Who benefits from an attack on the synagogue in Melbourne?
Dec 12, 2024
In my condemnation of the attack on the synagogue in Melbourne, I said, “This is not acceptable by any means. Unlike the Zionists who kept silent and never condemned Israel’s destruction of 819 mosques and 3 churches in just over a year in Gaza, many of which are historic, Palestinians do not condone attacks against holy places.”
Arabs and Muslims do not attack holy places. During Muslim wars with the Persian and Roman empires, Prophet Mohammad, peace be upon him, and the Caliphs after him, forbade Muslims from attacking all holy places and people who would take refuge in them, and even the cutting of a tree.
Despite the horror the Palestinians were subjected to during the Nakba – the massacres, the destruction of thousands of mosques and churches in the 531 towns and villages the Zionists destroyed in 1948, the ethnic cleansing, and the theft of their wealth and properties… – Palestinians did not commit any act against Jews and the dozens of synagogues in the cities to which they sought refuge, in Damascus, Beirut, Baghdad and Cairo.
This is not the first attack on a place of worship in Australia. Many mosques and Islamic schools have been subjected to similar attacks of arson, vandalism, and racism. Most of these occurred during Liberal governments, but we never saw such a rush to condemn and generosity to protect Australian Muslims, nor prime ministers and ministers visiting mosques and schools that were attacked.
So, going back to the synagogue attack, who is behind it? To answer this question, we must determine who benefits from this criminal act.
The only beneficiary is Israel. Therefore, aside from deranged persons, Mossad agents who have a history of killing Jews and attacking Synagogues when it serves Israel’s interests should not be ruled out.
To give some examples, on 30 June 1924, Professor Jacob De Haan, a noted ultra-Orthodox Jewish leader and prominent anti-Zionist, was assassinated by the Haganah, the largest Jewish terrorist group in Palestine, as he was leaving the synagogue in the Shaare Zedek Hospital in Jerusalem after prayer.[1]
On 25 November 1940, the ship SS Patria was blown up, killing 267 Jews, supposedly in a mass suicide protest against the British decision to transfer Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany to Mauritius instead of admitting them to Palestine.[2] It was not until 1950 that it was discovered that the Haganah had blown up the boat to discredit the British and generate worldwide support for the Zionist project in Palestine.
Once again, on February 24, 1942, the Zionists blew up another Jewish refugee ship, the SS Struma, in the Black Sea, resulting in the loss of 790 lives.
When Arab Jews refused to leave their countries, agents from the Israeli secret service Mossad were sent to disrupt their lives.
The case of forcing Iraqi Jews to leave Iraq is the most well-documented open secret plotted by the newly formed Israeli government under Ben-Gurion in the late 1950s. Mossad agents testified in Israeli courts to having thrown bombs at Jewish synagogues and cafes on the one hand and disseminated fake threatening leaflets in the name of Arabs on the other hand to create division between them and the wider community to force their migration to Israel. The account of Mordechai Ben Porat, one of the Mossad agents who was responsible for several deaths when he tossed hand grenades into the crowded Masouda Shem-Tov synagogue in Baghdad, is one example that is known in Israel.
Naeim Giladi, an Iraqi Jew who is very well familiar with the Israeli terrorist attacks against Iraqi Jewish communities, stated:
“…Jews from Islamic lands did not immigrate willingly to Israel; that, to force them to leave, Jews killed Jews.” In his book “Ben Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah & the Mossad Eliminated Jews,” he documented that Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, also known as Operation Ali Baba, was the airlift of more than 120 thousand Iraqi Jews from Iraq to Israel as a result of Israeli agents’ terrorist attacks against Iraqi Jews.
Moroccan Jewish historians also wrote about Mossad’s terrorist crimes against Moroccan Jews to cause mass immigration. Among them, Michel Knafo, who published his book “Le Mossad et les Secrets du Reseau Juif au Maroc” describing Mossad’s plot to smuggle Moroccan Jews to Israel. He documented eyewitness life stories of the smuggling operation.
