Published: 15 April 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
BURIED IN SUZANNE RUTLAND’S 663-page tome tracing the epic life story of Isi Leibler, who passed away in Jerusalem on Tuesday aged 86, are some wonderful nuggets from the battlegrounds where he has waged his myriad wars over the last five decades.
There’s the ASIO file from the 1950s when Australia’s spy agency was shadowing Leibler as he wooed Australian Communist Party members to betray the regime by admitting that Soviet Jews suffered state-sponsored anti-Semitism.
The boycott he effectively led in 1968 against the “megalomaniac” owner of the Australian Jewish Herald, which led to the closure of the oldest Jewish newspaper in Australia.
The reported PLO assassination plots against him in the ’70s and ’80s.
How Bob Hawke, after being duped by the Soviets into believing Refuseniks would be released in 1979, was so drunk when he met Leibler at Rome Airport that he was “barely able to walk”.
The revelation that former prime minister Malcolm Fraser asked Leibler to pass confidential information to Mossad during the 1980s.
And the ultra-Orthodox poster campaign in Jerusalem in 2005 accusing Leibler of being an anti-Jewish informant because he was alleging serious corruption at the World Jewish Congress (WJC).
An alleged traitor. A foiled assassination plot. An undercover messenger to Mossad.
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How does one man from the “edge of the Diaspora” (to borrow Rutland’s 1988 title of her renowned history of Australian Jews) become so powerful and so dangerous that he becomes targeted – not just by non-Jewish enemies but by his fellow Jews?
The answer comes from the historian’s 20 years of exhaustive research, most notably inside Leibler’s personal archive, which has clearly been a “treasure trove” for the author. Written chronologically, Rutland unfurls Leibler’s globe-trotting odyssey from Antwerp to Melbourne, before spreading his wings across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, North America and, critically, the Asia-Pacific, ultimately moving to Israel in the twilight of his life.
Leibler wanted to be an Israeli diplomat, according to the foreword by Elyakim Rubinstein, the former Israeli Attorney-General. His experience of anti-Semitism in Belgium infused his fighting spirit and he recoiled from anything with a whiff of appeasement. Quiet diplomacy was not in his DNA. To the contrary, his style was no holds barred, all guns blazing trench warfare.
There are many take-aways from Rutland’s voluminous deep dive into this Australian-Jewish titan. But one unmistakeable conclusion is this: those who waged war with Isi Leibler did so at their peril.
By the 1960s, having abandoned his dream of becoming a career diplomat, Leibler joined a travel company, Astronaut, which would later evolve into Jetset and become the largest of its kind in the country. The chapter on Leibler’s battle against Qantas, while weighed down by painstaking detail, reveals that his stubborn unwillingness to blink dated back at least 50 years ago.
According to Rutland, he made a “bitter enemy” out of Qantas such that the national carrier set out to destroy him. In a withering draft to his solicitors in 1969, Leibler accused Qantas of acting like a “private gestapo” and, in subsequent correspondence, of employing the tactics of “crude gangsterism”. Ultimately, he prevailed in the arbitration, albeit receiving a slap on the wrist.
Aside from the “Aussie battler” taking on and defeating a giant corporation, what underpinned Leibler’s ability to become a global player was the profits his travel business soon accrued, a point the author rightly makes on several occasions. “For all of Isi’s financial success, money was primarily a vehicle to facilitate his passion: working for Israel, Soviet Jewry, and the Jewish world.”
But an unofficial Jewish diplomat he soon became. His three-decades-long herculean crusade to corral a global movement and spearhead a modern-day Exodus of more than one million Soviet Jews has been well documented, and Lone Voice dedicates several enthralling chapters to it. (Rutland has also written a separate book about it, titled Let My People Go, co-authored with Sam Lipski.)
As Rutland’s thesis proves time and again, he rarely – if ever – waved the white flag. And he usually prevailed, even if it took decades.
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What began with a “lifechanging” meeting in 1959 with Shaul Avigur, the Israeli spymaster who founded what would become the Mossad, climaxed during a visit to the Soviet Union over Rosh Hashanah in 1987 when Leibler addressed 2000 Jews crammed inside Moscow’s Choral Synagogue, “one of the most moving experiences of his life”.
What has not previously been so well chronicled are Leibler’s efforts as Israel’s roving envoy to Asia. Rutland documents how in the 1980s and 90s Leibler built diplomatic channels with India and China, meeting Indian Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen, helping to accelerate the establishment of formal relations between Jerusalem and New Delhi and Beijing, both in 1992. Again, without Jetset, his booming travel business, Leibler could not have “nudged China and India to move closer to Israel”.
The latter chapters on Leibler’s long-running battles in the 2000s to allege corruption at the WJC and, later, to blow the whistle on accusations of $US50m-plus of fraud at the Claims Conference are captivating for their detailed recounting of these scandals, even at the cost of years of scrapping, personal and financial sacrifice, public shaming and, perhaps worst of all, the allegation that he was a “moser”, a Yiddish word implying he was a Jewish informer worthy of excommunication.
