Isi Leibler was the original influencer

Without ever entering parliament, this is how Jewish Australian Isi Leibler rescued Israel from its unfair reputation as an outcast nation.

Isi Leibler with then-prime minister Bob Hawke. Leibler had an ability to arrange meetings with the world’s mighty ones.

Isi Leibler was one of the most influential of all Australians in international politics, an unexpected role because he was never a parliamentarian, and never an ambassador nor top civil servant. He was also exceptional because his political base sprang from one of the nation’s smallest ethnic groups, the Jews.

Independent and provocative, he was a one-man political party. A lone warrior, he relied also on close relations, usually cordial, with most of Australia’s long-serving prime ministers. John Howard praises this book. Bob Hawke – he once wished he was born in Israel – was Leibler’s close friend and vital business associate, although their final parting was not amicable.

Isi arrived in Melbourne as a four-year-old in 1939, a few months before the start of World War II. That his maternal grandparents were killed in the Nazi gas chambers at Auschwitz shaped his career, giving him a lifelong sense of mission.

A “rebellious youth” at high school, he found Melbourne University more to his taste and earned high praise from Professor William Macmahon Ball for his final essay in political science. Its subject, of course, was Israel.

Saved from national service by the medical finding that he suffered from “flat feet”, Isi eagerly went overseas in 1957 – just before his father’s sudden death – but initially he was not attracted to Israel. He dismissed Tel Aviv, his landing place, as “a sordid imitation of Melbourne”; and after a stay as spectator in Jerusalem he confided that he no longer wished to become the prime minister of Israel.

The Leibler family’s business was the importing of diamonds, mainly from Antwerp, and Isi might have made his fortune in that field had he not been ultra-adventurous.

After creating in the 1960s the most innovative travel agency perhaps seen in Australia, he entered aviation – fighting and almost losing to Qantas, but surviving to see his creation Jetset go global and make him wealthy.

Isi Leibler in Jerusalem in 2013

Meanwhile, he declared war against anti-Semitism. He persuaded leading Australian communists that their masters in Moscow were excluding the local Jews from their goal of universal brotherhood. Often persecuted, the Russian Jews – some 2 per cent of the population – had not been allowed to emigrate. Isi boldly and successfully urged the Australian government to champion the Russian Jews. After the United Nations and global Jewish organisations took up the crusade, more than 150,000 were allowed in the 1970s to emigrate – before the ban was imposed again. The full tide of emigration did not flow until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

 Leibler’s ability to arrange meetings with the world’s mighty ones is visible in photographs scattered among the pages of this biography. Here he is, with his intense eyes and dashing moustache, standing with Indira Gandhi in 1981 and Imelda Marcos a year later. He greets President Reagan in 1985, Mrs Thatcher in 1987, and Jesse Jackson in 1992. It is the author, Professor Suzanne Rutland’s belief – at present the evidence is not conclusive – that Isi was vital in persuading China and India to extend full diplomatic recognition to Israel. Without doubt, he did much to rescue Israel from its unfair reputation in the world’s forums as an outcast nation.

Isi Leibler Book Cover copy

His memory of events and conversations, with the help of a masterly filing system and one of the largest private libraries ever assembled in Australia, was photographic. His writings were lucid and sometimes truculent, and his energy was exceptional, especially in light of the fact that at the height of his career he slept merely five hours a night.  

During many of the periods when he was travelling alone he relied heavily on his favourably-connected wife Naomi, whose father was the Chief Rabbi of the Great Synagogue in Sydney. Though Isi had a long disagreement with one brother, his extended family was crucial for him. When finally he went to live in Jerusalem, his own mother and Naomi’s mother were with him, one living to 103 and the other to 105.

An expert on Jewish history, Professor Rutland is overall an admirer after devoting years of research to him. According to the last paragraph of her very big book, Isi Leibler “has been a passionate, pugnacious voice, guided by integrity”.

He died in Jerusalem just when the book was completed.

 Geoffrey Blainey’s Short History of the World has been translated into many languages.

Lone Voice: The Wars of Isi Leibler

By Suzanne Rutland

Hybrid Publishers, 680pp, $49.99