Heaton Park, Boulder, Washington DC – and now Bondi beach. Add the murders of Rabbi Zvi Kogan in the UAE and Ziv Kipper, an Israeli-Canadian businessman, in Egypt, and Jews have been killed on five continents since the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas upended the Middle East and unleashed a wave of antisemitism around the world. Anti-Jewish terrorism is now a global problem, as is the hateful extremism that drives it.
The death toll from the appalling atrocity in Sydney is shocking enough: at the time of writing, 15 people killed, including a child, and many more injured. Awful images circulate, as they always do. The mobile phone footage of two gunmen calmly taking aim at families enjoying a Hanukah party is utterly chilling. It takes a special kind of dehumanisation, an ideology of pure hatred and self-righteous conviction, to do that.
The sheer randomness of these sites of anti-Jewish murder adds to the terror. Places that used to feel like safe, cosy corners of the Jewish world are now suddenly on the frontline. In Manchester, it was the solemn occasion of Yom Kippur that was targeted. In Sydney, it was the happy, lighthearted joy of Hanukah. If you are Jewish today, wherever you are, the decision about whether to celebrate Jewish festivals anywhere other than in your own home may be a matter of life and death.
Nobody should have to live like this. More to the point, our societies cannot continue to function if this becomes the norm. The whole basis of western liberal democracy, the belief in shared values within a diverse society, is endangered by these attacks.
We are yet to discover the detailed motivations of the Bondi attackers, but it looks for all the world like a product of the same Islamist extremism that struck in Manchester. And nobody doubts that it will strike again.
Some people react as if this terrorism is akin to a natural disaster or unforeseen tragedy: blind hatred with no cause or purpose, and therefore no deeper explanation needed. But terrorism does not emerge from a vacuum. It is merely the most violent, lethal expression of a set of attitudes and beliefs that are much more widely held than just by those who wield the gun or the knife.
When it comes to antisemitic terror, the ideas that some take as justification for murder are popularised and normalised through the language of much of the anti-Israel movement that has marched up and down our city streets and through our university campuses these past two years. That might be uncomfortable for some to accept. But violent words lead to violent actions, especially when left unchallenged by fellow marchers and unchecked by the law.
Just this weekend in Birmingham, “One Solution Intifada Revolution” was brandished on a huge banner across the front of a pro-Palestine march. Elias Rodriguez, the man accused of shooting dead Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky outside the Jewish Museum in Washington DC in May, was said by witnesses to have shouted “There is only one solution, intifada revolution” afterwards. There is no shyness about this support for violence: the Birmingham banner even included the upside-down red triangle that has become the symbol of the Hamas military wing, used in propaganda videos to mark out their targets ever since 7 October 2023.
After rapper Bobby Vylan, one half of the group Bob Vylan, chanted “Death, death to the IDF” during a set at the Glastonbury festival in June, it became the rallying cry of anti-Israel protesters everywhere. It got Bob Vylan invited to the Irish parliament and Bobby Vylan on to Louis Theroux’s podcast. Far from a call for death putting the rapper beyond the pale, it made him a celebrity.
Is there a connection between this embrace of a call for death in the name of Palestinian rights, and people inflicting actual death apparently in the name of the same cause? As soon as you ask the question, the answer seems obvious.
Perhaps this speculation sounds unfair. The devastation in Gaza is real and lots of people involved in pro-Palestinian activism do not support antisemitic violence against Jews, whether in Britain or Australia. But like it or not, it seems this movement has generated and sustained a political culture in which violence is both conceivable and enacted.
Shooting Jews celebrating Hanukah is the most extreme manifestation of this hatred. But in sentiment, in the message it sends Jews, it is little different from the “Free Palestine” graffiti scrawled on a Hanukah menorah in north London on Friday that was reported to the Community Security Trust. None of this brings Palestinian freedom any closer, but antisemites have other priorities.
The upshot is that yet again, Jews around the world are grieving. They will probably flock to Hanukah events in even greater numbers now, to show their resilience and solidarity. Jewish life will go on. Beneath that defiance, everyone is asking: will this country be safe for our children? Yet as the massacre at Bondi beach shows, even if you go to the furthest corners of the Earth, there is no escape.
This is now a global emergency of antisemitism, and it is the consequence of two years of turning a blind eye, taking the easy path and ignoring the warnings. Make no mistake: alongside the grief and the defiance, Jews are angry. And they have every right to be.