“As much as the battle to expose wrongdoing was costly and painful, Isi did not flinch in the face of intimidation, vindictiveness and legal onslaught,” Rutland writes. “Not for the first time, Isi’s adversaries had underestimated his intellect and determination.”
But for all of his colossal successes, some of Leibler’s wars did come at a cost, personally and communally, and the book covers many of his bruising battles: with former Executive Council of Australian Jewry president Joachim Schneeweiss (the pair “bickered relentlessly”), former WJC president Nahum Goldmann (whom he accused of being a shtadlan, a pejorative reference to Medieval court Jews who acquiesced), and former WJC Secretary-General Israel Singer (whose reaction to Leibler’s line of fire prompted the whistleblower to chastise Singer’s “hysteria” as “grotesque”), to name just a few.
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Bob Hawke's bromance with Leibler imploded in 1988 after Hawke equated the aspirations of Soviet Jews to Palestinian Arabs and Black South Africans. Leibler “hurled an explosive private letter” at the PM and Hawke thereafter refused any further direct contact.
Then there’s Bob Hawke, whose longstanding bromance with Leibler imploded in 1988 after Hawke equated the aspirations of Soviet Jews to Palestinian Arabs and Black South Africans at a speech to celebrate Refuseniks who were visiting Australia. Appalled by Hawke’s ill-timed comments, Leibler “hurled an explosive private letter” at the PM (the contents of which are not revealed), and Hawke thereafter refused any further direct contact.
And of course, Edgar Bronfman, the WJC president who in the early 2000s accused Leibler of being an “an arrogant twit” and “a right-wing dog” as the two traded blistering salvos leading Bronfman to launch a $US6m defamation suit against Leibler. Bronfman later rescinded the suit and the WJC was forced to pay Leibler’s costs.
Not even his own kin was spared. In the ’80s and ’90s, sibling rivalry boiled over into an embarrassing public turf war between Isi and his younger brother Mark over who speaks for Australian Jewry, especially vis-à-vis the government of the day: the ECAJ, which was Isi’s longstanding domain (he was president four times across two decades), or the Zionist Federation of Australia, which was Mark’s fiefdom for a decade.
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The Jewish and non-Jewish press had a field day but it was the Jewish community which lost out.
But the “Brothers at arms” scandal – as the Sydney Morning Herald headlined it – is recounted somewhat at arm’s length by the author, quoting sources but never revealing any reflections or, for that matter, remorse by Leibler. A truce between the siblings was brokered in the mid-1990s .
Though Leibler claimed during the virtual book launch in March that he did not censor any of Rutland’s work, Lone Voice is largely uncritical of its subject. Moreover, it is burdened at times by detail to the point that some pages (343 and 489, for example) have more footnotes than text, breaking the narrative flow. And while some of the footnotes are revealing, others are a distracting detour.
It is here where the contrast emerges between Michael Gawenda’s 2020 unauthorised biography of Mark Leibler and Rutland’s authorised biography of Isi Leibler. One is written by a journalist; the other by an historian. The Powerbroker is a shorter, pacier read, with Gawenda, a former editor of The Age, injecting his own story into the narrative, adding a layer of intimacy and personality. Lone Voice is a more academic read, with the language at times overly formal.
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A barrage of criticisms has been hurled at Isi Leibler – stubborn, zealous, ruthless, pugilistic, battle-hardened – but his courage to fight for causes he believes in deeply cannot be discounted.
But it’s an equally intriguing read. And the 13-page index is a seductive roll call of major powerbrokers of the 20th century: Arafat, Barak, Begin, Brezhnev; Gorbachev; Clinton; Carter; Xiaoping; Krushchev; Gandhi; Netanyahu…
A barrage of criticisms has been hurled at Isi Leibler over the decades – stubborn, zealous, ruthless, pugilistic, battle-hardened – but his courage to fight for causes he believes in deeply cannot be discounted: Soviet Jewry, Israel, modern Orthodox Judaism, diplomatic relations between Israel and the Asia-Pacific region and, of course, Australian Jewry.
To that end, Lone Voice will remain an enduring reference point, especially for those analysing the politics of the Australian Jewish community in the second half of the 20th century.
There are many take-aways from Rutland’s voluminous deep dive into this Australian-Jewish titan. But one unmistakeable conclusion is this: those who waged war with Isi Leibler did so at their peril. For, as Rutland’s thesis proves time and again, he rarely – if ever – waved the white flag. And he usually prevailed, even if it took decades.
Lone Voice: The Wars of Isi Leibler, by Suzanne Rutland, Hybrid Publishers, $49.95
Main photo: courtesy Hybrid Publishers
