A troubling trend: the mainstreaming of the Australian Jewish Association

The media dissects candidates but has given the AJA – a far-right, unrepresentative group opposed to the two-state solution – a free pass to mainstream credibility

THIS ELECTION CAMPAIGN has shone an intense spotlight on the Jewish community like few before. Candidate and media attacks about BDS, allegiance to Israel and antisemitism have been as fierce as they have been frequent.

While the conflict generated by these skirmishes will most likely fade after May 21, a more troubling byproduct, with a greater horizon, has taken root almost unnoticed.

It is the mainstreaming of the Australian Jewish Association.

During the past six weeks, national media outlets across the political spectrum have quoted the AJA prominently and frequently through the election campaign. The AJA has appeared next to, and sometimes ahead of, recognised community leadership bodies such as the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) and the Zionist federation of Australia (ZFA).

The AJA has no standing as a representative body and does not represent the views of the majority of Australian Jews. Perhaps its name, which includes the word association, has implied to other media that it somehow represents a broader grouping of Jewish community interests.

But let’s be clear. It is a private advocacy group, formed some five years ago, whose policies and views place it on the far-right of the political spectrum in relation to the Middle East and public debate. The AJA does not support a two-state solution in the Middle East.

It does not recognise the right of Palestinians to have their own state. Its mission statement says “the land of Israel includes the biblical Jewish homelands of Judea and Samaria”. That is settler speak for the occupied territories.

As Philip Mendes pointed out in a recent article, the AJA president David Adler has argued that “most Palestinians (or at least their leaders) are aligned with terrorist activities”, a point which the AJA’s Director of Public Affairs, Robert Gregory, emphasised in an article responding to Mendes.