Published: 16 December 2024
Last updated: 16 December 2024
Israelis are not denied visas to Australia because they have served in the Israel Defence Forces, a spokesman for Home Affairs has told The Jewish Independent.
Home Affairs was responding to a report on Sky News which claimed two great-grandchildren of an Australian Holocaust survivor had been denied visas to Australia to visit their relative on her 100th birthday.
The spokesman said one of the applicants had already received a visa at the time of the report and the second has received their visa since. Both had applied for regular visitor visas and had been sent a military service form, a form which seeks additional information from applicants who have served in overseas armed forces, before a visa is granted. Neither had a visa denied.
The spokesman said the request for information about military service was a procedure for information-gathering when department officials felt they did not have adequate information in a visitor application form. He said the form was only a request for information and had been sent to 20 people in the past year, including people from the US and the UK. Requests for this information can delay visas but do not mean they will not be granted.
"We have granted 11,000 visas to people with Israeli citizenship in the past year and the vast majority of those would have done military service, so clearly it's not a sticking point," the spokesman said.
The issue of visas for Israelis has been heightened by the case of Ayelet Shaked, a former Israeli cabinet minister who has made derogatory comments about Palestinians and was refused a visa under a clause which allows the minister to deny a visa to someone he believes could incite discord.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu linked the Shaked case and the Government's UN votes in favour of Palestine to the Adass Israel synagogue bombing.
In addition to visitors, Australia has an increasing number of Israeli migrants, with their own cultural community, captured in the TJI series Pita with Vegemite.
Rifts between Jewish community and Government
There is a growing rift between the organised Jewish community and the Federal Government.
NSW Jewish Board of Deputies president David Ossip refused to attend an event at the Sydney Jewish Museum last week, when the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese gave the Museum $8.5 million towards its new Centre of Contemporary Jewish Life.
"Whilst I have the greatest of respect for the office of Prime Minister and am grateful for the funding that the Federal Government is providing the Museum, I personally couldn’t countenance going to hear the Prime Minister talk about antisemitism whilst his Government was preparing to shift its policy further against Israel (as demonstrated by its votes at the UN the next morning), as ordinary Israelis are facing onerous questioning about their military service before obtaining visas to come to Australia and whilst he fails to rein in his Foreign Minister who deliberately grouped Israel with China and Russia and who continues to use incendiary, demonising and provocative rhetoric which endangers the Jewish community," Ossip wrote in an email explaining his decision.
Former Labor minister Mike Kelly published an article on the weekend criticising the Albanese government's stance on Israel.
Kelly described as "despicable" the Australian government support of the latest UN ceasefire resolution, which doesn’t make that conditional on the release of the hostages.
"In doing so, we have repeated our heinous behaviour at the Evian Conference in France in 1938 when, together with the other countries, Australia callously rejected Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. It was Evian that sent the signal to Hitler that the world didn’t care what he did with the Jews," he wrote.
Kelly also took issue with Foreign Minister Penny Wong's criticism of the civilian casualties from Israel's campaign against Hamas in Gaza.
"Our government has openly acknowledged that Hamas cannot be part of a Palestinian government and must be removed from control of Gaza. How does it suggest this should have been done? What military expertise is it relying on to criticise the Israeli methods in the face of such a large-scale military threat and capability?" wrote Kelly, who is a former army officer and a former minister for defence material.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported on a fiery meeting between the Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Jewish leaders, quoting AIJAC's Colin Rubenstein's assessment: “The relationship is probably the worst it’s ever been by some distance.”
READ MORE
Inside the fiery meeting that would define the government’s relationship with Israel (SMH, paywall)
Australia’s damning of Israel is poisonous. I say that as an ex-Labor minister (Mike Kelly, SMH, paywall)
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Comments1
Rachel Sussman17 December at 10:28 am
A very thoughtful report, I hope this is the case. I myself had some visitors from Israel but they came before the request for these extra information became ‘necessary’.
I would like to point though that the ‘Israeli migrants’ are essentially Israelis holding dual citizenship rather than ‘true migrants’.
As for Shaked, to be honest I have some reservations about her views. Saying this, she does not incite hatred as such even if one does not agree with her views. What I find upsetting is not so much that she was refused entry as much as the fact that those who truly incite hatred within Australia are permitted to do so under the guise of ‘free speech’. Such double standard is upsetting.
Sadly the trust between many in the Jewish community ( including myself) and our Government has been broken and I am afraid is now beyond repair.