Is the Jewish Council Australia a ‘front group’ for outside interests?

Is the Jewish Council of Australia merely a ‘front group’ for outside political interests?

In an earlier article (Mendes 2024), I posed the question as to whether the newly formed Jewish Council of Australia (JCA) could learn from the fatal errors of the earlier Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism (JCCFAS), and transition into a legitimate representative of progressive Jews advancing opposition to anti-Jewish racism within the wider Australian Left.

On further reflection, the answer is a flat no. The JCA has arguably unmasked itself as little more than a ‘front group’ for outside political interests that exhibits nil commitment to advancing the well-being of Australian Jews.

Political front groups which attempt to obscure their real ideological aims and agenda have long been present across the Australian political and ideological spectrum. For example, the accusation of being a ‘Communist front’ was often thrown by conservatives at progressive groups during the Cold War in an attempt to discredit their views by implying that they were being naively manipulated by the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) in order to present a respectable front for pro-Soviet policies. Nevertheless, the CPA did in fact establish some formal ‘front’ groups within the trade unions and wider civil society such as the Australian Peace Council and the Union of Australian Women to advance pro-Communist agendas.

The Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism (JCCFAS), from which the JCA seems to derive its name, was also accused by diverse sources of being a Communist ‘front’ group. That allegation was primarily a result of its failure to condemn institutional antisemitism in the Soviet Union, and particularly its refusal to acknowledge the antisemitic (rather than anti-Zionist) basis of the July 1952 Slansky show trial in Czechoslovakia, and the January 1953 Doctors Plot in Moscow (Mendes 2003).

There is no doubt that a pro-Soviet faction seized control of the JCCFAS from about 1951 onwards for at least a decade, and prevented any public criticism of Soviet anti-Jewish policies. That blind spot on Soviet antisemitism provoked enormous mistrust by most Jews towards the JCCFAS and consequently their d political marginalization within Australian Jewry. Indeed, during the antisemitic swastika epidemic of early 1960 (Seldowitz 2025), the then-president of the Victorian Jewish Board of Deputies, Nathan Jacobson, rejected any involvement of the JCCFAS in Jewish community protests. He insisted that the JCCFAS was ‘governed by the Communists’ and ‘their first loyalty was to the Communists, not to the Jews’ (Cashman 1960).

But, nevertheless, the JCCFAS was probably not a formal CPA front group. There is little evidence that the CPA ever directed or took much interest in the Council’s internal policy processes and directions. Additionally, the Council’s alignment with CPA views was not consistent. On the one hand, they endorsed the Communist view that East Germany was an anti-racist paradise and that conversely West Germany had failed to de-Nazify (Mendes 2025). But on the other hand, the Council mostly remained pro-Israel from 1948 until its demise in 1970, even after the Soviet Union transitioned from an initial friend of the Jewish state to an implacable enemy (Mendes 2000; 2016).

It is also noteworthy that the JCCFAS remained throughout its history a robust opponent of all domestic forms of antisemitism. To be sure, much of its advocacy involved collaboration with progressive groups such as trade unions, peace groups, the Labor Party and the Communist Party. But the Council also activated partnerships with non-leftist groups such as churches to combat antisemitism. The JCCFAS displayed nil tolerance for domestic antisemites whatever their background or affiliation (Mendes 2022). That commitment to combatting antisemitism is the antithesis of the approach adopted by the contemporary JCA.

To be sure, not all alleged ‘front’ groups in Australian politics have been on the progressive Left. Kelly (2019) documents how the right-wing Institute of Public Affairs think tank created front groups from 1986 onwards in a range of policy areas including: climate change, industrial relations, constitutional reform, and Indigenous affairs. The purpose of these front groups was to influence policy discourse and outcomes.

The establishment of the ‘Indigenous’ Bennelong Society in 2000 (closed down in 2011) is arguably of most relevance to our analysis. That society included prominent white conservatives such as Des Moore, Ray Evans, Peter Howson and Gary Johns, and some First Nations community activists such as Helen McLaughlin and Wesley Aird. Its agenda was to support the then Liberal National Coalition government’s Indigenous affairs agenda – particularly on issues such as land rights, the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal children, and opposing proposals for First Nations self-determination or so-called ‘separatism’ – and to discredit contrary opinions that were widely held within First Nations communities (Kelly 2019).

The Society’s more subtle agenda was to divide public opinion on these issues, and to disingenuously imply that many First Nations Australians shared the ultra-conservative views of the Society. Similarly, the JCA slyly insists that the Australian Jewish community is divided on core issues such as Israel, Zionism and antisemitism, and pretends that its radical Left views have significant community support rather than being totally marginal. As with the Bennelong Society, it aims to muddy the waters within political parties, community groups and the media as to who legitimately speaks for Jews as an ethno-cultural community.

Yet, the JCA has done nothing to engage with Jewish lived experiences of antisemitism, or to actually combat antisemitism. Rather, it has to the contrary, actively denied or minimized antisemitism as reflected particularly in its problematic report into the antisemitism crisis in Australian universities (JCA 2024).

