How Antisemitism Was Normalised in Australia

It was a shock, but it was not a surprise. Two men driven by their pathological hatred of Jews have barbarically murdered innocents in Australia on its most iconic beach. In 2025, men with high-calibre weapons hunted Jews for sport.

I live in Bondi. My home is two hundred metres from the Lewis Continental Kitchen—the target of Iranian terrorists in 2024—and a little over seven hundred metres from the golden sands of Bondi Beach. In this small area are a half-dozen synagogues. Chabad of Bondi were the ones who organised Chanukah-by-the-Sea.

The shocking messages came to me minutes after the attack began, with people across the world asking if I was OK. We were driving to my parents’ house for a pre-planned Chanukah event of our own, watching a cavalcade of police and ambulance vehicles stream in the opposite direction towards Bondi.

The entire evening was spent watching 24-hour news channels, answering messages from friends asking if we were OK, and trying to eat the traditional sufganiot and latkes which, like all Jewish mothers’ cooking, were delicious—but I was hardly in the mood to eat.

As the stories of heroism emerged, we fell silent. The man who wrestled a gun away from the terrorist deserves the Cross of Valour, as do the police who drove the ambulances so that paramedics could treat more victims. All of them are the absolute best of Australia. Just like the surf lifesavers who run towards danger, so many Australians did the same when confronted with terrorism.

No one in the Jewish community I spoke to felt like this was a surprise. Many felt like this was an inevitability. Ever since 7 October, the Jewish community in Australia has been drinking from a firehose of antisemitism. Daily occurrences of hate—an inexorable tide of evil we felt rising around us.

The worst feeling was seeing those who we thought might be sympathetic to our plight dismiss our fears as a “hoax” or a “moral panic.” Elites in our media threw these deliberate fictions and red herrings into the national debate, making the warning signs almost impossible to see for the average Australian.

The worst were the egregious and uncalled-for accusations that Jews were “weaponising” antisemitism to shut down debate on Israeli policy, and the obscene navel-gazing debate over whether pro-Hamas rioters at the Sydney Opera House were chanting “Where’s the Jews?” or “Gas the Jews”—as if the difference between the two actually matters.

Australian civil society has failed. This attack is the result of a series of failures of leadership across our country. From politicians to business leaders, academics and commentators, there has been too much equivocation and misdirection on antisemitism.

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