The beach lies less than four miles from the heart of Sydney. In that half-mile crescent of gold, the city’s restless energy dissipates. A crowd gathers there on Sunday evening for a minute of silence to mark one week since the Bondi Beach terror attack, when two gunmen targeted Jews celebrating Hanukkah. A 10-year-old girl and a Holocaust survivor were among the 15 people killed.
One week on, there is a visible security presence, with armed police in riot gear, body scanners and cordoned-off zones. Thousands attend the service, closing a national day of reflection on the final day of Hanukkah.
Over the last week, Australia has been engulfed in a swirl of confusion and grief—and amazed admiration for people like the Syrian-born greengrocer Ahmed el Ahmed, who charged and disarmed one of the shooters.
Mostly, though, since last Sunday, it feels like something in our understanding of Australia has been violently wrenched off center. A sense of horror at Australia’s worst act of terrorism, coupled with the recognition that in a nation built on the idea that different people can live side by side without fear, at least one group can no longer count on the simple freedom of gathering in public and assuming nothing terrible will happen.
Antisemitic incidents have been increasing all over the world. Even before last Sunday, reports of threats, harassment and violence directed at Jewish Australians dwarfed those against other minority groups. Jewish schools and synagogues have long been fortified. For Jews, security guards, bollards and police patrols have been regrettable but necessary facts of diasporic life.
What Bondi pulled into focus again is an old and uniquely persistent strain of racism that travels easily across ideological boundaries. It appears on the far right and far left for differing reasons, thriving in both closed societies and those that pride themselves on inclusion. Deeply inconvenient, if you happen to be Jewish. People have long tried to make sense of it. Hannah Arendt spent a lifetime on it. Christopher Hitchens wrote that its pervasiveness almost defies explanation.
This is why many warned that something like the Bondi attack felt inevitable. “I’ve been holding my breath, fearing that something like this would happen because it hasn’t come without warning,” Jillian Segal, Australia’s first special envoy to combat antisemitism, said in a radio interview.
Australia has seen a recent surge in antisemitic attacks, and it is worth getting granular on the details. Between Oct. 1, 2024, and Sept. 30, 2025, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry recorded 1,654 antisemitic incidents, more than four times the average before Oct. 7, 2023. The previous year set a grim record of 2,062 incidents.
Those “incidents” include synagogues being firebombed with people inside and day-care centers and cars being torched. They also include protesters storming an Israeli restaurant, bomb threats targeting Jewish institutions, and ubiquitous acts of vandalism. Jewish artists have also been doxxed or canceled, and students have been harassed on campuses. Many rabbis now advise congregants to conceal their Jewishness in public.
Intelligence showed Iranian government figures in Tehran had orchestrated arson attacks on Jewish sites in Australia to mimic home-grown terror and deepen social division, and the Australian government rightly registered its concern by expelling an Iranian diplomat. But the focus on foreign meddling risked blunting recognition of the domestic situation that was becoming ominously permissive of anti-Jewish discourse.
That’s not to diminish acts of violence or discrimination against Muslims, which is also an ongoing problem. The Islamophobia Register likewise recorded a sharp rise in 2023-24. Both deserve attention.
The Muslim community in Australia is over six times more populous than the Jewish community. Studies by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and the Islamophobia Register Australia have found that, on an annual basis, there are roughly 306 anti-Jewish incidents per 100,000 Jews and 20 anti-Muslim incidents per 100,000 Muslims. Since Hamas’s attacks, those figures have jumped to around 1,400-1,700 and 40-80, respectively.
Naming this asymmetry is not a hierarchy of suffering but rather an acknowledgment that, of all the racism Australia has flirted with over the years, antisemitism is unique. None is so persistent, protean or underexamined. You still hear politicians say “antisemitism has no place in Australia,” but I’m not sure anyone believes it.
In the aftermath of Bondi, nearly everyone has declared that they reject hate while reflexively buttressing their own positions. This defensive impulse is arguably part of the problem, a way to avoid seeing this as a matter of national collective responsibility.
