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.