A paid advertisement opposing Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s state visit to Australia has come under scrutiny with doubts raised about the accuracy and consent of some Jewish signatories.
The full-page open letter, organised by the Jewish Council of Australia, appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age on Monday. It purportedly included about 700 signatures from more than 1000 Australian Jews who signed an online petition against Herzog’s contentious visit. The letter said Herzog was “not welcome”, and hosting him during the war in Gaza “betrays Jewish communities, multicultural Australia and everyone who stands for Palestinian human rights”.
Within hours of the ad’s publication, several signatories who appeared on the list claimed they never gave permission for their names to be included. Others claimed the list included an offensive phrase in Hebrew, as well as the names of dead people who were “kapos” – Jewish inmates forced by the Nazis to serve as “stand-in” guards in concentration camps during the Holocaust.
In response, the council said some “offensive and obscure historical references” and false names had “slipped through the cracks”, but they represented a “handful” of the hundreds of signatories.
“We are deeply offended by the fact that racist actors appear to have targeted us in this way through references to Nazis and the Holocaust,” the council said in a statement.
The names of David Slade, managing director of Slade Pharmacies and president of United Israel Appeal Victoria, and his wife Tammie, were both falsely included in the advertisement.
Slade said he was alerted to their names being included in the open letter when an acquaintance sent him a photo of the ad on WhatsApp.
He said the couple did not endorse or authorise their names to be included on the list, and they supported Herzog’s visit to Australia.
“Fabricating support isn’t activism, it is deception,” Slade said.
“It damages trust and damages community cohesion. We are very unhappy about this.”
Slade described the inclusion of fake names as a “gross ethical failure” by the Jewish Council of Australia and the newspapers that published the advertisement.
“Spreading falsehoods and lies isn’t the way to go about public discourse,” he said.
“If they (the JCA) had real support they wouldn’t use fake names.”
He questioned how such a mistake could have occurred, describing it as “very distressing” for Jewish Australians.
“If people are putting out an open online petition, targeting an issue causing immense social unrest, they knew full well what they were putting out and its intended purpose and therefore there should have been a system of checks.”
The council said its members had carried out “a number of review processes in a short time frame to delete duplicates, antisemitic and offensive names which were submitted by malicious actors. We deleted a significant number of names through this process.
“Unfortunately, a handful of names with offensive and obscure historical references, and names of real Jewish people falsely submitted by others, slipped through the cracks,” the statement said.
“Some Jewish people were also included in the list who are genuine signatories, but have the same names as others in the Jewish community. The fact that someone shares a name with someone else, which is common in the Jewish community, should not disqualify someone from signing a petition or writing an open letter in their name.”
Nine’s published advertising terms and conditions say that advertisers must check for any errors in advertising copy and are responsible for its contents. Nine is the publisher of the Herald and The Age.
Those who wanted to sign the letter filled out an online form, which asked users their name, email address and whether they were Jewish Australian or a non-Jewish ally. Only those who identified as Jewish were included in the advertisement.
The list of names has since been updated on the council’s website, with about 20 names removed by Tuesday afternoon. The advertisement in question has been removed from the digital edition of Monday’s Herald and The Age.
The council will explore ways to avoid “similar attacks” in future, but said the few “false names should not detract from the large numbers of Jewish people who are deeply offended by Herzog’s visit”.
Pro-Palestinian protesters – including some calling for the Israeli head of state’s arrest and many chanting “free Palestine” – gathered in Sydney and Melbourne on Monday to protest Herzog’s four-day visit to Australia, by invitation from the Albanese government, following the Bondi shooting.
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