In that report, the JCA claim to analyse 389 reported incidents of antisemitism presented within the public submissions to the first parliamentary inquiry into antisemitism within universities. Using the contested Jerusalem Declaration as their mode for defining antisemitism which ridiculously describes the pro-racist Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement as ‘not…antisemitic’ (JCCV 2024: 27), the JCA allege that only 79 of the 389 incidents were actual examples of antisemitism. The JCA frame the remaining 310 incidents as examples of legitimate support for Palestinian nationalism, or alternatively unclear.

This breakdown has two major flaws. Firstly, the report wrongly implies that the antisemitic activities and the so-called non-antisemitic activities are perpetrated by two separate groups or samples. The JCA are trying to manipulate the reader into believing that the perpetrators of antisemitism are some random group of right-wing or Nazi-like persons within universities who had no connections with the pro-Palestinian encampments. Or additionally that political anti-Zionists can never be racist antisemites. In fact, it is more likely than not that most of the two samples are sourced from the same cohort of people. That is, the perpetrators of antisemitic incidents relating, for example, to what the JCA terms ‘myths about Jewish practices or Jewish wealth and power’ (p.16), are also the perpetrators of so-called anti-Zionist incidents such as, for example, chanting the slogan ‘From the river to the Sea, Palestine will be free’ (p.19).

Secondly, the report interrogates these 389 incidents as isolated events not connected to wider manifestations of systemic and institutional antisemitism within universities. For example, they do not examine the positions of structural power that antisemitic academics may hold over Jewish students, nor do they examine how individual incidents are compounded by the failure of administrators in some universities to provide structural support to the Jewish victims. More broadly, there is no recognition that Jewish students and academics are a small, vulnerable minority cohort within universities, and that in contrast many of the perpetrators of antisemitism are part of the majority white ruling establishment within Australian society.

Overall, the JCA report fails to name or condemn the actual perpetrators of antisemitism in universities. Nor do they demand that the perpetrators of the anti-Jewish incidents they acknowledge in their report listen to the voices of Jewish victims and educate themselves about the often intergenerational traumatic impact of anti-Jewish racism. Nor do they propose any concrete strategies to combat antisemitism.

To the contrary, the JCA propose that universities should introduce education and training programs to inform ‘students and staff about the history of Palestine and the Palestine liberation movement’, and additionally introduce modules that ‘educate students and staff about both antisemitic and anti-Palestinian tropes and ideas’ (p.7). These proposals seem to reverse the roles of perpetrators and victims. It is Jews, not Palestinians, who are being oppressed and discriminated against within universities, and some (but almost certainly not the majority) of the perpetrators of anti-Jewish racism are Palestinian and other Arabs. If the JCA seriously wanted to confront antisemitism within universities, then they would be proposing that their allies within pro-Palestinian movements be targeted by specific education about the history and sources of Arab antisemitism including the ethnic cleansing of over 800,000 Jews by Arab and pro-Arab North African regimes between approximately 1948 and 1967.

That the JCA prioritizes measures to curb so-called ‘anti-Palestinian racism’ (p.24) in universities, rather than the embedded institutional antisemitism that has now been exposed by two parliamentary inquiries and a further more recent large-scale survey of 548 Jewish students and staff across 30 universities (AAAAA 2025), can arguably only be explained by reference to their conflicted interests.

Just as the Bennelong Society pretended to be supportive of First Nations Australians (Kelly 2019: 143) but in fact represented outside interests whose real agendas were antithetical to advancing their wellbeing, so the JCA pretends to oppose antisemitism, but arguably represents the interests of groups outside the Jewish community that privilege the rights of perpetrators of antisemitism rather than the victims.

The JCA conveniently neglects to name whom these groups are, but their political agenda can be assumed to be congruent with that of the pro-Palestinian groups to whom the JCA genuflects on all matters of political contention. For example, the JCA simplistically dismisses Jewish concerns about the inherently antisemitic implications (JCCV 2024; Stogner 2025) of inflammatory statements such as ‘From the River to the Sea’ and ‘intifada’ on the simplistic grounds that the ‘Palestinians and their allies have made it clear that these expressions represent calls for freedom, justice and self-determination for Palestinians, rather than antisemitic sentiments’ (p.14).

Yet, any serious student of the history and politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be aware that such statements represent the dogmatic views of the hardliners within the Palestinian national movement (i.e. Hamas and the other Palestinian equivalents of the Greater Israel settlement movement) who demand the replacement of Israel with an ethnocentric Arab state of Greater Palestine, rather than the Palestinian moderates who recognize the need to reconcile legitimate Israeli and Palestinian national rights via two states for two peoples.

The JCA actively disrespects the views of all moderate Palestinians globally, and specifically undermines the credibility of those anti-racist Palestinians in Australia who honourably separate their legitimate criticisms of Israel from any conflation with antisemitism. But most significantly, the JCA display nil concern for advancing the wellbeing of Jews affected by lived experience of antisemitism within universities and beyond.

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References

Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism (2025) 2024 survey of AntiSemitism in Australian Universities. AAAAA. https://www.aaaaa.org.au/5a-publications-1/2024-survey-of-antisemitism-in-australian-universities.