Published: 5 January 2026
Last updated: 6 May 2026
In November 1995, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir, an Israeli religious extremist. At the time, Benjamin Netanyahu and figures on the Israeli right angrily rejected any suggestion that months of incitement, dehumanisation, and the misuse of religious language had helped make the murder possible. Responsibility, they insisted, lay with a single fanatic.
Three decades later, that account has not survived historical scrutiny. Amir may have pulled the trigger alone, but he acted within a political culture that had rendered Rabin a traitor and made political murder morally imaginable.
That history matters now. In the aftermath of the Bondi massacre, a similar refrain has taken hold: two isolated “lone wolves”, tragic but disconnected from any wider social environment. Australian police have stated that the father and son acted alone and were not part of a broader terrorist cell, even while acknowledging ideological motivation.
“Acted alone” is a description of logistics, not an explanation. Yet it has shaped media commentary and opposition to calls for a Royal Commission, on the premise that there is no structural or systemic problem to examine, only individual pathology, gun reform and security failure.
This is a convenient absolution. It recasts concern about antisemitism since 7 October as hysteria, opportunism, or cynical attempts to suppress free speech, while insulating the surrounding rhetoric from scrutiny.
