How could it happen here?

The fire-bombing of a Melbourne synagogue this morning is the worst anti-Jewish attack to occur in Australia in more than 40 years.

The fire deliberately started at the Adass Israel synagogue, as men were gathered for early morning prayer, was a racist hate crime that should appal every decent Australian.

While injuries were, fortunately, few and minor the event is a massive rent in a social fabric that has been weakened by a refusal to stand up to antisemitism over the past year.

For Jews, the sight of Torah scrolls being carried from a burned-out synagogue evokes some of our worst collective memories. References to Germany in the 1930s no longer seem quite so hysterical.

Police, fire authorities and witnesses have all made it clear that the fire was deliberate. It is safe to assume that the culprits were motivated by some form of anti-Jewish hate.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese rightly took the matter very seriously, declaring his abhorrence of antisemitism and his conviction that the attack “goes against everything we have worked so hard to build in Australia”.

Exactly what thinking motivated the perpetrators can only be a matter of speculation at this stage.

One possibility is that they were far right extremists and/or white supremacists, as was the case in the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in 2018 and the Christchurch mosque attack in 2019.

Another – not so very distant from the first– is some form of far left and/or Islamic extremism, phenomena which have produced numerous synagogue attacks around the world this year, including in Toronto, Paris and London. 

A very real possibility is that they are thugs who have absorbed the anti-Jewish sentiments swirling around our (in)civil spaces and thoughtlessly realised them in violent action. In many hate crimes, the perpetrators’ ideology is secondary to anger and grievance, a propensity for violence, and sometimes mental health conditions.

Whatever the story they tell themselves, ideologues and deluded alike draw much of their motivation from the social context in which they live.

This attack occurs in the context of a dramatic increase in the number of anti-Jewish incidents in Australia. A report released just days ago showed anti-Jewish incidents have quadrupled in Australia since October 1, 2023.

Directly after the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, certain elements felt emboldened to abuse and threaten Australian Jews.  The tragedy of the Israel-Hamas War in Gaza over the past 13-months has aggravated the sense that Jews as a group are uniquely culpable, as old a canard as exists.

Australian authorities, most particularly on university campuses, have been unwilling to draw lines on acceptable speech preferring to hide behind freedom of speech defences than to confront the difficulty territory of vilification and incitement.

The passion and polarisation of the Israel-Palestine debate has moved beyond the politics of how a tiny slice of land in the Middle East should be divided, into a way of dividing Australians, and of excluding those with whom we do not agree.

There has been a dangerous slippage from criticism of Israel’s policies to delegitimisation of Zionism as the national movement of the Jewish people, to the harassment of and discrimination towards Jews who express any attachment to or connection with Israel, to straightforward hate on the basis of group identity.

The result of that slippage is a loud if not large group of Australians who no longer recognise the targeting of Jews as anathema to Australian society.   

The decline in civility begins with online messaging, posters and stickers but devolves to verbal abuse and culminates in vandalism and physical attacks.

Jews who choose to dress distinctively and practice forms of Judaism that set them apart are most vulnerable. The Adass Israel synagogue, although a modest building, is visible because of its location near Ripponlea station, because of the traditional garb of its congregants, and because of the constant activity of these three-times-a-day synagogue goers.

If the perpetrators thought that in attacking Jews they were somehow defending Palestinians, the choice was ironic, because the Adass Israel are among the least Zionist of all Australian Jews.

But this is no time to make distinctions. We are all at risk. To paraphrase the famous poem of Pastor Martin Niemöller, first they came for the Haredim…

Hate crimes become possible when we do not recognise the humanity and equality of those who are different from us.

Australian Jews, whether they wear black hats and side curls or yellow ribbons and board shorts, are entitled to safety and freedom.   

Whoever threw that firebomb has failed to understand that Jews are people, and that hurting people is wrong. It’s as simple as that.