LONE VOICE: THE WARS OF ISI LEIBLER, AN OVERVIEW

Suzanne D. Rutland (OAM PhD) is Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney. She is a renowned Australian Jewish historian and has published widely on Australian Jewish history, edits the Sydney edition of the AJHS Journal and has written on issues relating to the Shoah, Israel, Soviet Jewry and Jewish education. Her book, The Jews in Australia was published by Cambridge University Press in 2005. Her most recent work had been a widely praised biography of the remarkable Australian and member of the Australian Jewish community Isi Leibler – Lone Voice – The Was of Isi Leibler. To record something of Isi Leibler’s achievements both in Australia and globally, Suzanne Rutland addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 25 May 2021.

LONE VOICE: THE WARS OF ISI LEIBLER, AN OVERVIEW

SUZANNE D. RUTLAND

On the 13 April this year, Isi Leibler, a personality who was larger than life, passed away. Newspapers in Australia paid tribute to the man who was a titan in the travel business and a leading figure in the Jewish world. In an article entitled “Isi Leibler, key advocate for Jewish ‘refuseniks’, dies in Israel”, Tom Cowie of The Age in Melbourne, quoted Bob Hawke in relation to Isi’s campaign for the release of the Jewish refuseniks in the Soviet Union, a campaign which Hawke was deeply involved with: “I venture to say, Isi, that nobody has made a greater individual contribution than have you,” Mr Hawke told the Melbourne Concert Hall (now Hamer Hall).

In The Australian, Alan Howe entitled his obituary: “Extraordinary Isi Leibler changed his world”, and quoted former Labor MP for Melbourne Ports, Michael Danby, who said Leibler “was incorruptible. He has no peer in Jewish diaspora leadership.” Howe noted that “As was often the case, the feisty, hard line Leibler and Danby had their moments”, further quoting Danby:

In earlier years Isi Leibler and I had many ups and downs but over the last decade we developed a firm friendship based on a mutual respect and an immovable devotion to the Jewish people and Israel. Many senior politicians I introduced him to revelled in his fruity evaluations. His profile in the broader Australian community was for decades that of the authoritative voice of the Australian Jewish Community.

The World Jewish Congress headlines their article “Honorary WJC Vice President remembered as passionate, committed to the future of world Jewry” and noted that “Isi Leibler helped with the sustainability of Australian and Soviet Jewry throughout his Life”. Apart from this, tributes were published in almost all the key Anglo-Jewish papers in Israel, The United Kingdom and the United States.

So, who was Isi Leibler, and how come he received such wide coverage in the general Australian and global Jewish press?

Over the last 20 years I have had the honour and privilege of researching in Isi Leibler’s unique archive and extensive library – what I call a treasure trove for an historian. You might ask how I got the key to this treasure trove. At the end of last century, I was approached to write a history of Jewish communal leadership in Australia. I became engrossed in the struggle of Soviet Jews for their freedom and full human rights, which all the obituaries noted, and I was aware of Isi’s landmark 1965 publication on Soviet Jewry and Human Rights, and the letter which Rex Mortimer, a Communist leader, wrote at the beginning of the publication acknowledging that there was antisemitism in the Soviet Union.

In 1998, I managed to get access to Mortimer’s secret security file from the National Archives of Australia, and found that each time Isi’s name was mentioned, there was a number indicating that Isi also had a security file. However, when I applied for access to the file, I was told they could not locate it. After nine months back and forth with their stating they could not find the file and my insisting that it must be there they finally located it. It was unbelievable. As part of his efforts, Isi was constantly chasing the Australian Communist leaders because he had been urged by Shaul Avigur, one of the founders of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence, who had recruited Isi, to see if he could get a Communist leader to admit to Soviet antisemitism. Avigur stressed that there was no point for others to make that claim, because the Soviet response would just be that they were anti-Communist. A Communist leader, such as Mortimer, who had spent time in Moscow and was deeply embedded in the party structure was another story.

