Sir Frank Lowy reflects on anti-semitism

Last weekend I was honoured to catch up again with Frank Lowy, surely Australia’s most successful 20th Century immigrant. I’d last spoken with Sir Frank in late May at a breakfast at his home in Tel Aviv with a group of visiting Australian journalists.

Now, on the eve of the second anniversary of October 7, the 95-year-old founder of the Westfield shopping centre empire was in a pensive mood in the office of his Sydney Point Piper home.
As he prepared to finish his annual stay in Australia, though, he reflected most on what was happening to fellow Jews in Australia. It was an emotional mix of sadness, anguish, bafflement and perhaps suppressed anger.

“I am 95 years old and came here when I was 21, and I prospered, and people prospered with me,” he told me.

Now living in Israel, he says his heart beats stronger at the thought of the Australia in which he raised his family and built his wealth. But he is “at an absolute loss” to find the words to describe – or defend – what the sudden rise of anti-Semitism here.

The question is, he asks is: what happened to Australia? And where is the political leadership to do something about it?

The contrast with the land that had given him so much opportunity over the past seven decades leads him to the only answer that made sense. There must be “dark forces” at work.

“The whole anti-Israel, anti-Jewish stuff started on the 8th of October, one day after the onslaught of Hamas on Israel,” Sir Frank told me. “The question arises here: were these people who knew it was going to happen because the organization of demonstration, it does not happen spontaneously. Somebody had to do it beforehand. Who were these people?

“I don’t want to make any accusation. But this whole anti-Semitic wave of people and activities was led by somebody. It was convenient to blame Israel. And if you blame Israel, you think you have to blame the Jews …

“I can’t find the answer to that, unless there were some dark forces just like the Iranian ambassador was sent home. Maybe that’s how it was organized. They knew the attack will come on Israel and Israel will be destroyed, so ‘let’s go’”.

I visited Sir Frank to run him through the Centre for Independent Studies’ new multi-year research project aimed at understanding and combating the alarming rise in anti-Semitism in and other religious intolerance in Australia.

I wanted to test our plan with the man who had survived the European Holocaust that claimed his father’s life, started work in a factory the week after landing in Sydney penniless and, just eight years later, listed Westfield on the stock exchange. I came with an offering of an April 1960 report in the Financial Review that included a picture of Westfield’s first supermarket development in western Sydney.

As a marker of Australia back then, it was also the time when the Melbourne Stock Exchange admitted, seemingly for the first time, a Jew as one of its members. At the time, the Financial Review called it a blow for tolerance.

That makes Australia look like a backward place. But it was also true that by the time that BRW Magazine came out with its first Rich List in the 1980s, Jewish people, many of them in effect refugees from World War Two were well over-rerepresented in the ranks of Australia’s most wealthy people. There were the Pratts, the Gandels, Solomon Lew and Harry Triguboff.

But it is notable how little there Jewishness was commented upon, let alone there being any backlash against the remarkable generation of post War wealth creators.

It was pleasing to receive his moral support for the CIS project. “I am very positive about your work,” Sir Frank said. “I hope that Australia will revert to its traditional policy of all Australians are equal.”

And though insisting he doesn’t want to get political, our conversation led to a political point that inevitably touches on those now in power in Canberra. “And the government stays silent on it,” he laments.

“I don’t want to be political but they are leading the country I lived in – I am still an Australian citizen – and I believe in so much …

“People, particularly Jewish people are very worried that lot of anti-Semitism has risen in Australian that has never been before, and the government doesn’t stop it.

“Bob Hawke loved the Jews. John Howard loved the Jews. We were part of the Australian make-up of migrants and born Aussies and the relationship was totally friendly, uninterrupted for 60,70 or 80 years.”

“There was an Australian head of the UN [HV Evatt] who declared the state of Israel in 1949. Ministers came to Israel. Israelis came here and we were friends. And a big question is ‘what happened to Australia?’. Because Australians are good people, they are used to immigrants. They welcomed immigrants because Australians needed the people.”

Sir Frank does not excuse everything happening in Gaza. “There is a war in Gaza,” he told me. “Hamas is a deep terrorist organization. I can be sympathetic to them [the Palestinians, not Hamas]. Israel is fighting a war. That is a thing that is hard to say because war is war and the Israeli people themselves are wondering about that question. And they are questioning the ethos of the Israeli army. I don’t say suddenly that Israel is a saint of a country, but for a country like Australia to allow anti-Semitism to arise …

The CIS research project, “The New Intolerance: Antisemitism and Religious Hatred in a Fracturing Civis Compact”, will seek to answer the cultural questions that Sir Frank and many others are asking. It is being run by Peter Kurti, the director of the CIS Culture, Prosperity and Civil Society Program.