The Israeli 'study missions' for Australian union leaders

Peter Lerner is the Director General of International Relations for Histadrut, Israel’s national union peak body, and a retired lieutenant-colonel in the IDF, for which he has also acted as a spokesperson. In 2014, the British Sunday Express called Lerner “Israel’s other Iron Dome” for his work deflecting international criticism of Israel during its bombing campaign of Gaza in that year, a descriptor Lerner has included on his website.

For the last nine months, Lerner has given extensive media interviews to global news outlets in which he has consistently disputed the civilian death toll in Gaza and obfuscated about the massacres of Palestinian civilians. In April, Lerner was the Israeli government’s spokesperson of choice to defend the IDF airstrikes that killed Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom and six others.

Lerner has just wrapped up a “whirlwind visit” to Sydney, where he had meetings with “labor officials, labor unions [and] the Jewish community” to discuss how the global labour movement can contribute to “peace and a two-state solution”.

Lerner’s visit has already generated controversy among local Jewish anti-Zionists. Sydney-based activist group the Tzedek Collective condemned Woollahra’s Emanuel Synagogue for hosting Lerner at a communal Shabbas dinner, calling it an “unholy blending of political propaganda and religious service” designed to “hide Zionist war crimes behind the veil of Judaism”.

But the main purpose of Lerner’s visit — to meet with like-minded trade union officials — has flown largely under the radar. In an interview on RN Breakfast with Patricia Karvelas last week, Lerner said the trip came together when he “got a phone call quite out of the blue a couple of weeks ago, saying ‘we would like you to come to Australia, we’ve put together a schedule’.”

While Lerner did say he was not meeting with ACTU secretary Sally McManus, he declined when asked to specify who organised his trip, saying only that “friends here in the labour movement in Australia” had invited him over and that his priority was “keeping the conversation within the labour movement and within the unions open”.

Lerner’s visit, and the apparent need to keep its details under wraps, is a good indicator of the deep divisions within the union movement over how to respond to the genocide in Gaza.

On paper, the unions are saying all the right things — following on from a similar statement by the International Trade Union Confederation, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) called for an immediate ceasefire on October 22. In February the ACTU called for an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory and for recognition of Palestine as a sovereign state.

In April the ACTU issued its strongest statement yet, calling on the government to end all military trade with Israel, issue sanctions against Israeli officials, and ensure that Australian companies are not supplying Israel with weapons materiel that could be used to violate international law, such as the bomb bay door mechanisms for the F-35 fighter jet manufactured by Rosebank Engineering in Melbourne.

But the proliferation of rank-and-file Palestinian solidarity groups like Unionists for Palestine in the last nine months speaks to a frustration among many unionists that union leaders aren’t taking a stronger stance against the genocide. While officials like Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) Sydney branch secretary Paul Keating, who was arrested at a Palestinian solidarity rally at Port Botany in March, have shown up for the movement, the absence of high-profile unionists like ACTU secretary Sally McManus and president Michele O’Neil at the ongoing weekly rallies across the country has been noticeable.

While much focus has been on those unions that have expressed support for Palestine, the work of right-wing unions and union leaders to suppress the broader movement’s support for Palestine has gone relatively unnoticed. In February, The Jewish Independent noted that the Australian Workers Union (AWU), the Transport Workers Union (TWU), the Health Services Union (HSU) and the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA) had stayed silent on the genocide for more than four months.

While the SDA’s well-known status as a Catholic bigotry factory disguised as a union explains their leadership’s stance, other union figures have made their support for Israel known as well. In May, HSU members staged a protest outside a meeting in Sydney between HSU national president Gerard Hayes and Israeli ambassador Amir Maimon. Hayes has also tried to prevent HSU members from flying the HSU flag at Palestinian solidarity rallies.

Efforts to water down the union movement’s support for Palestine go back a long way. In 2009, then-AWU national secretary Paul Howes launched Trade Unions Linking Israel and Palestine (TULIP), a short-lived confederacy of unions in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom “to campaign for moderation in union views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”.

In November, Daany Saeed at Crikey published an exhaustive list of politicians, journalists and editors who have been on tours of Israel sponsored and organised by Zionist advocacy groups. What’s less widely known is that Australian union officials have also been taking paid trips to Israel since 2010 courtesy of the Australia Israel Labor Dialogue (AILD), an organisation focused on “building links between unions in Israel and Australia”.

Notable attendees of the AILD’s yearly “study missions” to Israel include Hayes, new national secretary of the Rail, Tram and Bus Union (RTBU) Alex Claassens, former AWU national secretary Scott McDine, Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) deputy chief executive Adam Portelli, HSU national senior vice president Diana Asmar, Professionals Australia Victorian director Scott Crawford, former ACTU assistant secretary Michael Borowick*, TWU Queensland director of organising Josh Millroy, former TWU national executive officer Polo Guilbert-Wright and SDA Newcastle and Northern Branch secretary David Bliss.

Other past attendees of the AILD study missions have gone on to senior advisory roles in Labor politicians’ offices or to lobbying work, including Phoebe Drake, a longtime advisor to Anthony Albanese; Maddie Bradford, a senior advisor to Victorian premier Jacinta Allan; Jason Byrne, a former Young Labor national president and parliamentary advisor to Don Farrell; and Andrew Anson, an associate partner at lobbying firm SEC Newgate.

Victorian Labor Member for Kororoit Luba Grigorovich also attended the 2018 study mission while she was the Victorian state secretary of the RTBU. I’ve mainly included that because Daany Saeed appears to have missed it on his list (hi Daany).

There’s no comprehensive public list of which union officials have been on these trips — the AILD’s social media presence is fairly basic — but photos on the AILD’s Twitter page show Australian unionists taking part in the trips in 2013, 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2019.

A recap of the 2019 trip published by the Britain Israel Trade Union Dialogue (BITUD) also includes an interesting detail — it says that on its first morning, the joint British-Australian study mission was hosted at Histadrut’s headquarters by Peter Lerner.

I’ve sent questions to the AILD asking for a complete list of Australian union officials who’ve taken part in its study missions, and to Peter Lerner asking for more information about which unions invited him over. I’ll post an update if and when I hear back.

*Note: an earlier version of this article incorrectly listed Michael Borowick’s former position as “former ACTU national secretary”.

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