Aaron Patrick: In Australia, warriors fight daily over Israel, Iran and Palestine with vicious words

In the Gaza Strip Hamas and the Israel Defence Forces fight each other with bullets, rockets and missiles. In Australia, Labor identity Bob Carr and Jewish leader Jeremy Leibler wage a war on X. The stakes are lower, but the debate in Australia over one of the world’s great, intractable conflicts is fought with a passion, vitriol and intensity that suggests the distant conflict has firmly rooted itself on Australian land. Conducted mainly but not exclusively on social media, the fight has made and shattered reputations, created life-long enemies and formed unlikely alliances. As his party tries to contain tensions across society, Mr Carr has emerged as one of the most influential protagonists. The foreign minister in 2012 and 2013 and NSW premier from 1995 to 2005, Mr Carr in recent days has escalated criticism of Israel, using language that has surprised even hardened Jewish leaders. On Tuesday he accused “war criminals in the IDF” of bombing a Gaza hospital because they “heard it had a children’s ward” which made it an “irresistible target”. “More courtrooms will have to be built in The Hague for eventual trials which promise to be bigger than Tokyo,” he wrote, a reference to the prosecution of Japanese civilian and military leaders after World War II. ‘Wrong side of history’ In return Mr Leibler, whose position as president of the Zionist Federation of Australia makes him a prominent Jew, accused Mr Carr of a “classic antisemitic trope” targeting “not just the Australian Jewish community but the Australian way of life”. Mr Carr is on “the wrong side of history,” he wrote back on X. The conflict between the two goes beyond tweets. Mr Leibler has complained about being targeted by NSW Labor Party colleagues of Mr Carr’s who used a state parliamentary inquiry into anti-Semitism to criticise Jewish representatives. Several of those MPs joined Mr Carr in the big pro-Palestinian march over the Sydney Harbour Bridge on August 3, which was led by a photograph of Iranian leader Ali Khamenei. Mr Carr might feel aggrieved too. He has watched the pro-Israel lobby pursue critics of the Jewish state, including broadcaster and Palestinian advocate Antoinette Lattouf, who a judge found she was fired by the ABC for her political beliefs. Mr Carr asked The Nightly “how many more children must die before he [Mr Leibler] condemns Netanyahu and the IDF?” Mr Liebler’s position, like most Jewish leaders, is that Hamas can end the war if it stops fighting. Backing Iran Tuesday’s news Iran was likely behind attacks on a Melbourne synagogue and a Sydney kosher cafe re-ignited feuds festering for years. One of Australia’s main experts on Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps - she was the terrorist group’s prisoner for two years - academic Kylie Gilbert-Moore complained to The Nightly about a pro-Iran antagonist, Tim Anderson who accused her of being an Israeli spy when she was released in 2020. Fired from Sydney University in 2019 for anti-Jewish statements, Mr Anderson on Tuesday wrote on his website that “recent history tells us that Mossad and the CIA are almost certainly responsible” for the attacks on the Adass Israel Synagogue and Lewis Continental Kitchen security services have attributed to the IRGC. While the views, expressed under the name of an organisation he calls the Centre for Counter Hegemonic Studies, may seem from the fringe, they are consistent with a pattern of pro-Iran commentary. With 221,000 X followers, the Sydney-based Mr Anderson can reach almost as many people on the site as top ABC journalist Laura Tingle. On Wednesday he argued Iran protects its Jewish population from religious discrimination. While Iran’s estimated 10,000 Jews are not openly persecuted, according to Israeli press reports, they are prohibited from any contact with Israel, which the regime has vowed to destroy. “Tim Anderson is a known contributor to Iranian state TV,” Dr Gilbert-Moore told The Nightly, and “we should not be surprised that he has fallen into line behind the official Iranian regime narrative on the IRGC’s sponsorship of antisemitic terror attacks on Australian soil.” The right corner In a twist experts have likened to a horseshoe, some of Mr Anderson’s leftist views are shared by right-wing figures. They include NSW MP and former Labor leader Mark Latham, who, amid fighting abuse allegations from a former girlfriend, has decided to attack NSW’s Labor premier, Chris Minns, for doing too much to protect the state’s Jewish community. “It’s quite simple: the Jewish Lobby sucked up to Minns, got to his pretty-boy ego and he fell for their censorship agenda,” he wrote on X Wednesday. “He changed domestic laws to deal with a foreign problem.” Mr Latham argued that now two attacks have been established as originating overseas, a law introduced in February to protect people accessing synagogues and other religious buildings had proven unnecessary. He did not mention the that latest figures available recorded 2062 anti-Jewish incidents from October, 2023 to September last year, ranging from verbal abuse to assault.