Inside the ARC of Israel influence in the Queensland Election

Part 2 of the Wendy Bacon investigation into far-right Queensland Jewish Collective campaigning in the Queensland Election finds a new right-wing group, Australians for Responsible Citizenship, has been established – sceptical on climate and pro-Israel.

With three days to go before the Queensland election, the Queensland Jewish Collective (QJC) has made a final plea for voters to put the Greens last. 

According to the QJC, their case is “not complicated” but simple: “For the past 12 months, we have watched a country, alone, fight an existential battle against multiple armies, backed by Iran. Two of those armies, Hamas and Hezbollah, are proscribed terror organisations in Australia.” Their key allegation is that the “Australian Greens have seen fit to SUPPORT these TERROR organisations …”.

The Greens strongly reject claims of antisemitism but do support sanctions on Israel and have supported a blockade of the Australian factory supplying military aircraft parts to Israel.

For QJC, this is all the evidence it needs to prove that the Greens support terror organisations. But if this were true, it would mean that the growing list of countries, unions, human rights organisations, councils, churches, students and individuals around the world, who also support sanctions, support terrorism too. For QJC, you either support Israel and its armed forces or you are on the side of terror. It is that simple.

But for many watching images of hospitals being bombed in Lebanon and Gaza, a bedridden young man being burned alive, starving men and boys being herded like cattle by an Israeli army that has received $17.3 billion in US military aid during this year alone, Israel looks far more like a wrathful, vengeful tyrant than a vulnerable victim. 

Indeed, the International Court of Justice has found that Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to a plausible case for genocide, the UN has voted resoundingly for a ceasefire and recognition of a Palestinian state, and yesterday at the historic meeting of BRICS nations in Russia a communique was issued condemning Isreal and calling for a ceasefire.

QJC ideology

There is no doubt that the ideology underpinning the QJC campaign is strongly held by those at its heart. Hava Mendel, who authorises the QJC’s communications, wrote in the Times of Israel earlier this year of a yearning for the return of Zion that is written about in the Hebrew scriptures.

But she is also appealing to a broader group who have an aversion to progressive people who eat what she called ‘woke salad’ every day; people attracted to the broader right-wing message of speaking out against ‘radicalism’ to protect ‘Australian values and democracy’.

Like all contemporary campaigning organisations, QJC strongly relies on social media. Here, they have stalled. Today’s Facebook post got just 15 likes, several of them from people in the core group. QJC’s Twitter account has not posted for more than a week. The only time they got a boost was when their partner Australian Jewish Association, which has a growing social media following, and its close ally, Advance, promoted them.

Billboards are their key asset on which most of the money donated to QJC has been spent. These rely on a single powerful image aimed at a broader audience. The price of billboard advertising in inner Brisbane varies. According to QJC’s website, it has paid either $1800 or $800 (depending on size) a week for several different billboards since August. In addition, the group also needed to fund the printing and distribution of more than 42,000 colour leaflets.

QJC financial backers

So where is the money coming from? 

To find that out, MWM looked at two sources of information. 

Unlike other jurisdictions, Queensland does require donors who give more than $1000 to register their donations with the Queensland Electoral Commission in real-time during the election campaign. Donations from individuals or companies giving smaller amounts that add up to $1000 must be declared within 7 days of being spent. 

QJC is registered as a third-party organisation and currently has five donations listed totally nearly $12,000.

One donor springs out as bigger than the others. Brisbat Holdings, a company owned by Natan and Gillian Brisblat, has made two donations totalling $6,200.

Samuel Natan Brisblat immigrated from Israel 25 years ago and started his family company, Eureka Furniture, which today has 40 stores in Queensland, NSW and Victoria. MWM tried to contact Natan and Gillian and their son Joel, who is a joint owner with them and the CEO, but were told they were overseas. A Eureka Furniture receptionist agreed to forward an email to them with questions and an invitation to comment. They have not replied.

Natan, now in his seventies, attracted a lot of attention on Instagram late last year when he posted images celebrating the IOF. An Israeli veteran himself, he was supporting troops engaged in the conflict with Hezbollah on the Lebanese border.

His son Daniel, who is a real estate agent in Brisbane, reposted his father’s image with a ‘proud of you, Dad’ comment. 

Since then, Natan Brisblat has closed his twitter account but the images remain.

In December, when Palestinian supporters saw these posts, they were upset. By then, the IOF had already bombed residential areas and hospitals in Gaza. Thousands were known to be dead, with no one knowing how many were buried under the rubble.

When the image was re-posted on a Stand4Palestine page, it attracted many comments. Some interpreted the message as meaning that Natan Brisblat himself was fighting in Israel. Some of Stand4Palestine’s followers had friends and family who had been killed in the war.

Many expressed outrage at what they regard as a double standard which discriminates against Arab Australians and other pro-Palestinian supporters who could be arrested if they even posted an image of a Hamas or Hezbollah flag.

There was talk of boycotting the Eureka stores. One Eureka store in Auburn was graffitied.

Two of the other declared donors on the Electoral Commission site are QJC directors Have Mendelle, who has contributed nearly $2000, and Josh Turier, who has contributed $2000. 

There are two other substantial donors: Noga Ehrinbaum, who has contributed $2000, and Brisbane businessman and public relations expert Nathanial Trieger, who has contributed $1800.

