Published: 17 March 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
EVE ALTMAN and BEN WYATT argue the Australian Jewish community should not be welcoming an Israeli politician associated with the controversial judicial overhaul.
Ayelet Shaked, a former minister of justice and minister of interior, is scheduled to speak at the United Israel Appeal’s upcoming Women’s Division events, named "Celebrating Powerful Women".
Shaked’s time in Israeli politics may mark her as a powerful woman, but not one that our community should be celebrating.
Throughout her career she has taken a hardline stance against refugees and asylum seekers, promoted “creeping annexation” of settlements in the West Bank, and clearly laid the foundations for the judicial overhaul, which has prompted Israel’s largest ever protests.
Australian Jewish leaders have been disappointingly slow to recognise the dangers to Israel of the current civil crisis.
Now that the Zionist Federation of Australia and Executive Council of Australian Jewry have finally done so, supporting the woman who began the process is unacceptable.
In this political moment it is tone-deaf for UIA to feature Shaked, without whom the government would not have the foundations to implement the judicial reforms.
Shaked recently explained that one of the goals of her diaspora tour is to shore up support for the government and its anti-democratic agenda.
For Shaked to be invited into our community by UIA in order to promote this agenda shows, at best, a lack of understanding of her involvement in the crisis in Israel, and, at worst, an attempt at substantive alignment in support of these anti-democratic proposals.
Anyone who values Israel as a Jewish and democratic state should be horrified by both the judicial crisis being pushed by the Netanyahu government and the cascading sectarian violence. The recent pogrom in Huwara carried out by Israeli settlers was the most confronting explosion, not least because of its similarity to the violence which many of our ancestors suffered under Tsarist terror.
Shaked laid the foundation for the government’s plan as justice minister in 2015 with plans to ‘reform’ Israel’s legal system, spearheading parliamentary interference in the appointment of new Supreme Court justices. In 2019, one of her party’s central election pledges was “defeating” the court, arguing that for too long it had blocked her legislative goals.
By the time her tenure as justice minister was completed, she boasted of appointing 330 judges and court registrars, declaring that she “broke the paradigm of the judicial system.”
Most concerning has been Shaked’s work to kill off any hope of a two-state solution and institute permanent Israeli military rule over millions of Palestinians. In 2015, she called for the establishment of an official state body to formalise the rights of settlers to gain legal custody over land that they claim. Her party, The Jewish Home, proposed a bill in the Knesset to extend Israeli labour laws in the West Bank, only for it to be withdrawn when they realised this would also improve Palestinian labour rights.
These episodes from Shaked’s past lay bare her goal for the establishment of legalised Jewish supremacy in which unrestricted settler expansion is matched with precise restriction of Palestinian rights. This is the very definition of apartheid policies and unworthy of any country committed to democracy.
Israel is experiencing the largest protest movement in its history, responding to the anti-democratic policies proposed by its most right-wing government to date. In this political moment it is tone-deaf for UIA to feature Shaked, without whom the government would not have the foundations to implement the judicial reforms.
Hosting her illustrates how out of touch Australian organisations like UIA are with the realities on the ground in Israel. It paints a bleak reality of the values and vision these organisations wish to uphold.
One cannot willingly attend such events, listen to and applaud speakers like Shaked, and still say that they are standing on the side of progress and democracy, let alone for human rights and equality more broadly.
Our community organisations play an important role in connecting us to current affairs in Israel. We cannot expect all community members to be experts on the ins and outs of Israeli politics, tracking the political pathway and problematic history of different MKs, such as Shaked.
We put trust in our community organisations, with whom we’ve had long relationships, to help us maintain our connection to Israel. We trust that this connection is guided by the principles of the Declaration of Independence, that Israel will be “based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel… [and ensures] complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex”.
Presenting Shaked, describing her as “one of Israel's most active and influential legislators, spearheading unprecedented reforms of the legal system”, without acknowledging how these "unprecedented reforms" paved the way for Israel’s democratic crisis, is a betrayal of that trust and does a deep disservice to the community.
This is a time for the Australian Jewish community leadership to make a clear choice.
Will they side with the two thirds of Israelis who are opposed to these anti-democratic laws, or will they lock themselves in with the Shaked-Netanyahu-Smotrich camp?
Committing the Jewish community to the latter path will create serious long-term damage to the community’s long-standing commitment to a democratic Israel.
Photo: Ayelet Shaked in a mock perfume advertisement produced by her party The Jewish Home as part of the 2022 election campaign. The advertisement listed qualities such as “Judicial reform” and “Restraining the Supreme Court” and used the tagline "Facism: to me it smells like democracy".
