Leader in fight for indigenous Australians’ rights is on board for denial of those rights in Israel and Palestine

“Australian Jew working to end discrimination against indigenous peoples,” reads a proud headline from the Jewish Telegraph Agency (JTA) today, January 22, 2012. The article reports that a “high-profile Jewish Australian cited the effects of the Holocaust on his family as a driving force in his work to help ‘end the exclusion’ of Australia’s Indigenous peoples from the nation’s constitution”

The “Jewish Australian” is “Melbourne lawyer Mark Leibler, co-chair of the Panel on Constitutional Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples”, who has spent years fighting for the rights of the indigenous people of Australia. JTA quotes Leibler from a recent op-ed: “[R]acism doesn’t just belong in another place or time. It casts a shadow here in Australia because it is still part of our nation’s constitution.”

“It was racism and its off-shoot Nazism that caused my parents to flee Belgium in 1939,” Leibler continues. “It was racism that saw my maternal grandparents murdered in Auschwitz. My family has never forgotten our debt to Australia. We owe our freedom, prosperity and the very lives of our children and grandchildren to this country. For me, one way I can help repay this debt is by working to change our constitution for the better.”

“As far as the constitution is concerned,” Leibler laments, indigenous people “are invisible: no mention of their heritage and cultures; no mention of their place as the first inhabitants of this country and as the world’s oldest continuing cultures.” He adds that this deliberate omission and denial reflected “the values and beliefs of the time it was drafted. The founding fathers deserve our gratitude and respect. But their perspectives – including those on race – were of the 19th century, not the 21st.”

Leibler’s passionate fight for equal, constitutional rights for the indigenous in Australia is a just and noble cause to be sure, but a closer look at Leibler is illuminating. Leibler, who according to his own website is “one of Australia’s leading tax lawyers and corporate strategists,” has deep and powerful connections to Israel. Indeed, half of his “extended bio” [PDF] is dedicated to celebrating his Zionist credentials:

Mark is also Deputy Chairman of the National Australia Bank Yachad Scholarship Fund, which enables Australian scholars of diverse backgrounds – including indigenous scholars – to study in Israel and to return with ideas and experiences of advantage to Australia. His 2006 essay ‘Crossing the Wilderness: Jews and Reconciliation’, published in New Under Sun – Jewish Australians on Religion, Politics & Culture, examined the parallels between the Jewish and Indigenous Australian experience and considered the importance of land to both cultures.

Mark is deeply involved in Jewish affairs, occupying senior leadership roles in several Australian and international Jewish bodies. In Australia, he holds the positions of National Chairman of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, Life Chairman of the United Israel Appeal of Australia and Governor of the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce. He is also a Patron of the Victorian Chapter of the Australian Friends of Tel Aviv University. Mark served for ten years as President of the Zionist Federation of Australia and for six years as the President of the United Israel Appeal of Australia. Internationally, Mark recently completed his term as Chairman of the World Board of Trustees of Keren Hayesod – United Israel Appeal, serves on the executive of the Jewish Agency for Israel, and holds office as a Governor of both Tel Aviv University and the University of Haifa in Israel.

Leibler’s bio also includes accolades he received from Australian government officials including former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (who once declared of himself, “support for Israel and the Jewish community is in my DNA”). Another former Prime Minister, John Howard, said this in tribute to Leibler: “I want to salute his contribution to Jewish causes within his own country and also around the world. Mark is a single-minded, committed, dedicated Jew, a man who in every way has demonstrated himself as being a wonderful Australian citizen.”

Leibler’s position on the Executive of the Jewish Agency is instructive. The Agency, formed in 1929 by the 16th Zionist Congress, was and is still tasked with increasing Jewish immigration to and the continued colonization of historic Palestine.

Keren Hayesod – United Israel Appeal (KH-UIA) is the leading fundraising agent for the Jewish Agency. According to the website for its Australian chapter, of which Leibler is Life Chairman, “[s]ince its inception in 1920, KH-UIA has assisted over three million Jews to make Aliyah and has helped them to find their way in Israeli society,” and boasts, “KH-UIA is the main institution for financing the Zionist Organization’s activities in Eretz Israel” which it deems the “ancestral homeland” of all Jews worldwide. The indigenous people of Palestine – Palestinians – are conspicuously absent from all Agency and UIA literature.

The following image containing three vintage UIA posters, one stating “Welcome Jabotinsky,” is featured on the website of the United Israel Appeal of Australia:

(Incidentally, Vladmir Jabotinsky, in his 1923 Zionist manifesto, The Iron Wall, wrote, “Zionism is a colonization adventure and therefore it stands or it falls by the question of armed force. It is important to speak Hebrew but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot – or else I am through with playing at colonization,” adding, “Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population.”)

The indigenous rights of the Palestinian people are directly anathema to the mission of both of the Jewish Agency and the United Israel Appeal. One wonders what Leibler thinks of the 1937 letter Israeli founding father David Ben-Gurion wrote to the then-head of the Jewish Agency in Palestine, Moshe Sharett (later, the second Israeli Prime Minister after Ben-Gurion), in which he stated, “Were I an Arab…an Arab politically, nationally minded…I would rebel even more vigorously, bitterly, and desperately against the immigration that will one day turn Palestine and all its Arab residents over to Jewish rule.”

The following year, Ben-Gurion told the Jewish Agency Executive, “I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see in it anything immoral.”

Moshe Sharett himself wrote in 1914, “We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it…if we cease to look upon our land, the Land of Israel, as ours alone and we allow a partner into our estate – all content and meaning will be lost to our enterprise.”

Just today, during a speech at the Jerusalem Symposium in Memory of Avi Schaefer, Natan Sharansky, current head of the Jewish Agency, said, “The State of Israel is the realization of Herzl’s vision of an answer to anti-Semitism.”

After Herzl came Ben-Gurion, who viewed the Zionist project as the common mission of the Jewish people.Ben-Gurion’s vision came to fruition through the Jewish Agency, and it has been a success.”

So, what is to be made of Leibler’s defense of indigenous rights at home in Australia while simultaneously working with groups that explicitly deny such rights to indigenous people in Leibler’s beloved Israel? Are we to believe that Leibler considers Jewish Americans, Jewish Europeans, Jewish Ethiopians, Jewish Yemenis, and Jewish Australians to be the indigenous people of Palestine?

This post first appeared on Nima Shirazi’s site, Wide Asleep in America.