Bondi Beach shows the price of indulging antisemitism

The Bondi Beach massacre, like the Heaton Park attack, has brought the same responses from Jewish communities worldwide – shock, revulsion and horror, but not surprise. There seems to be a ‘new normal’ in which Jews are no longer surprised by antisemitic atrocities, as if expecting them has now become a routine part of the Jewish experience.

This is certainly true for Australian Jews. They have experienced a tsunami of Jew hatred since the fateful massacre of 7 October. According to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, there were 2,062 antisemitic incidents in the year after 7 October, a fivefold increase from the year before.

Prominent Jewish leaders have received death threats, universities have seen ‘systemic’ levels of Jew hatred and people have been physically and verbally assaulted in the streets. Synagogues have been attacked, Jewish graves vandalised, and businesses set on fire.

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In 2025, swastikas were spray-painted on a synagogue in Sydney shortly before two nurses were suspended after they were filmed saying that they would kill any Israeli patients entering their hospital. In August 2025, Iran’s hand was revealed to be behind an attack on a kosher deli and the torching of a synagogue, leading to the Iranian ambassador’s expulsion.

The vacuous slogan that ‘antisemitism has no place in Australia’ is frankly meaningless. Antisemitism can be found in an uncomfortably large number of places and is tolerated by far too many.

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Anti-Israel marches and demonstrations, with their appalling chanting and iconography, have been a focus of unrelenting hatred. The tone was set on 9 October, 2023, when a rally outside the Sydney Opera House involved language so incendiary that it received cross-party condemnation. The police ended up making one arrest – that of an Israeli supporter bearing the country’s flag.

Some of these rallies featured calls for ‘globalising the intifada’. For the umpteenth time, this is no mere academic slogan, nor an exhortation to peace and civil liberty. It is a call to arms and a demand for violence against Jews, something the authorities struggle to comprehend. As in London, such calls have gone unpunished. As Lynda Ben-Menashe, president of the National Council of Jewish Women Australia, has said, “When there is no visible consequence to incitement, violence always ensues.”

In the aftermath of this latest atrocity against Jews, it has become commonplace to say that Jews should not be targeted because of what goes on in Israel. Of course, this is as true as it is obvious. If anyone suggested that Muslims were fair game because of 7 October or 9/11, or that Chinese people should be hounded because of the Uighur atrocities, they would be rightly castigated for racism. The notion that Jews should be on the front line of a foreign conflict is to pile calumny upon absurdity.

But this only captures half the truth. If the history of antisemitism teaches us anything, it is that Jews are continually targeted because of malicious and irrational lies that are told about them. Historically, the lies have been many and various: that Jews were responsible for Christ’s death, for poisoning wells, for controlling the world economy or for defiling the white race. The inexorable logic is that they must be removed from society by any means possible.

Today, the focus has shifted to the Jewish state and Zionism. A motley collection of Islamists and hard-left activists promote the view that Israel is a Nazi state, an illegitimate country and a nation of demented baby killers.

These malevolent libels, promoted by Qatar, Iran and Hamas, have been disseminated by media outlets, regurgitated by NGOs and UN officials and repeated ad nauseam by academics. Activists call for a world cleansed of Zionism, which really means a world where Zionists (Jews) are to be ostracised, eliminated, and, in the most extreme cases, murdered to sanctify the world. They demand ‘death to the IDF’, knowing that this would leave Israel’s six million Jews defenceless against their enemies.

Is it any wonder that in such an incendiary atmosphere, malign actors take their ‘revenge’ in the darkest way possible against those that they see as ‘Israel’s agents’?  We have seen such consequences on Bondi Beach, but equally in Washington, Boulder and Manchester.

The ideology of anti-Zionism promoted by the Free Palestine movement, one which is embraced with such fervour by your party and by a host of other crackpots and extremists, must be called out for what it is: a hateful attack on Jews worldwide that presents a mortal danger, not just to Jews themselves, but to the societies in which they live.

For Jews are, as ever, the canary in the coalmine. Antisemitism is merely the latest salvo of a global war that its ideologues hope will end with triumph against the West and the destruction of the liberal values that embody it. Antisemitism is a mortal threat to the Jews, but equally a threat to Western societies and all they stand for. For their own sake, governments must do everything they can to stop it.

• Jeremy Havardi is a freelance journalist and author