Published: 16 December 2025
Last updated: 22 December 2025
“It is only through good fortune that serious injuries or deaths have not yet resulted from recent arson attacks or other expressions of violence in Australia.”
I wrote those words last July following the East Melbourne Synagogue arson attack and a mob invasion of the Miznon Israeli restaurant. Today I feel devastated that my fears have been realised.
The horrific massacre at the Chanukah celebration at Bondi Beach last night has left Jews in Australia, and around the world, in a state of grief and despair. We are heartbroken, reaching out to family, friends and community for solace and comfort.
The outpouring of support from the wider Australian community has been so moving. Statements from our leadership, from the prime minister, police and security services that they will do everything in their power to ensure the safety of Australian Jews are welcome, stirring and to a degree reassuring.
Yet a sense of hollowness pervades this language. The platitude “Antisemitism has no place in Australia” has been factually inaccurate and, clearly, an ineffective moral call.
A deep intuition shared by many Jews is that the permissive posture adopted by leadership in government (and the arts and academia) towards extreme forms of protest and activism, cannot be unrelated to last night’s events.
Because anti-Zionist activists rarely take the responsibility of defining exactly who counts as a legitimate Zionist target, this inevitably bleeds into the hatred and marginalisation of Jews
