Pearls and Irritations

Like heated milk boiling over in a saucepan, the sad Bankstown Public Hospital nurses’ affair has brought to a public head a long-simmering debate, rarely mentioned in polite company, about the extent and legitimacy of Zionist Israel’s interference in Australian political and public life and in our most vital community institutions like national broadcasters or health systems . This is a debate, however awkward, that Australia needs to have.

Journalism is said to be the first draft of history. The writer of this essay has been “in the thick of it” for the last 72 hours. I have been engaged in fierce keyboard warfare sparked off by the case of the immediate sacking on 12 February of two Bankstown Hospital nurses, both Australian citizens of Islamic faiths and backgrounds. They had been entrapped by a skillful Israeli online influencer into making foolish anti-Israeli statements, which were in clear transgression of their professional duty as health professionals to treat and be seen to treat all patients equally, regardless of who they are or where they come from.

My biases

First to declare my biases. I am proud of my partly Jewish and partly Irish Catholic ethnic background. I cherish my citizenship of multicultural Australia, my country of birth to which I owe my first loyalty. I regard all Australians as my equal fellow citizens, irrespective of their birth, ethnicity or religion.

I have come over recent years — consolidated by my witnessing close-up online the horrifying genocidal actions carried out by the state of Israel in and around Gaza and the West Bank over the past sixteen months since 7 October 2023 — to view Zionist Israel as a criminal state that has forfeited its right to exist in its present form and with its present apartheid ideology, laws and actions.

I pray that this criminal state might be peacefully replaced by one multicultural state exercising sovereignty over all the disputed Israeli and Palestinian occupied territories: a state that will offers equal human rights under one set of laws to all its citizens and residents, regardless of their ethnicity or religion or previous citizenships or residencies. I believe that a peaceful transition to such a state is possible despite the genocidal horrors of the past 80 years. European history offers many examples of reconciliation of communities after the bitterest of conflicts. Such reconciliation usually — not always — requires a supervising outside power or coalition of powers to help manage and enforce the process.

I now regard Zionism as a pernicious political ideology, a perversion of Judaism which is one of the world’s great humanitarian religions. In my view, the promises of the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917 were, and continue to be, betrayed by the Zionist settler colonists and their descendants, especially since the establishment on 14 May 1948 of the apartheid-based state of Israel. This is a shameful history, now better understood internationally since the traumatic events of 7 October 2023 and afterwards.

I have come to a better understanding since 7 October 2023 of how Australian Zionists, both as organised community groups and informally as well-connected individuals, are exercising powerful foreign interference on behalf of the Zionist state of Israel in Australian political life and public institutions.

I believe it is important now to expose such interferences which collectively have come to threaten the happiness and harmony of our multicultural Australian democracy. In this sense, Zionist Israel’s wars and oppressions against its neighbours have spilled over into faraway Australia.

We can no longer politely pretend to ignore this foreign interference in our institutions and politics. We need to face up to it and deal with it according to our democratic values, or we are at risk of undermining the multicultural harmony of our country.

The recent political context

In a Facebook post I sent out very early on Wednesday 12 February 2025 — how long ago it seems now, and just hours before the Bankstown Hospital events first became known to me through my social media — I wrote as follows. I rely on informed readers to fill in the detail which for space reasons I cannot spell out – I have made some explanatory additions in square brackets:

“Am I the only person who sees how a lot of events/issues relating to Zionist improper influence in multicultural Australia are coming to a head now at around the same time ? In no particular order …

“The Adass Synagogue bombing [in Melbourne on 6 December 2024] by expert saboteurs, unsolved after three months [sic] police investigation;

“The unsolved crude graffiti incidents against Jewish schools etc in Sydney;

“The explosives-laden [abandoned] van in Dural. Unsolved;

“[Attorney-General Mark] Dreyfus’s paying-homage visits to Zionist Israel and Auschwitz [in Poland] ;

“Australia’s backing -away from UN votes reiterating support for ICJ and ICC criminal charges against Zionist Israel;

“The [ongoing] Antoinette Lattouf case, looking more and more like a train wreck for the Zionist lobbies;

“The crude Zionist/Daily Telegraph attempt yesterday [this event took place on 11 February 2025] to provoke [and record] a false flag antisemitic attack at the Cairo Cafe in Sydney’s inner west (fortunately foiled by quick-thinking cafe staff );

“The federal laws on antisemitism [tough so-called ‘Hate Crime’ laws that were passed in Canberra on 6 February 2025, including mandatory minimum sentences for terror offences and displaying hate symbols ], already running into trouble;

“Jayson Gillham’s [ongoing] case against the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and their Leibler family lawyers ;

“Mark Leibler’s online outburst [in his X account on 8 February 2025] against anti-Zionist Jewish Australians ;

The Mary Kostakidis ongoing case, etc.”

My Facebook post concluded :

“We are seeing a test of strength across many fronts for and against the Zionist lobby which has hitherto gone unchallenged at the level of political and media elites. Max Blumenthal of The Gray Zone has his finger on the pulse of this. He sees this as internationally important.” [Max Blumenthal, a well-known independent American journalist, posted on his X page on 26 January 2025, “Australian police are investigating whether ‘overseas actors or individuals’ are paying local criminals to carry out antisemitic crimes in the country’, and see the subsequent commentary thread on Blumenthal’s X account].”