Go Fund Me

The other source of information we used to identify contributors was QJC’s Go Fund Me account. The fund was set up late last year before QJC registered as a company with early fundraising supporting billboards. The purpose was initially to raise awareness of the attack on Israel by Hamas on October 7 and the plight of the Israeli hostages. 

By August, the company had been formed, and the fundraising for the state election campaign began. QJC registered as a third party organisation – their message being to Put the Greens last. 

In all,132 separate donations have been made total of $14,233. Many of these are anonymous and others were spent during the earlier campaign. Two weeks ago, the fund was suspended, and this announcement was made: “We are working on getting a better, more secure and more direct way to donate!”

Potential donors were redirected back to the QJC website qldjewishcollective.org. “Thank you so much, we will keep working hard and staying up to ridiculous hours to be worthy of your donations and make real impact. Getting rid of radicalism and extremism in QLD!” 

Go Fund Me anonymously

MWM invited Have Mendelle to do an interview, to which she responded, “We have no availability to do interviews at this point. We are a very small managing team, on a volunteer basis, and are really time-limited with kids, work and pre-polling”. We later asked her a specific question about the security concerns but did not get a response.

Because many of the donors chose to remain anonymous, it may be that they have concerns that they could be identified through disclosure processes. 

Several other donors stood out on the GoFundMe list.

Yoni Nazarathy is an Associate Professor in Mathematics and Physics at the University of Queensland. He was a leading participant in Camp Shalom, which was set up on the campus in opposition to the pro-Palestinian student encampment. In the 1990s, Nazarathy was a commander in an Israeli army tank brigade and served in both Gaza and Lebanon. 

He has called for those who do not support a BDS on Israel to resign from the National Tertiary Education Union, which supports sanctions on Israel. He has also attended a rally organised by Never Again is Now, a pro-Israel group partly led by right-wing Christians such as Mark Leach, who supported the Better Councils astroturfing campaign in Sydney.  

Advance Australia

Another donor is Simon Fenwick, a major donor to the Advance No Campaign last year. He has only indicated a donation of $300, which is small compared to his previous massive donations to conservative causes. 

Fenwick has a background in funds management and was a Founding Partner at International Value Advisors LLC (USA). He is a major backer of the conservative political group Advance. In 2020, he donated $1 million to Advance over concerns about Covid 19 restrictions and Chinese influence in Australia. Last year, he donated $250,000 to Advance for the ‘No’ campaign leading up to the referendum on the ‘Voice’ for Indigenous Australians. He has also been one of the Liberal Party’s biggest donors.

Last year, the ABC reported that Fenwick was on the Board of the right-wing think-tank the Institute of Public Affairs that advises Advance. He opposes action on climate change.

Fenwick is also on the Board of the University of Queensland’s Endowment Fund, which is a major source of philanthropic funds for the University.

Libby Burke, who has donated $200, has 25 years experience in the public relations industry and journalism. She has been part of the Queensland Jewish Board of Deputies (QJBD) Public Affairs team and is on the board of the Holocaust Museum.  According to the museum website, she now works for the Queensland government.

The QJBD is the ‘roof organisation’ for Jewish organisations in Queensland but has no official association with the QJC. As stated in our first report, the accountants at the registered office for QJC suggested we ring the QJBD if we wanted to contact them. We emailed QJBD Chairperson Jason Steinberg after we could not contact them by phone and have had no response. 

The QJC has claimed to be a multicultural partnership. It has received a letter of endorsement from the Australian Hindu Association and right-wing Iranian Hesam Orouhi, but beyond that, there is little, if any, evidence of broader grassroots involvement. Although we cannot know who is behind the anonymous donations, the flow of QJC-identified donations came from two sources – well-connected pro-Israel Zionist sources and broader far-right sources. 

New player on the scene, ARC

ARC’s advisory board includes John Howard, John Anderson, Andrew Hastie, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Tony Abbott, Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson and a raft of other climate sceptics and Israel government supporters.

The Australian Jewish Association has partnered with QJC, is a key ally of Advance and is the strong link between these two groups. This week, AJA  has been moving in a bigger scene: working on a broader political strategy at the invitation-only Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference, which has been heavily promoted by Sky News.

AJA Chairperson David Adler has been posting photographs of himself on Facebook with other conservative figures, including Scott Morrison and Peter Costello. “AJA has been holding productive discussions on the sidelines of the ARC Conference in Sydney,” said Adler on Facebook.

He also went on the Andrew Bolt Show on Sky News Australia and called for deportation of not only non-citizens who “support terror” – which he defines as any positive reference to Hamas or Hezbollah – but dual citizens of Lebanon and Australia who make similar references as well. To top a good week off, Adler was awarded the highest honour possible by Rabbi Yanky Berger of Chabad Double Bay for his work for Israel.

Meanwhile, while many have been critical of Australians serving with the IDF in Gaza and Lebanon, the AJA has stated that it will lay a complaint against a Muslim Sydney barrister, ​​Mahmoud Mando, who wrote that Nasrallah, the assassinated head of Hezbollah –  part of the Lebanese government – would prove to be on the right side of history, with the NSW Bar Association. 

Far right Israel lobby group campaigning hard against the Greens in Queensland