Health diplomacy is Ron Finkel’s mission to bring peace 

 “I hear from people who are talking to people in Gaza that there is a really deep (desire) to rebuild. They want to start again and we have to … wrap our arms around them, and give them a chance to live their aspirations. It’s been an awful period, but it’s also an opportunity now – not only to hand out. But to offer a hand up as well.”

The royal commission into antisemitism will build awareness of an issue that’s “been under the radar for many years” but more will be needed to build social cohesion, according to a man who has spent more than a decade creating bridges between Israelis and Palestinians.

Melbourne businessman and philanthropist Ron Finkel says the last couple of years since October 7 have revealed the “very, very thin veneer” of social cohesion in this country. We’re proud of our multiculturalism, but often it’s better described as “multisiloism”, he suggests.

The Jewish chair of Rozana International, the not-for-profit he began in 2013 to improve healthcare for Palestinians, says: “We have a challenge in connecting the silos. You don’t have to connect all of them, but there has to be some mechanism in place to enable some of them to get together.” 

And it’s not about traditional food events, for example, where you can taste “196 different cultures and their foods”. “That isn’t social cohesion,” says Finkel. “My definition of social cohesion is to (give) groups in our society an opportunity to get to know, as Australians, the other. That takes a very specific set of plans and ideas and projects.”

With 120,000 Jews in a population of 27 million, the odds of an Australian meeting a Jew are not high, he says: “So the knowledge they have comes from a variety of different sources – some constructive, some not so constructive – but that’s true of a lot of our multicultural society. “We’ve got this catalyst of concern now (after the war in Gaza and the Bondi shootings) and people are using this phrase, ‘social cohesion’. I think that they mean kumbaya, and that’s great, but it doesn’t actually happen absent some planning and thinking.

“Broadly speaking, I think the establishment of the royal commission is really important, and it will enable issues to be brought up that don’t necessarily get aired and analysed. What I think will come out of it is awareness of antisemitism which has been under the radar for many decades, but which has become much more acute. “Beyond that, I would be surprised if social cohesion was its brief because to address issues of social cohesion, you have to take time to identify ways of connecting the communities engaged in the problem.”

Finkel has long believed in practical measures to build connections.

A successful venture capitalist with degrees in law and commerce from the University of Melbourne, he is a leading member of the Jewish community. Finkel spent time in London as president of the World Union of Jewish Students and lived in Jerusalem before returning here in 1985. His younger brother is former chief scientist Alan Finkel.

The not-for-profit Ron Finkel founded is named after Rozana Salawhi, a four-year-old Palestinian girl who was rushed to the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem after she fell from a nine-storey balcony in 2012. Finkel has a long connection with the hospital as founding president of a supporting organisation, Hadassah Australia, and was inspired to set up Rozana Australia after seeing the hospital’s work.

“I witnessed, even in the most brutal of times when suicide bombings were happening in the city of Jerusalem, survivors were taken to the Hadassah Hospital, and they were treated immediately by teams comprising Jewish Israelis, Arab Israelis and Palestinian doctors,” he says. “They all worked together and while there would be terrible incidents outside, you’d have an ocean of calm inside the hospital.”

He wondered: “How can we sprinkle this outside?”

The answer was Rozana, now headquartered in Switzerland with branches in Canada, the UK, the US and Germany as well as Australia. Its work has included transporting Palestinian patients to Israeli hospitals and, more recently, funding Palestinian health workers in two mobile tent clinics in Gaza. As part of its “health diplomacy”, it trains Palestinians in Israeli hospitals, runs a specialised hub to train nurses, and supports healthcare infrastructure in the West Bank.

Now, Finkel’s offshore work is coming full circle, with the federal government funding Rozana to bring Israeli and Palestinian health workers to Australia for training and to help build social cohesion.

The 15 professionals – five Israeli Jews, five Israeli Palestinians and five Palestinians – who arrive next month are a microcosm of what’s possible when health is the connective tissue. They will have a five-day facilitated retreat at Monash University and a series of meetings with specialists and emerging Jewish and Palestinian leaders in Melbourne and Sydney.

