Published: 10 September 2026
Last updated: 10 September 2026
Booker-Prize-winning author and journalist Richard Flanagan recently claimed that Israel tries to keep the world ignorant of “the orgy of evil” it has visited upon the Palestinian people. In a searing speech at Sydney’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas held on August 22, he said that one way it does that is by trying to silence us with the “deadliest slur” of antisemitism.
He described the politicisation and weaponisation of the Bondi massacre as a “foreign influence operation” led by what he and others call “the Israel lobby”, and asked:
“To what extent has the Israel lobby itself contributed to antisemitism in Australia by consistently advocating for Israel’s war in Gaza in a highly aggressive fashion … could it have been the lobby’s own acts fuelling antisemitism?”
He even denies that antisemitism was present at Bondi. “Where was the antisemitism to be found at Bondi on that terrible day? Nowhere, nowhere, nowhere.”
In his speech, Flanagan uses the word “lobby” 19 times.
Lobby. Lobby. Lobby. The Israel lobby.
I am sick of these words. “The Israel lobby” gets in my craw. I keep seeing it in essays, books, interviews and speeches. It reverberates and echoes across social media.
Flanagan names three groups as part of the “Israel lobby”: the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, the Zionist Federation of Australia, and the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.
Comments9
Mark Ian14 September at 11:06 pm
Palestinians refused 92 % of the West Bank with Land Swaps and hit Israel with murder suicide bombers designed to destroy Israeli Peace Advocates from the 1992 Rabin Peres Election .
They had in the Past violently attacked the November 29 1947 Partition Plan causing war and the displacement of 750,000 Palestinians from their home .
Peace in 1947 would mean all Palestinians living in the Arab State .
They blocked Jewish Escape to Palestine from May 1939 without compensatory refuge in other Islamic Lands like Turkey that proclaimed- we will not take in Jewish Refugees even to save them from the Holocaust.
This is the Israeli Lobby remembering history-long may it be strong .
Debbie Lustig14 September at 01:23 am
Here again is the stupendous overreach of the term “Israel/Zionist/Jewish Lobby”.
If any group was so powerful as to influence the media, the government, culture, universities etc, it’s doing an appalling job of it. Because if it was so powerful, it would also have the power to curb the insane, obsessive antisemitism – lightly camouflaged as anti-Israel sentiment – that’s spiralled out of control.
Flanagan’s ideas of the Israel/Zionist/Jewish lobby are mad, paranoid and deranged. They are nothing more than smears and vilifications which reflect a society dangerously out of control – one that has utterly lost its ethical moorings.
The real questions, for me, are how such a bigot can write with such gravitas and beauty. And how he ended up with these views. Someone should ask him what happened to him in relation to Israel and the Jews. Where his breathtaking Jew-hatred began, and why.
judy11 September at 11:01 am
(begin part 2)
(4) “the [cult] experience left me wary … of the way repetition can make an idea feel true simply because we hear it over and over.” [garden] joseph goebbels said something similar: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” and we know how effective nazi propaganda became. and still is, tragically.
(5) personally, i felt exhausted by the time i got to the end of this article, with all the examples. it seemed like the author wanted to identify as many “important people” as possible and attribute some “nasty-words” to each. what came to mind is a quote from shakespeare’s macbeth: “the lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
(6) my word-finder identified 20 instances of “lobby” in flanagan’s speech. 19? 20? whatever … way too overloaded and conspiracy-invoking.
peace, judy
judy11 September at 11:01 am
(1) i’m puzzled / dismayed by the editor’s choice to use the octopus as the lead graphic. it’s a symbol that’s often accused of being anti-semitic. does the symbol become more-ok when we use it on ourselves?
(2) in general, i cringe every time i hear “israel lobby,” “jewish lobby,” “zionist lobby”; i invite the user to define that term, or not use it at all, as it’s overloaded and highly associated with conspiracy theories. no definition == no further discussion.
(3) i read flanagan’s speech at the link provided. i wonder: how would we react had flanagan provided an objective definition for “israel lobby” and used that? for example, “three self-declared ‘zionist’ or ‘israel-focused’ ‘advocacy’ groups, i.e., AIJAC, ECAJ, ZFA,” and then used the acronym AEZ, for example, instead of “israel lobby”?
and how would we react if flanagan had provided objective, irrefutable references / examples to some of the accusations against the “israel lobby,” e.g., “part of AEZ did / said < this, that >“?
(end part 1)
Bram van O.11 September at 10:29 am
Mary, I understand your concern about the term (pro)Israel lobby. How do you suggest one refers to a collection of pro Israel advocacy groups?
The past three years have seen a spate of reported complaints against individuals in the arts. Each of the complaints was on the grounds that the person had expressed concern over Israel’s actions in Palestine. In all cases the complaint was against an action the person did undertake as a citizen, outside the context of the role the person played in the environment where the complaint was made. Flanagan calls attention to these events as a pattern of behavior.
Antoinette Latouf (ECAJ, Lawyers for Israel)
Khaled Sabsabi (ECAJ)
Randa Abdel-Fatah – Bendigo Writers festival (consortium of Jewish academics)
Randa Abdel Fatah – Adelaide Writers Week (Jewish Community Council of South Australia, Australian Jewish Association)
David Rowe – Financial Review (ECAJ, Anti-Defamation Commission)
Matt Chun (Queensland Jewish Board of Deputies, Australian Jewish Association)
Grace Tame – International Womans Day Bendigo (Australian Jewish Association)
Not one of these groups is exclusively a pro Israel advocacy group. All of them proudly advocate for Jewish interests.
What collective noun would you suggest for this gaggle of organisations?
joe lenzo11 September at 01:37 am
We will have to agree to disagree on this one. It might not be that they wield too much power but that the govt is scared schemeless of being call ed antisemitic. antisemitic and islamophobia are the two most divisive words driving anti-cohesion, What’s wrong with “racist” and “hate crimes”
philip mendes10 September at 11:06 pm
Massive kudos to Mary Garden for interrogating the Blame the Victim nonsense that informs attacks on Jewish community advocacy groups. The subtext of these attacks is that Jewish community groups should not have equal right to participate in public discourse and debates. Hence, Jews should be relegated to second class citizenry. Imagine if Flanagan or others applied the same prejudiced assumptions to APAN or other Palestinian community lobby groups.
Little Bird Bookshop, Brisbane10 September at 05:43 am
What a terrific article. What to add?
The Flanagans have been in my life since about 1977, when my family did what we non-Jews are allowed to do and moved to a place to which we weren’t indigenous.
We moved from the UK, where my father was a never-persecuted, well-paid, Labour-supporting, antisemitic and anti-Zionist (they almost always go together) hospital doctor working for the NHS and my mother was a more conservative and kinder NHS physiotherapist.
I joined the all-powerful Jewish lobby shortly after October 7 when I saw a huge number of people led naturally enough by the Greens calling Gaza a genocide. This was when the official death toll was 1900 and all the dead could well have been combatants.
Since then the abuse has been relentless and deeply painful in a number of ways. The only assistance I have ever got from the all-powerful Jewish lobby has been that on four of the eight occasions on which my shop’s front door lock was superglued, the problem was fixed by two Israelis (both indigenous to Israel) who didn’t even charge me for the replacement locks.
If you want to help this ally, follow Little Bird Bookshop on Facebook.
Michael Gawenda10 September at 05:15 am
This is a very fine article. I think the point that Mary makes- that once you come to believe this conspiracy theory about an all powerful lobby, any argument you might raise against it simply confirms its power. That’s the maniacal power of conspiracy thinking.