cohesion, referencing inflammatory comments in which she called for the Gazan city of Khan Younis to be turned into a soccer field. Burke also blocked right-wing American provocateur Candace Owens from receiving a visa, in part because of antisemitic statements.

The head of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, Nasser Mashni.Credit: Wayne Taylor

Mashni says Palestinian lobby groups like APAN “are gaining some access to decision-makers, but it’s nowhere near the well-documented influence the Israel lobby has enjoyed”.

“Pro-Israel groups’ outrage over losing their access-all-areas pass only exposes their longstanding sense of entitlement, now challenged by growing awareness of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza,” he says. “Israel’s far-right turn has diminished its bipartisan appeal, and the pro-Israel lobby’s grip is starting to loosen, and rightly so.”

Michael Chaitow, executive director of the progressive New Israel Fund Australia, says it is wrong for Netanyahu to blame Australian government policy for the rise in antisemitism. “It is possible to be a friend of the Jewish people and the Jewish state, whilst criticising the ways in which the Israeli government is behaving,” he says.

Other Jewish leaders say Labor has underestimated the tight bond many Australian Jews feel with Israel, especially following the October 7 massacres. “The question in my mind is whether we are past the point of no return,” the leader of one major Jewish organisation despairs. “Can any semblance of a relationship be salvaged?”

Sofer predicts the Australia-Israel relationship will remain acrimonious even when the war in Gaza ends. “Both governments have established a mutual and negative perception of each other, and I fear that a change of government in Australia, Israel, or both is needed for the relationship to improve,” he says. “Until then, the countries will just need to hang in there and find a way to interact.”

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