Pearls and Irritations

When I began editing Quadrant with Peter Coleman in 1989, my co-editorship was soon overwhelmed by the most unpleasant controversy of my life, at least thus far.

Peter Coleman suggested that we should publish two of my Melbourne Herald columns in each issue. For April, one of the columns I chose concerned the most recent development in the Hawke government’s “war crimes” legislation. Not only were the war crimes that might be prosecuted limited in time to the Second World War, in a last-moment amendment they were also limited geographically to what one minister, Michael Tate, called the continent of Europe “left of the Urals”. It was generally believed that this amendment had been introduced in case the war crimes legislation interfered with the emerging Japanese tourist trade.

As it happened, the passage of the amended war crimes legislation coincided with the death of Emperor Hirohito, the Japanese war leader, who was actively responsible for troops involved in the murder of vast numbers of Chinese – according to the recent estimate by Francis Pike in his Hirohito’s War, 20 million – and for the executions and torture of large numbers of Australian prisoners of war, captured by the Japanese following the fall of Singapore. While preparing to prosecute a handful of obscure Eastern Europeans involved in Hitler’s war against the Jews, the Hawke government was preparing to send to Tokyo a high-level delegation to mourn the death of this major war criminal.

My brief column explored the paradoxical presence of moral absolutism in Europe and moral ultra-pragmatism in Asia. “Most Australians’ direct experience of war crimes stems from the Burma Railway and not Auschwitz,” I wrote. “Judgment has deserted a Government which thinks it can ask Australians to mourn Hirohito and, simultaneously, put some local East European SS guard on trial.”

By now almost everyone in the Jewish community following the debate about the war crimes legislation was probably aware of the reasons for my opposition. In addition, many involved in the cultural politics of the Jewish community must have known of my engagement, in thought and in writing, with what I regarded as the unique evil of the Holocaust.

And yet Quadrant received the following extraordinary letter from the late Bill Rubinstein, a New York historian with an academic post at Deakin University in Melbourne, and a man for whom courtesy was an unknown human quality. Rubinstein’s letter-to-the-editors began thus:

In his column, “Left of the Urals” … Robert Manne makes one of the most obscene false analogies ever to appear in Quadrant; indeed, one would have to turn to a racist journal of the neo-fascist extreme right to find a similar point in print … The “minor European war criminals” whom Manne weeps over may well have murdered 500 Jewish (and other) women and children in cold blood … Imperial Japan at its worst never engaged in genocide and never attempted to murder a whole people … Indeed concerning the Nazi genocide of the Jews, it is well-known that Japan pointedly refused to kill any of the Jews living in its domains … I simply despair for the future of a once-great magazine … It is exceedingly strange that a man whose grand-parents were murdered by the Nazis should be so keen to see that their murderers get off scot-free, is it not?

There have been very many unpleasant things written about me over the years, but nothing can compare with Rubinstein’s letter, which we published in Quadrant in June 1989.

I had believed for a long time that my mentor and friend Frank Knopfelmacher, overcome by the tragedy of twentieth-century Europe – by the almost unprecedented evil of both Nazism and Stalinism – was gradually losing his mind. The collapse of the Soviet Union afforded him no pleasure, as I thought it should. No one grasped the illegitimacy of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellite states as accurately as he. Needing a formidable enemy, Knopfelmacher turned to the group he believed now ran the show in the United States: neo-conservative, Zionist-inclined American Jews.

It was in this frame of mind that Knopfelmacher now sprang to my defence against Rubinstein with his own letter. He was happy we had published Rubinstein’s letter because it provided “an example of the kind of verbal bullying and attempted terror with which the ‘war-crimes’ racket has been shielded against critical evaluation”. Knopfelmacher argued that the consequence and purpose of the war crimes racket was ethnic destabilisation in Australia, targeting “Communist bloc ethnics and the rapidly diminishing holocaust survivors”.

Knopfelmacher argued that the racket was engineered by the Likud government in Israel and powerful forces in both the United States and Australia. He hinted that some of the leading actors were Mossad agents: “Sudetenethnics attached as a fifth column to overseas fatherlands, and at the beck and call of their political directives”. “Pollard” – an American Jew who had spied for Israel and was currently in prison – “was only the tip of an iceberg”: “[T]he transformation of the Jewish diaspora into a reservoir of political auxiliaries for a country other than the one in which they live and prosper, and from which they neither came and to which they do not intend to go is a historically attested road to strife and ruin.”

It took me far too long to realise that Knopfelmacher’s letter was primarily aimed at the most powerful figure in the Australian Jewish community, Isi Leibler, once a close political friend of Knopfelmacher’s – in the campaign to allow Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel – but now a bitter enemy. Among the four letters attacking Knopfelmacher in the September issue of Quadrant, one was from Leibler, then the president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.