The Bankstown Hospital nurses’ events

There is still no clarity on when the crucial online video conversation between the two Bankstown Hospital nurses and the Israeli online influencer Max Veifer was recorded (Sky News says “earlier in the week”, which puts it in a timeframe between 9 and 12 February), or when and how the edited video spread like wildfire into Australian media and politicians’ offices. I first became aware of it on my social media feeds during 12 February. The first released video was followed by a slightly longer video supplied to police and to the media by the Veifer production team. They claimed this was now the complete unedited video, but clearly it is not (see below).

We have seen since 12 February these edited videos in which the two nurses had a chat with Veifer, who lives and works out of Israel, on the online chat entertainment program ‘Chatroulette ‘ in which he rings people around the world allegedly at random. We don’t know how the two nurses were invited and accepted an invitation to chat with Veifer in the Bankstown Hospital on a work break while they were wearing their working uniforms. We don’t know how they were encouraged to take part, but it seems very clear now that they were in some way entrapped.

Veifer, a personable young man, presents himself as a Borat-style amusing and sympathetic person (“Borat”, played by actor Sacha Baron Cohen, was a very popular comedy show in around 2005), and as an engaging chatty young Israeli who enjoys talking to people at random from different countries. I saw another recent clip in which he tried unsuccessfully to entrap two young women from South Lebanon into making anti-Hezbollah statements. They saw through him and he reacted harshly.

The two Bankstown Hospital nurses were sitting ducks for Veifer. Trustingly entering into what they thought was the lightheartedly ironic spirit of the show, they were quick to volunteer to Veifer that they hated Israel and Israelis, and they would not treat Israeli patients. One boasted — clearly an ill- judged joke in bad taste — that he had killed Israeli patients.

The video cut off abruptly when Veifer asked his next follow-up question, “What about Jewish patients?”

In what is still only a two-and-a-half-minute publicly circulated video, we are clearly only seeing a tightly edited snippet. There may be more surprises to come.

NSW police have impounded and are studying the CCTV of the video conversation. This will tell us how long the conversation was — surely more than two-and-a-half-minutes — and the expressions and body language of the nurses during it. I don’t know whether it will provide any audio of what they said, but it is nevertheless forensically valuable in establishing the full truth about the conversation.

All hell broke loose as soon as the offending video became public in Australia. The hospital suspended the two nurses. Urgent police investigations got underway. Relevant ministers and the nurses’ union fiercely condemned the two nurses and promised they would never be allowed to work in Australian hospitals again.

Sky News’ leading presenter Sharri Markson quickly broadcast a very sympathetic video interview with Veifer. She effusively praised him for his public service to Australia in bringing to light the alleged “very real problem of antisemitism in Australian hospitals”. They agreed this needs to be investigated vigorously, because patients are vulnerable in public hospitals to staff who might put their politics ahead of their duties. Veifer emphasised how similar Australians and Israelis are, how peace loving Israel is, and how we should be better friends.

The two now distraught nurses are under close medical observation. One, a young woman born in Australia, is ethnically a Palestinian who has reportedly lost 70 relatives killed under Israeli attacks. She is reported to be a highly regarded and well-liked nurse. The other, a young Afghan man, came to Australia as a child refugee, obtained citizenship and his nursing qualification .

My assessment

Though I feel great pity for the two nurses’ self-inflicted personal agony, this is not my subject here. I want to offer a hypothesis how this event might have come about, and its political significance from here on .

In intelligence community language, I consider it highly probable that Veifer is a Mossad agent of influence, or a trained agent of Hasbara (with the aim to encourage good thoughts about Zionist Israel). He is just too good at his job of persuading gullible people to like and trust him. It is clear to me that the two nurses had been previously profiled and targeted. It could not have been an accidental random phone call; of course not . Clearly the nurses were scoped out. It looks in retrospect like a flawless operation, swiftly and efficiently planned and carried out at all stages including the Markson interview .

What were the objectives? I submit, once again with high probability, there were at least three.

Firstly, to generate more mistrust and mutual alienation between Islamic Australians and other Australians. The failed provocation the day before at the Cairo Cafe had the same objective. Possibly other as yet unsolved allegedly antisemitic crimes have a similar purpose.

Secondly, to instil fear into non- Zionist Jewish Australians, to encourage them to retreat into the alleged greater safety of the Zionist-influenced parts of the Australian Jewish community. Here it is worth noting that the Hadass Synagogue firebombed in Melbourne in December belonged to a non-Zionist Jewish orthodox community.

Thirdly, to strengthen the political influence of Australian Zionists in Australian political and media elites, and to remind those elites of the power of the Zionist lobby in Australia .

In all three regards, the Bankstown Hospital nurses affair, though it still has some ways to run, can be counted as an Israeli Zionist political success, at a moment when the Albanese Government’s political commitment to Israel might have been thought by the Netanyahu Government to be perhaps weakening. Australia is an important political ally whose support Zionist Israel would not want to lose. This is an important and testing moment in Australia-Israeli relations.