It will take quite some time before the liberals of Sydney and Melbourne are able to extricate the stone that Prof. Raphael Israeli of the Hebrew University tossed into the Australian well. The veteran orientalist, a guest of the Shalom Institute at the University of New South Wales, was quoted in an article in the Australian Jewish News, a weekly, as saying Australia should cap Muslim immigration He went on to warn Australians of being swamped by Indonesian immigrants.

According to Israeli, who didn't back down when he was approached by the national press, the experience of the West proves that when a Muslim minority becomes more than one-tenth of a country's population, it bodes ill. "When the Muslim population gets to a critical mass you have problems. That is a general rule, so if it applies everywhere it applies in Australia." Even though their numbers are still well below that in Australia, complained Israeli, "they are so vocal, and they make so much noise," that it's incumbent on the state to implement a "preventative policy" that will leave the Muslim citizens as a "marginal minority" before life becomes "untenable."

In a subsequent article, Israeli noted that he was surprised by the intensity of the responses to his comments. The Israeli ambassador to Australia, Naftali Tamir, also did not imagine in his day that his remarks to Haaretz in praise of the Israeli-Australian brotherhood of "the white race" over "slant-eyed" Asia would shock public opinion in the country where he was serving.

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The astonishment of both the professor and the diplomat is characteristic of certain Israelis who believe, apparently, that the naive farmers of the outback will thirstily gulp down their perceptions. As poet Dahlia Ravikovitch wrote so wonderfully and ironically: "In the southern tip of the garden, where the sprinkler cannot reach, it's like Australia: dry, with dwarfish shrubs."

In this case, the Israeli sprinkler has hit a non-dwarfish thicket of sensitivities, some of them local and some of them common to the global garden. Let us begin with the harsh truth: Many Australians are prepared with all their hearts to agree with the Israeli professor, as are masses of French people and Britons. Professor Mark Baker of Monash University wrote in the Australian Jewish News that "Raphael Israeli can most certainly fill a book (he has written several) to exhibit the facts we most fear" regarding the approximately half a million Muslims living in Australia, who constitute about 2.5 percent of the population. The riots that broke out last summer in Sydney between "white" and Muslim youngsters also fanned the fears, as well as their popular sidekick, the sweeping generalization.

But the researcher from Jerusalem hardly offered anything to his audience beyond a simplistic generalization, an emotional smashing of political correctness and a mantle of academic respectability for street-style Islamophobia, which started out as a reaction to the violence and fanaticism of radical Islam itself and is culminating in the excoriation of all Muslims.

The Jewish community, whose liberal and conservative components often share an ardent Zionism (alongside well-founded Australian patriotism), responded with discomfort. The professor's nationality, even his surname, and the platform in which his views were published, awakened sleeping demons of insecurity in a normally tranquil Jewish environment. Dr. Colin Rubenstein, president of the Australia/Israel Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), harshly criticized Israeli's "unacceptable and unhelpful" views, saying that the Council "will not be co-hosting any of his further appearances in Australia." Hilton Immerman, the CEO of the Shalom Institute, publicly denounced "any form of racial stereotyping or ethnic quotas," but proceeded to declare, with due academic level-headedness, that Israeli's lectures at the institute would proceed as planned.

The content of other Jewish voices ranged from support to rejection; such diversity of opinion surely attests to the strength of Australia's Jewish community. Israel's varied spectrum of opinion should likewise be represented in Australia. Not all Israelis are Raphael Israeli.

The gratuitous advice to the Australian authorities has, apparently unwittingly, touched upon one of the core issues in the approaching elections, but the astonishment at Israeli's burning interest in Indonesia has crossed political boundaries, as mass immigration from the Muslim neighbor to the north is not at all on the agenda. The conclusion: Self-appointed Israeli advisors should take care to do their homework.

One of the more interesting responses was written by Waleed Ali, who chairs the Muslim Council in the state of Victoria. He called for calm, serenely asserted that Israeli doesn't understand Australia, noted that indeed the "fundamental danger at the heart of this discourse is that it is incapable of understanding Muslims as human beings," and argued that the exclusion of his co-religionists will not help in integrating them into modern Western society. Here, perhaps, is the positive lesson for the Muslims of the Western world: Arise and deliver a moderate and temperate voice. Only you will extricate the stone from the well.