The Israel lobby has comic Bassem Youssef banned from Australia while the government gives a free pass to IDF soldiers suspected of war crimes. Andrew Brown on the joke that could not enter Australia, and the army that could.
On Sunday morning, before the sun is over Sydney Heads, up to 40 current and former soldiers of the Israel Defence Forces will jog across the Sydney Harbour Bridge with numbers pinned to their chests and a cheer squad waiting at the Opera House.
On Thursday night in Perth, a stage will be empty.
Bassem Youssef will not be on it. Home Affairs wanted an FBI clearance and a criminal record from Egypt, whose generals forced him into exile in 2014. His passport had lapsed. Cairo took its time. The tour is gone.
Youssef performed here in 2023 and 2015 without a police certificate. He did not change. The lobby did.
In June, Peter Wertheim of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry told the Sydney Morning Herald his organisation had gone to Home Affairs to have Youssef kept out.
His stated principle was that anyone with a record of “debased generalisations about entire national or religious communities” should never be granted a visa. Hold that sentence. We will come back to it.
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Home Affairs will not say what it did with Wertheim’s request. The paperwork did the job a refusal would have done, and no minister had to sign it.
Now the runners.
Their trip is paid for by the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council and the Zionist Council of NSW, which calls them a “peace delegation”. They run for the Israeli charity Shalva, and Shalva has published their profiles.
IDF war crimes suspects
Meet First Lieutenant Roy Oryon. Shalva’s profile says he served as deputy commander of Company B, 13th Battalion, Golani Brigade, through what Israel calls the Swords of Iron War. He led his men on October 7. Company B lost 18 soldiers that day and he wears 18 flowers tattooed on his skin for them.
The profile does not say where Company B went next. Golani’s 13th Battalion went into Gaza. It is the brigade whose reconnaissance battalion, before dawn on 23 March 2025, fired on a convoy of ambulances outside Rafah for more than five minutes, killed 15 medics and rescue workers, then bulldozed the bodies and the crushed vehicles into the sand for eight days.
The IDF’s own inquiry admitted its deputy commander fired on the convoy himself and filed a false report. He was sacked. Nobody was charged.
Meet Oryan Omer. His LinkedIn lists five years in Israeli Military Intelligence to 2020.
Meet Yael Zafarti. Her LinkedIn shows six years in Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence arm, and the title Head of Cyber Security Analysis from April 2024 to January 2026.
Unit 8200 is the unit that +972 Magazine and the Guardian identified as the builder of the artificial intelligence systems that generated Gaza’s kill lists. It is also the unit a Western security source told Reuters helped develop the booby trapped pagers that exploded across Lebanon on 17 and 18 September 2024, blinding and maiming more than 3,000 people and killing at least 37, two of them children.
Zafarti was running cyber analysis for the unit at the time. She now works as a product manager in Tel Aviv.
These are the people the Zionist Council of NSW is inviting Sydney to applaud over drinks.
Tony Burke MIA
The International Court of Justice found the genocide case against Israel plausible in January 2024. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister.
In September 2025 the UN Commission of Inquiry, with Australian barrister Chris Sidoti on the panel, found Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. Sidoti has said Israeli personnel who served there should be interrogated wherever they land.
They are landing here. And nobody is asking them anything.
Section 501 of the Migration Act says a person fails the character test where there is reason to conclude they were involved in genocide, a crime against humanity or a war crime. No conviction is required. Families for Palestine put that section to Tony Burke on Tuesday.
He has not replied.
His Department has the mechanism. In December 2024 two Israeli siblings were sent a 13 page military service form asking whether they had abused detainees or taken part in war crimes. Home Affairs called it routine. So here is the question.
The question
Was that routine form sent to 40 soldiers arriving together, with a sponsor, a promoter and a Facebook page? If yes, say so. If no, explain why a comedian needed clearances from two governments to tell jokes, while a Golani lieutenant needed nothing but a bib.
Burke is not squeamish about the power. He cancelled Simcha Rothman’s visa a year ago and refused Ayelet Shaked and Hillel Fuld. Each time the lobby howled that Jews were being punished for opinions.
Now go back to Wertheim’s sentence.
Debased generalisations about entire national communities. He wrote it on behalf of an organisation that has spent two years defending an army whose commanders are wanted by the ICC and whose conduct a UN inquiry has called genocide.
He asked the Government to ban a comedian for words. His movement is importing a Golani officer and a Unit 8200 department head for a party.
That is not a double standard. It is a single standard, applied with total consistency.
Israelis are protected. Their critics are processed.
The runners cross the Bridge at dawn. Youssef will reapply from Los Angeles. MWM has asked Home Affairs whether any of the delegation was sent the military service form and whether AIJAC or the ECAJ lobbied for them. We will print the answer. We are not expecting one.
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Andrew Brown is a Sydney businessman in the health products sector, former Deputy Mayor of Mosman and Palestine peace activist