Leibler claimed that the Jewish community almost unanimously supported the war crimes legislation. He would have preferred it if it dealt with all crimes against humanity and not only those connected with the Holocaust. The claim that the Jews were seeking vengeance and not justice – something Knopfelmacher had never and would never have argued – was plainly anti-Semitic. Leibler pointed out that he had discussions with the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, and other political leaders three or four times a year. The question of the Australian war crimes legislation had never been discussed. He objected most strenuously to the term used by Knopfelmacher: “pseudo ethnic fuhrers”. “Did nobody at Quadrant blanch at the use of such language?” Knopfelmacher’s letter might have been published in a journal under the “primatur” of the Stalinist cultural commissar, Zhdanov. In addition, Leibler pointed out that he “fully” endorsed “the views (if not the style)” of Bill Rubinstein’s letter. And (just in case we hadn’t noticed) he was “appalled and disgusted”.

I came under great pressure in 1989 to denounce Knopfelmacher. I did not. I could not. I did realise, however, that I could not publish him, in his present state of mind, on American Jews or Israel, and I wrote to him that I could no longer listen to his nightly telephonic diatribes against the Jewish American conservative intelligentsia (some of whom, not long after, as neo-conservatives, were critical in leading the United States into the catastrophic Iraq invasion).

On August 11, 1989, The Australian Jewish News published a 4,000-word analysis of the “Quadrant Controversy” by the journalist Michael Gawenda, a current defender of Israel’s behaviour in Gaza, that on December 1 2024 a former Israeli Minister of Defence, Moshe Yaalon, described with complete accuracy as involving the perpetration of war crimes and ethnic cleansing. Gawenda accepted the false Rubinstein claim that because I had not discussed (in an 800-word article) the difference between genocide and war crimes, I had indeed equated Hitler’s Holocaust and Hirohito’s war crimes. More importantly, he criticised me for publishing Knopfelmacher’s letter. The question Gawenda and the Jewish News now raised was whether I was leading Quadrant to anti-Semitism and the racist right?

By now I was becoming angry. In the brief space Lipski allowed for my reply, I pointed out the centrality of the Holocaust to my political thought and to my teaching for many years, and the way in which it had led, naturally, to my work on behalf of refugees from totalitarianism in our own age – the Vietnamese “boat people”.

On August 25, Rubinstein and Leibler were given the last words in the Jewish News. Leibler made it clear that it was I who was leading Quadrant to the racist right. He had known Coleman for many years and had “the highest regard” for him: “Manne’s co-editor … is a man who could not conceivably be regarded as harbouring any trace of antisemitism or racial prejudice.”

Shortly after, Leibler and Rubinstein achieved their greatest success. Without interviewing me or even reading the relevant articles in Quadrant, the journalist, Pamela Bone, wrote an article in The Age that suggested my co-editorship of Quadrant was a sign that racism in Australia was once again on the rise.

In his attack on Knopfelmacher and then me, there was one detail of relevance concerning his relations with Israeli leaders that Leibler omitted. Leibler argued that Knopfelmacher’s claim that some of Australia’s Jewish leaders had “dual loyalties” was plainly anti-Semitic. As Lone Voice, Suzanne Rutland’s 2021 highly sympathetic biography of Isi Leibler reveals, however, while he was the most prominent leader of the Jewish community in Australia, since 1959 Leibler had indeed worked for Israeli intelligence, following a “transformative meeting” with “the legendary Israeli spymaster” Shaul Avigur.

According to Rutland, for decades Leibler “acted unofficially under instructions from Avigur and Levanon [another senior member of Israeli intelligence], becoming a de facto operative for Israel on foreign affairs [my emphasis] … Notably, unlike its American and British counterparts, Australian Jewry remained closely aligned with Israeli government priorities.”

With the publication of Rutland’s Lone Voice it became clear, to my considerable surprise, that the man who dominated Jewish politics in Australia for several decades, who had accused me of racism and anti-semitism, was a covert agent of Israeli intelligence, as Knopfelmacher had claimed.

This is an edited and updated extract from Robert Manne, A Political Memoir: Intellectual Combat in the Cold war and the Culture Wars (La Trobe University Press).

On 11 December 2024, Suzanne Rutland, Professor Emerita, University of Sydney, submitted the following:

The article above is based on a completely inaccurate understanding of the late Isi Leibler’s efforts for Soviet Jewry over the period from 1959-1989. Shaul Avigur, whom Robert Manne refers to, worked with the illegal immigration movement to Palestine known as Mossad L’Aliyah Bet which is where the post-1948 for Israel’s Intelligence Agency name ‘Mossad’ [Institute} came from. However, Isi Leibler did not have any connection with the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, the ‘Mossad’.

In 1953, [the] Israeli Prime Minister asked Avigur to became head of Lishkat Hakesher (Liaison Bureau), later known as Nativ (The Path), which was concerned with rescuing Soviet Jewry in the face of Soviet antisemitism. As is clear with the formation of Lishkat Hakesher, the campaign for Soviet Jewry began in Israel, and therefore, it had to be clandestine during the bitter years of the Cold War in the 1950s and early 1960s to protect the lives of the three million Soviet Jews.

Avigur remained in this role until 1971, when he was succeeded by Nehemiah Levanon. Thus, Nativ was a separate organization which was not connected with the Israeli Intelligence Agency.