That same approach has also shaped the debate around the federal government’s response, particularly the July report by the antisemitism envoy, Ms. Segal, which proposed adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, strengthening hate crime laws and creating a national database of incidents, while reconsidering university funding if campuses did not do more to combat antisemitic speech.
The report was not warmly embraced, with critics arguing that such measures risk blurring the line between antisemitism and legitimate criticism of Israel, despite the report explicitly differentiating between the two.
In the reaction, one can see antisemitism occupying a peculiar moral space as the one racism people seem genuinely reluctant to acknowledge or relinquish. Prominent writers and academics condemned Ms. Segal’s recommendations as a threat to free speech, with one prominent writer calling it an existential threat to Australian democracy. Others dismissed the urgency, suggesting Jews were not truly at risk and that concern was designed to muzzle anti-Israel dissent.
We do need to consider that tension carefully. Critiques of Israel can intersect with, but are not always evidence of, antisemitism. Sometimes, of course, they are. A University of Sydney lecturer was filmed calling Jewish students “parasites” and “filthy Zionists.” “Zionists are the most disgusting thing that has ever walked this earth,” she said. Not exactly a principled critique of government policy.
Ms. Segal’s report stated that a critique becomes antisemitic when it denies Jews the same rights to sovereignty, self-determination or defense afforded to any other nation. When slogans like “Zionism is racism” or calls to eliminate Israel replace calls to reform its policies, there is an obvious double standard rooted in hostility toward the Jewish collective identity.
On campuses, this necessary parsing seems to have been abandoned, with many pro-Palestinian activists treating Jews as oppressors by default. There you see recycled versions of old conspiracy theories in which Jews are believed to sit at the center of oppressive global power structures. One can, of course, condemn Israeli settlements or civilian harm without invoking antisemitic tropes, but when only one nation is singled out as uniquely evil or illegitimate, it becomes an issue of moral consistency.
And so it is that each week, for years, major Australian cities have filled with protesters chanting “globalize the intifada” and “from the river to the sea.” On the surface, these might seem harmless, until one recalls that they can be understood as calls for global violence against Jews and for the dissolution of the world’s only Jewish state. After Oct. 7 and Dec. 14, how should we interpret these—especially since most marchers are young, well-meaning and often unaware of the subtext? The subtext matters.
The defining feature of contemporary antisemitism in Australia is that almost no one believes they are engaging in it. Ours is an antisemitism without antisemites. I know plenty of people who are not antisemitic but feel morally compelled to boycott shops known to have Jewish owners; who on Oct. 8 said that the Jews “had it coming”; who marched beneath “globalise the intifada” banners and placards of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The new refuge of the oldest hatred is the conscience of the well-intentioned.
Meanwhile, public life increasingly rewards grievance and performative outrage, discouraging harder discussions about what sustains democratic pluralism and the principles that transcend identity to serve the common good.
Everyone said “no to hate” this week, which is good and expected, but doesn’t address the conditions that allowed the tragedy to happen. We’re still squeamish about confronting intolerance that emerges from minority communities. So after every act of jihadist violence, we get disclaimers that “Free Palestine” isn’t antisemitic, that Islam is a religion of peace, that we mustn’t generalize. And fair enough, but also beside the point.
Extremist preachers who radicalize young Australians with dogma about women’s impurity or Jewish wickedness undermine the thing that made Australia worth migrating to in the first place. And while most Australian Muslims reject such extremism (Ahmed el Ahmed is a perfect example), the absence of leaders willing to speak clearly about jihadist ideology leaves the door open for populists who will.
Australia has been, by any reasonable measure, one of the world’s most successful pluralist democracies, which is why Bondi feels like a rupture in the national story, and in the consensus that old conflicts should not be fought on this soil. Ours is a society made up of families who have at some point come here for a better, safer life, wanting to put an ocean or two between themselves and any number of hostilities that have left the world scarred. We came here, as my grandfather used to say, to get away from all that.
This Christmas, many of us will head back to the beach. It will be a time to pause and mourn, to take care of each other, to fix the way we talk to each other. If there’s a conversation worth having, it’s one that reaches across the aisle in a common defense of reason, human dignity and solidarity, the very ideals that make a multi-ethnic democracy possible.
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