During a visit to Jerusalem at the end of 1999, I came armed with a copy of telephone conversations between Isi and various Communist leaders, as well as conversations they had behind his back. While the ASIO, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, was not tapping Isi’s phone, they were tapping the phones of the various Communist leaders. Some of these copies included conversations between two Melbourne Jewish Communists, Bernie Taft, a party hack, and Judah Waten – an Australian writer and novelist who hated Isi with a passion. These conversations were often very derogatory. When I showed Isi these copies, he was chuffed. Isi always suspected he had a security file but now he knew his suspicions were correct. I had found the key that opened the treasure trove. And what a treasure trove it is. There are over 200 bound volumes, each of around 1000 pages of documents. They are colour coded according to subject area, so IJL Personal is blue – with 80 volumes; Soviet Jewry is red – with 40 volumes; Asia-Pacific is green – with 12 volumes and so on.

One of the challenges facing a biographer, is how to structure the story. Should it be purely chronological or should it be thematic. I looked at Jill Margo’s award-winning biography of Frank Lowy and saw that she took a purely chronological approach, but I felt that was not appropriate for Isi’s story. Some facets such as his business story, would only of be interest to one group of readers. My decision was to structure the book as a mixture – allowing the chronology to determine the order of the thematic chapters.

There are so many facets to Isi’s life that in this short talk I can only touch on a few aspects, although I am more than happy to expand at question time. I have been asked about the title Lone Voice: The Wars of Isi Leibler – really the suggestion of my editor, Elliot Jager. However, I knew that the title had to have the concept of Isi the fighter in it, because Isi was a fighter all his life – from his response to antisemitism in his government high school, through to his battles with Qantas, to what might be called one of the great battles of his life with the World Jewish Congress. Isi was never afraid to stand up for what he believed in.

With Soviet Jewry, he had many battles. After meeting Avigur in 1959, he began a campaign for Australia to raise the issue at the United Nations and in November 1962, at the urging of anti-Communist Garfield Barwick, Australia was the first country to raise the issue of the abuse of human rights in the UN. However, that led to tensions between Senator Sam Cohen, who opposed this move, and the Honourable Syd Einfeld in the House of Representatives who supported it. Then, he stood up to Dr Nahum Goldmann, as Isi described him “the King of the Jews”, in Brussels in 1966, accusing Goldmann of being subservient to the Soviets, because he was advocating secret diplomacy rather then public demonstrations. Here was this young 32-year-old upstate from Downunder – what I call the Edge of the Diaspora – standing up and attacking the most senior leader of the Jewish Diaspora. What Chutzpah (cheek)!

One issue that Isi spent much of his life combatting was antisemitism. In the 1965 a new phase of antisemitism began with two key groups working together: The Australian League of Rights, led by Eric Butler, and The Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, and other groups supporting the Vietnam war. Both were joined by an obsessional fear of Communism but also shared the same views in terms of Jewish conspiracy theories and antisemitism.

With his new, young aggressive leadership style of not keeping one’s head down but responding, he took up the cudgels. He worked closely with two academics: John Playford in Adelaide, in terms of the East Europeans and Ken Gott in Melbourne who wrote a key study entitled Voices of Hate. Through these efforts, he brought these issues into the public arena.

In 1965, Isi decided to help out Lodz Holocaust survivor, Bono Wiener, who was running a one-man travel agency in the Melbourne suburbs. Bono had offered Isi, then in the family diamond business which he took over in 1957 at the age of 23 after his father’s premature death. He saw the potential of group travel, with the post-war migrants wanting to return to their homelands in the UK, Italy and Greece. Within a couple of years, Isi had built the agency into a major enterprise, with city officers and 40 employees. On the way, however, he had trodden on the toes of Qantas executives who set out to destroy him. As I ploughed my way through the three volumes dealing with his Qantas battle in the late 1960s– each consisting of over 1000 pages – I was on a knife edge not knowing how it all would end, even though logically I knew Isi had to win that battle because he went on to build what become known as Jetset in the 1970s into one of the largest travel companies in the world.

One of the fascinating aspects of Isi’s life is the way he could build close friendships with key figures – and that particularly applied to both Bob Hawke of the Labor Party. When Bob was leader of the ACTU, the two men established a very close friendship, and they even went organised a travel business partnership between Jetset and the ACTU. At Isi’s urging, Bob went to the Soviet Union in 1979 to see if he could negotiate the release of the refuseniks.