There was nothing secret or “covert” about Isi Leibler’s close connection with Lishkat Hakesher/Nativ from 1959 onwards. In the 1970s, Leibler worked closely on Soviet Jewry with Robert (Bob) J. Hawke, when he was president of the ACTU. Hawke continued to be deeply connected with the issue as prime minister, as well as with PM Malcolm Fraser. It is important to note that when I wrote  “acted unofficially under instructions from Avigur and Levanon, becoming a de facto operative for Israel on foreign affairs … Notably, unlike its American and British counterparts, Australian Jewry remained closely aligned with Israeli government priorities” as quoted by Professor Manne, I wrote “foreign affairs”, not secret intelligence.

Hawke, himself, already was also connected to Israeli foreign affairs when Prime Minister Golda Meir requested him to fly to the Soviet Union in 1971 to advocate for the release of Soviet Jews, allowing them to immigrate to join family in Israel, as the Soviets had undertaken in 1967. All this is discussed in the book I wrote with Sam Lipski, “Let My People Go”: The untold story of Australia and the Soviet Jews 1959-89, which received the Prime Minister’s Literary Award (Australian History) in 2016.

Professor Robert Manne AO, FASSA, responded on 1 January 2025:

On 4 December, Pearls and Irritations published an article of mine concerning Isi Leibler’s attempt to portray me as a “racist” and an “anti-semite”, in part because I opposed the Hawke Government’s Nazi War Crimes legislation sponsored by the Jewish leadership and community and in part because when I was co-editor of Quadrant we published a letter of Frank Knopfelmacher’s where he drew attention to the question of the supposed “dual loyalties” of some Australian Jewish leaders. It was some time before I realised he was referring to Isi Leibler.

In her excellent biography, Lone Voice: The Wars of Isi Leibler, Suzanne Rutland writes about the “transformative meeting” in 1959 when Leibler — the most powerful figure in Jewish politics in Australia for many years — met “the legendary Israeli spymaster”, Shaul Avigur. According to Rutland, Leibler “acted unofficially” for several decades “under instructions from Avigur and [his successor Nehemiah] Levanon, becoming a de facto operative for Israel on foreign affairs”. Because of Leibler’s influence, Rutland continues: “[U]nlike its American and British counterparts, Australian Jewry remained closely aligned with Israeli government priorities.”

After reading Professor Rutland, in my Pearls and Irritations article I described Leibler as “a covert agent of Israeli intelligence”, a description to which Rutland takes exception. I was astonished when I learned of Isi Leibler’s decades-long, secret work with two Israeli intelligence officers as an “operative”, operating under their “instructions”. I was also astonished when I learned from Rutland that as a consequence of Leibler’s relations with Avigur and then Levanon and his influence in Australia, unlike their British and American counterparts, Australian Jewry “remained closely aligned with Israeli government priorities”.

Unfortunately, Rutland does not tell us what were the Israeli government foreign policy “priorities” Leibler managed to influence as the leader of Australian Jewry. I suspect most important was his belligerent support for Jewish settlement in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

In her response to my article, Rutland claims that in her description of Leibler as an undercover Israeli intelligence operative on foreign affairs she was referring exclusively to Leibler’s campaign for the right of Soviet Jews to migrate to Israel. If Leibler’s work under the instructions of Avigur and Levanon was exclusively concerned with the migration of Soviet Jews to Israel why does Rutland claim that as a consequence of Leibler’s leadership Australian Jews “remained closely aligned with Israeli government priorities” ie on several questions not only one?

Rutland’s claim that Leibler was concerned with ” ‘foreign affairs’, not “secret intelligence” (her emphasis) reveals a comprehensive misunderstanding of the work of all intelligence services. One of their most important tasks is to use their agents to influence the direction of foreign affairs in their nation’s favour. This vital work is done by those known as “agents of influence”.

Moreover, after the 1950s, according to The Encyclopedia Judaica, Shaul Avigur was concerned not only with the question of the migration of Soviet Jews to Israel but “served in special capacities on behalf of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Prime Minister’s office.” How then does Rutland know that the migration of Soviet Jewry was the only issue where Leibler worked as “a de facto operative” under “the instructions” of Avigur and later Levanon?

It was as a consequence of Rutland’s revelations, that showed that Leibler worked for decades under instructions as an operative for one branch of Israeli intelligence, that I described him in the article as “a covert agent of Israeli intelligence”.

The aptitude of that description can be demonstrated by quoting Rutland’s words but reversing the nations and inventing the names.

Thus: “Following the transformative meeting in 1959 of Ali Fayed, the leader of the Palestinian community in Australia, with the Palestinian Authority’s spymaster, Mohammed Sayad, Fayed acted unofficially under instructions from Sayad, becoming a de facto operative for the Palestinian Authority on foreign affairs. [U]nlike their British and American counterparts, Australian Palestinians remained closely aligned with the Palestinian Authorities’ priorities.”

Is there anyone who would believe the description of Ali Fayed as “a covert agent of Palestinian Authority intelligence” to be unjustified?