One of the most tenuous arguments in favour for The Voice was recently made by Mark Leibler. Speaking at an event in Sydney which included Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Marcia Langton, and Mr Pearson, The Australian reported that Mr Leibler said:

My sense of the ties between my Jewish heritage, the centrality of the state of Israel, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander traditions and cultures grew even stronger through my former articled clerk and great friend, Noel Pearson.

Noel has often described our two peoples as sharing a ‘land-based identity’ – historical and spiritual.

Noel also says that Indigenous Australians can and must resist victimhood, as the Jewish people have done, even in the face of persistent racism and victimisation. This is where the Voice comes in.

Comparing Indigenous Australians with the State of Israel is a strange comparison to make. As The Australian once again reports, Anthony Albanese has hardened Labor’s position on Israel, declaring the West Bank and Gaza as ‘Occupied Palestinian Territories’ and Israeli settlements as ‘illegal’.

Following on from that though, the religious worldviews of the two people groups couldn’t be more different. For instance, the Jews believe in a monotheistic, transcendent, and personal creator God. Whereas the Aboriginal peoples of Australia have traditionally held to a pantheistic worship of numerous spiritual entities immanently associated with the Land™.

But on an even more significant level, Israel’s relationship with the Promised Land and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s connection to Country are also diametrically opposite. The Uluru Statement from the Heart explicitly states (with bold replacing italics in the original document for extra emphasis):

Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign Nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands, and possessed it under our own laws and customs. This our ancestors did, according to the reckoning of our culture, from the Creation, according to the common law from ‘time immemorial’, and according to science more than 60,000 years ago.

This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.

In other words, the Aboriginal people of Australia and the Torres Strait understand themselves to be the eternal custodians of the land. And what’s more, it’s a ‘spiritual sovereignty’ which can never be extinguished. A Jewish understanding of the land though is completely different. As Matthew Littlefield writes in The Spirit Behind The Voice: The Religious Dimension of the ‘Voice’ Proposal (Connor Court, 2023):

The Bible provides a deep theology of dispossession. It teaches us that God owns all the land, everywhere. ‘The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell within’ (Psalm 24:1). This is the first pillar of this theology. No people on earth, whether pagan or Christian, homeowner or national sovereign, should view their land as anything more than a stewardship. God shows us very clearly in his own Scriptures how he takes lands from wicked peoples and gives them to new peoples. You might be thinking immediately of the Israelite. But if you read Deuteronomy 2 to 3 you will see that God does this for other nations as well. He worked through the Edomites and Moabites to punish the former inhabitants of the lands he gave them to steward.

In short, there is a fundamental difference between being an eternal custodian of the Land compared to a temporal steward of creation. A responsibility which according the Bible can be both given as well as taken away (See Leviticus 25:23; Deuteronomy 11:8-9). Indeed, the book of Hebrews tells us that not even Abraham viewed the Promised Land as being the eternal home of the Jews but saw it as a foreshadowing of a true and lasting place in the world to come:

‘By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.’ Heb. 11:9-10

All of which to say, the parallel between the State of Israel and The Voice is one of a false equivalence and should be seen for what it is. A vacuous attempt to leverage racial victimhood for the acquisition of political power and money. And what’s more, Mr Leibler in particular should realise that current Labor government is no friend of Israel.