Their presence will pose a stark question for the diasporas here: If we can work together in Gaza and the West Bank, why can’t you do that here?

Finkel says the meetings with younger leaders are especially important: “There are Palestinians in Melbourne who have never met Jews and Jews who have never met Palestinians.”

He has focused on the two communities “clearly under the spotlight”. “That’s Australia’s Jewish community and Australia’s Palestinian community,” he says.

“I’m not moving into the broader Muslim community, I’m talking about people who have skin in the game. The Jewish community’s identification with Israel is fundamental to our identity. Jews as a people have, for millennia, aspired to have a place to call home. Our pathway to self-determination was the establishment of the state of Israel. The Palestinians have aspirations to self-determination; they’re legitimate. We need to understand and recognise and support them to have a place to call home – it’s called the state of Palestine.”

 Finkel is an optimist but confesses to temporarily losing his spirit in the wake of the Hamas killings in 2023.

“About two weeks after October 7, I was talking to my wife, and I was really depressed – and I’m not a depressive type, believe me, I’m the ultimate half-full person,” he says. “I said to her, ‘it’s been very good, but I think this is the end’. I couldn’t see a pathway.”

A week later he perked up. One of the results of Rozana’s regular training of Israeli and Palestinian trauma and emergency medicine physicians over several years was a WhatsApp group that by 2023 connected more than 200 of those who had passed through the program. Finkel wondered how the group was coping after October 7: “I very tentatively rang up the co-ordinator, and I said, ‘what’s happened?’. And he says to me, ‘look, we lost some’. I said, ‘How many?’ He says, ‘Well, we lost one Palestinian and one Israeli … they dropped out’.”

 The other 218 were still in there and “a light went off in my head”, says Finkel. “The core premise of Rozana – the capacity of medical professionals to connect through the universal language of health – was really robust and strong. It doesn’t make them bosom buddies, but they had some sense of connection that many others didn’t have.”

 In December 2024, as the war raged in Gaza, Rozana began facilitated retreats of Israeli and Palestinians health workers.

Then, over six weeks last year, staff at Tel Aviv and Haifa hospitals – where one-third of staff are non-Jews – took part in Rozana-led programs to address the tensions between colleagues.

On the ground in war-torn Gaza, Rozana funds two mobile tent clinics, employing 19 Palestinian staff. Over November and December, the clinics treated about 4300 people. Finkel says Rozana will expand its footprint in Gaza.

Last year it received a $4m grant from the Department of Home Affairs to buy equipment for a rehabilitation hospital in Hebron and fund the training and visits here of health professionals.

 In November seven Palestinian health professionals, including surgeons, obstetricians, gynaecologists and epidemiologists from the West Bank ministry of health, visited Australia. They met specialists in areas deemed critical in Palestine – heart and lung disease driven by high levels of smoking; epidemic levels of diabetes; genetic screening (a high percentage of marriages in the West Bank are between first cousins); palliative care and mental health.

 Mikaela Stafrace, chair of Rozana Australia, says the meetings with Australian surgeons, dermatologists and other specialists were impressive: “They came together in the purest sense of what medicine does, of colleagues respectfully engaging with the other.” The health dialogues “spread a sense of the other – not all Palestinians are terrorists, not all Jews are Bibi Netanyahu”.

 Then there’s the economic impact. “When you have hospitals able to treat people who then become productive contributors to the community, you see an uptick in so many areas,” she says. “Health is a foundational pillar in building any self-sustaining community. There’s a very strong correlation between good health and good economic outcomes.”

 Stafrace argues the Rozana model is “very portable” and can be applied across many groups beyond Jews and Palestinians.

 Ron Finkel concedes that hope in the future of Palestine is not easy to conjure in today’s climate, but says: “From what we hear, because I haven’t been to Gaza, resilience is very much a characteristic of survivors (there).

“I hear from people who are talking to people in Gaza that there is a really deep (desire) to rebuild. They want to start again and we have to … wrap our arms around them, and give them a chance to live their aspirations. It’s been an awful period, but it’s also an opportunity now – not only to hand out. But to offer a hand up as well.”