In 2008, I received a grant from the Australian Prime Minsters’ Centre for this research project and thanks to Dr David Lee, historian for DFAT, received permission to access materials normally closed to the public. When I worked on that material, I was locked in a room, and every file was marked ‘Professor Rutland only’. It was there that I located the Australian Ambassador, Murray Bourchier’s secret report of Hawke’s 1979 visit to Moscow. I shall read just a little from a description of the report, to give you a flavour of Hawke’s experience then:

Hawke tried to limit his alcohol intake even as the Russians kept plying him with booze. Describing the evening to his colleagues in Canberra, Bourchier referenced “the usual bibulous” round of toasts, portraying the Soviets pushing liquor at the Australians. Dinner finally over, Hawke invited Bourchier and Tinney up to his room, only to find that two of his Russian hosts had tagged along, unbidden. They lumbered in clutching bottles of vodka, helped themselves to beer from Hawke’s refrigerator, and settled down for what they intended to be a long night of drinking. Bourchier lays out the surprising turn of events:

[Hawke:] “I don’t remember inviting you bastards to my room for a drink, so why don’t you piss off?”

“You think we better piss off, do you Bob?” they responded rather lamely, but they knew the gambit had failed..

“Yes!” said Hawke.

A much-fatigued Hawke explained to Bourchier that the refuseniks were waiting for him to telephone – which he could hardly do until the Russians were out. Over the next two days, Hawke and Hazel had three emotionally charged sessions with refuseniks. He captures the ambience in his memoirs:

My commitment to these people was reinforced by meeting them in their miserable apartments. Their nobility of spirit overwhelmed me. Here were professors, engineers, men and women of outstanding talent relegated to menial occupations, prevented from freely practising their religion, their children denied access to university. They were pariahs in a squalid society. Yet through all this their indomitable faith imbued their sad­ness with a warmth and optimism which moved me beyond measure. I felt a personal convergence with them and was determined to do everything in my power to honour that faith and justify their hope in me (pp.274-5).

It was in this inebriated state that Hawke believed that the Soviets had promised to release all Prisoners of Zion and refuseniks who had been held hostage by the Soviets for more than five years. He informed three leading refuseniks who were sceptical, but Hawke insisted this was correct. As Hawke flew to Rome to meet Isi and Naomi Leibler, they issued the statement. However, as I wrote in the book: “When all was said and done, Hawke’s mission proved a spectacular failure. It left him devastated”:

I was to reach black despair, driven for the only time in my life to contemplating suicide, when the duplicity of Soviet officials led me to give false hope of release to a group of Russian Jews.…I have never experienced such a sense of utter desolation. That I had been played for a sucker by the Soviets was of no moment. That I had, albeit in good faith, raised and then dashed the hopes of these great human beings brought me to a point of desperation that I questioned the value of continuing my own life. I have never seen anything to match the joy in their eyes, and the thought of their despair tormented me (Hawke, The Hawke Memoirs, 72 and 91).

Indeed, the realisation that he had let down the refuseniks by raising their expectations – only to see them dashed – was what agonized Hawke most, as Isi attested in a follow-up thank-you letter to Prime Minister Begin” (p.280).

At the same time, Isi ensured that all his activities were completely bipartisan. He established a very close friendship as well with Malcolm Fraser when he was prime minister. Indeed, when Fraser can to Melbourne to visit his mother, he would often come to visit Isi on a Friday night and the two men would sit until late into the evening discussing political affairs. When an Australian journalist wrote that he was a supporter of a particular Australian political party in the 1980s Isi demanded a retraction – insisting he had never aligned himself with one Australian political party.

This was important with all his political activities. Leibler first visit to China, 1981. Then, in May 1985, Israeli diplomat, Reuven Merhav, was posted to Hong Kong and met with Isi.  In August 1985 Israel opened a full-fledged Israeli consulate with Merhav consul-general in Hong Kong. Then in October 1985, Isi undertook his second China visit officially representing the WJC, ECAJ and APJA. He was seeking support for the holding of a colloquium in Beijing after the holding of a successful colloquium in Singapore. This did not eventuate at the time and the next colloquium was held in Hong Kong in 1987. Subsequently, Isi led a delegation of the World Jews Congress to China in 1991 when he met with the Foreign Minister. The colloquium was held in April 1992, just two months after China had recognising Israel in 1992 At the same time, India also recognised India, again due to Isi’s interventions.

Central to his success, was the support he gained from the Australian Foreign Minister, Gareth Evans, who instructed the Australian ambassadors to provide access to Isi with every Asian country he was trying to influence, both in terms of supporting the recission of UNGA Resolution 3379, Zionism = Racism and also either in recognising Israel, as with China and India, or strengthening ties with Israel, as with Japan.