There are a number of reasons why Israel may do such a thing.
Following Australia’s voting on 14 November 2024 alongside 158 other countries in favour of a UN resolution supporting the “permanent sovereignty” of Palestinians in the 1967 Occupied Palestinian Territory and joining 157 countries on 4 December in support of a resolution demanding an end to Israel’s unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the Israeli government was fuming, and Prime Minister Netanyahu considered Australia’s support for the UN resolutions would encourage terrorism and anti-Semitism.
Subsequent to the synagogue attack in Melbourne, Netanyahu blamed the Australian government’s support of these UN resolutions for the arson attack. He wrote on X on 7 December 2024, “It is impossible to separate this reprehensible act from the extreme anti-Israeli position of the Labor government in Australia,” he said, “Including the scandalous decision to support the UN resolution calling on Israel ‘to bring an end to its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as rapidly as possible’, and preventing a former Israeli minister from entering the country.”
The Israeli PM’s office reiterated the claim the UN vote would, with certainty, “invite more terrorism” and “more antisemitic riots” across Western campuses and city centres “including in Australia”.
Netanyahu also exploited this event to conflate anti-Israel and anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. He said, “Anti-Israel sentiment is antisemitism,” and he expected Australian authorities “to use their full weight to prevent such antisemitic acts in the future”.
Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal, repeated Netanyahu’s conflation, saying, “This attack is not an isolated incident but a reflection of a concerning environment where some individuals feel emboldened to act on antisemitic and anti-Israel sentiments.” She called on federal and state governments “to take immediate action to adopt and legislate the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism,” which is described as a threat to democracy and rejected by politicians, writers and academics, religious and secular Jews and non-Jews alike around the world. The Jewish writer Richard Silverstein wrote, IHRA “plac[es] the historical, political, military and humanitarian uniqueness of Israel’s occupation and colonisation of Palestine beyond permissible criticism…[It] bristles with contentious assumptions about the racial identity of Jews – assumptions contested by many diaspora Jews but on which both Zionism and anti-Semitism fasten – and about Israel as the embodiment of a collective right of Jews to self-determination.”
Add to all this the fact that Adass Israel Synagogue, which was chosen to be attacked, and the Adass Israel community is “strongly anti-Zionist” and “has ties to groups that are openly anti-Zionist, putting it at odds with a central feature of organised Jewish life in Melbourne.”
Therefore, the attack on the Adass Israel synagogue is at the core of Israeli government strategy aiming to:
- back up their accusation that supporting the establishment of a Palestinian state is support for terrorism and anti-Semitism in order to deter the Australian government from continuing to support the establishment of a Palestinian state and recognise it.
- Distract attention from the genocide it is committing in Gaza and regain the role of victimhood that it has lost internationally.
- And to achieve gains in conflating Zionism with anti-Semitism by demanding that the federal and state governments adopt IHRA.
Since it is commonly known that Israel, by conflating Judaism with Zionism and the occupation, crimes and apartheid it’s carrying out in the name of Jews, is causing an increase in anti-Semitism, one would think that those who are concerned about the rise of anti-Semitism would work on separating Israel and the Zionist colonial project from Judaism, not criminalising those who oppose Israel and its Zionist colonial apartheid project and inflaming anti-Semitism even more, and put more pressure on Israel to recognise the rights of the Palestinian people to equality and self-determination in their homeland.
Will they succeed with this strategy?
[1] Nathan Witt, “Jacob Israel de Haan: A Queer and Lapsed Zionist in Mandate Palestine”, Jerusalem Quarterly (Institute for Palestine Studies), 2021, pp. 87-104.
[2] Robert John and Sami Hadawi, Ibid, Vol. one (1914-1945), pp. 337-338.
Ali Kazak is a former Palestinian ambassador and head of delegation to Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific region. He is an expert in Australian-Arab relations and affairs, and author of “Australia and the Arabs”. (In Arabic).
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