Isi work as an unofficial diplomat for Israel in Asia encapsulated his plans to become an Israeli diplomat, cut short by his father’s early death. He remained passionate in his support of Israel throughout his life. In the book, I outline the journey Isi took from his strong support of Yitzhak Rabin who, he told me, he would have voted for if he had been an Israeli citizen in 1992, to his disillusionment with the Oslo peace agreement following the outbreak of the Second Intifada, when close to a thousand Israelis died in suicide bombings from 2000-2203, and thousands more were injured. In the 1990s Isi became very close to Yossi Beilin, one of the key architects of Oslo, and even supported him financially in his 1998 campaign. Yet, in 2000, they had a huge falling out and became bitter enemies. Isi’s journey to the right, becoming, a vocal supporter of Bibi Netanyahu, mirrored the journey of most of the Israeli public.

Isi also continued his campaign against antisemitism to the end of his life. In his comments about Isi at the launch of the book on Sunday, current co-president of the ECAJ, Robert Goot, said: “In one of his last “Candidly Speaking from Jerusalem” columns, published in August 2020, Isi warned:

Civilisation is currently facing the greatest threats since the rise of Nazism. Coronavirus and its social and economic by products have resulted in global waves of populism, accompanied by violent demonstrations initiated from elements of the extreme left and right. These elements, in particular the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in America, are exploiting racial issues to host radical anti-Semitic groups and oppose Israel in their platform.

After decrying the attitude of the dominant liberal media and expressing astonishment that the vast majority of Jews regard it as incumbent on them to be seen supporting the BLM movement despite its anti-Semitic components, Isi observed:

Many young people today are no longer able to visualise the powerlessness of Jews before the Jewish state was created. They have come to believe that it is inconsistent to be liberal and support what they view as a “reactionary” nationalistic Jewish state. Sadly, Jews in the United States and other parts of the Diaspora do not consider support of Israel to be a priority in their political agenda and rather seek to blend into the progressive camp even if that entails abandoning or turning against Israel. This explains the deafening silence of major Jewish organisations in the face of anti-Semites in the BLM and other “progressive” movements.

Robert commented: “Perhaps it is just as well then that Isi was not spared to witness the dramatic and truly frightening upsurge in ‘progressive energy’ we have witnessed during the Gaza campaign in the last two weeks in the US Congress and on the streets of so many cities throughout the world” – of course including Sydney.

In a letter to Isi upon reading the book, Rabbi Hirsch, Honorary Life President of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, wrote that one thing that made Isi unique among lay leaders was that and I quote generally “most lay leadership was a consequence of their philanthropic contributions. Your leadership, Isi, is also philanthropic, but primarily intellectual. More than anyone else in your generation, you have used your pen and your voice to advocate institutional integrity.” I believe that this really sums up Isi’s manifold contributions – which were not only based on his political activism but also on his ability to put pen to paper and powerfully present his point of view, as noted above, whether it was Soviet Jewry and Human Rights in the 1960s, The Case for Israel in the 1970s, his concerns about Jewish religious extremism in the 1980s, his many columns published in the Jerusalem Post and Israel HaYom (Candidly Speaking) from the 1990s to his passing, or his fight against corruption in the World Jewish Congress.

And his intellectual strength had firm foundations in his love of books. Starting as a schoolboy, he would wag school to go and visit book shops. Then, after completing his Honours in Political Science, he spent time in Jerusalem in 1957 before his father died when described how he would begin salivating from excitement whenever he passed a bookstore, but he had to check what he could spend with his parents. After building his travel company, he could buy whatever he wanted (image). He was a true renaissance man with a love of art, music, books and all fine things – and he was an absolute perfectionist in everything he did.

At the same time, he was a family man and as we see at the end of the book, surrounded by his children and with his 17 grandchildren, and now the number of great grandchildren expanding mainly in Israel he can feel a deep sense of achievement. I would like to thank Isi for giving me this opportunity to take this journey into his amazing life, to Naomi for being such a supportive life partner, and to Jonathan for his assistance and enthusiasm, to my editor Elliot Jager who contributed so much to the book, to Judith Landau, Isi’s PA for all her willing help and patience, and my children for supporting me all the way through this long journey.