Australia is changed forever
The slaughter of Jews celebrating Hanukkah at Sydney's Bondi Beach has rocked the country, and the world.
I landed in Australia this morning. It is a black day and a dark time for the country.
Below is my piece first published in The Nightly.
The Bondi Beach terrorist attack targeting Jews on Hanukkah is a frightening rupture of Australia’s innocence.
The slaughter of 15 people under the late evening summer sun at the country’s most famous strip of sand and surf has not just rocked Australia, but shocked the world.
At the time of writing, 16 people, including one of the killers, were declared dead, and around 40 were in hospital.
Leaders from around the globe expressed statements of horror, anger and disbelief that an attack of this kind could take place in Australia, and at its iconic beach — seen globally as a symbol of Australia’s beauty, freedom and outdoor spirit.
An innocence cheerily, now chillingly, depicted on Chabad Bondi’s online flyer, promoting their ‘Chanukah by the Sea’ event for Sunday evening.
The event was advertised with a uniquely Australian graphic, nine glowing candles pictured above the word ‘Chanukah’ set against various creamy tones of blue representing Bondi Beach’s surf, the horizon and sky.
‘Music, games & fun for all ages, grand Menorah lighting overlooking Bondi Beach,’ the flyer boasted.
Noting that the event would be held at Bondi Beach Park, ‘near the children’s playground,’ it urged local Jews to ‘Come celebrate the light of the Chanukah together with the community.’
‘Bring your friends, bring the family. Let’s fill Bondi with joy and light.’
It had all the promise of being the kind of event that showcases the best of modern Australia — Sydney’s Jewish community celebrating their holiday a fortnight before Christmas on the beach. Casual, fun, laidback, welcoming, inclusive.
NSW Police says around 1000 people were at the beach when the attack began, at 6.40 pm on Sunday night.
Little did organisers know that their very promise of spreading cheer, joy and light had caught the eye of unspeakable evil and that the event would become a death trap.
Ten-year-old Matilda was among the victims.
Scenes that no one ever imagined would take place in Australia, let alone at Bondi, ensued. Witnesses captured footage of a man wielding a shotgun roaming the park, while a second man shot at people from the raised pedestrian bridge.
We now know they were a father and son pair, Sajid Akram, 50, and his son Naveed, 24. Sajid Akram was shot dead. Naveed is in the hospital, along with around 40 others, whom they tried to kill.
Naveed Akrahm came to ASIO’s attention in 2019 over his association ‘with others,’ said the prime minister.
ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess said at least one of the shooters was known to the spy agency, ‘but not in an immediate threat perspective.’
How deadly wrong that assessment turned out to be.
Their rampage was initially as hard to believe as it was to watch. Was this really Bondi? Was this really real?
The terrible answer was yes.
The shock across the country, and the world, is not just at the brutality of a mass murder carried out in broad daylight, and with guns, given Australia’s strict firearms laws introduced after the Port Arthur massacre, but the shattering realisation that Jew-hatred is not something consigned to Europe, or to the last century.
It festers and murders right here on Australian soil.
While Australia has experienced terror attacks and shootings before, what Bondi underlined was that antisemitism lives onshore, and it is malignant.
Australians can no longer indulge in the misguided belief that our stable democratic system and faraway corner of the globe insulates us from overseas threats and the feuds that have riven other parts of the world.
The only ray of light was the superhuman heroism of 43-year-old Ahmed Al Ahmed, a fruit grocer from Sutherland, who took it upon himself to disarm one of the pair with his bare hands.
There is no award that can suitably honour this homegrown heroism. No words can pay sufficient tribute to his audacious fearlessness, the way his reflexes summoned a courage that seemed automatic to him, but he should be given every single accolade that exists — and then some.
The worst of humanity showed us its best.
The behaviour of the father and son that was filmed by eyewitnesses confirmed that the attack was clearly premeditated. The father put his licence to hold six guns to use, showing that their plan was to execute as many Jews as possible. The discovery of two crude homemade bombs meant that it could have been sickeningly even worse.
A full inquiry is promised.
How did we get here is one of the many questions that will dominate these next days.
‘Killing words lead to killing,’ Simon Sebag Montefiore, the renowned British Jewish historian and author of Jerusalem, said of the attack.
‘This murder of ordinary people is not only a consequence of the hysteria of a movement that often encourages and justifies globalising violence against people because of how they are — it is an essence of it.
‘This Hanukkah massacre, an atrocity of anti-Judaism, another antisemitic mass murder like that on Yom Kippur in Manchester, is part of a vicious delirium — one that has gleefully disinterred evil mutations and blood libels from the darkest of our European past and has swept up, thrilled and intimidated many.’
A second question that will be asked is can Australian Jews feel safe?
NSW Liberal Leader Kellie Sloane, who was at Bondi and helped deliver first aid, told 7NEWS: ‘What I worry about is our Jewish community is never going to feel safe again, I don’t know what we do.’
Her response was not political. It was existential.
But for many Australian Jews this traumatic fear has been real and live ever since October 7.
They don’t forget that protestors took to the Sydney Opera House forecourt to chant ‘Gas the Jews’, a day after the Jewish state suffered its worst ever attack at the hands of Hamas militants.
The war in Gaza has turbocharged this climate and contributed to an ugly and public breakdown between the government of Israel and the Albanese government. This was reignited when key figures of the Israeli government — members of which Australia and other allies have sanctioned for their extremist policies towards Palestinians in the West Bank —sought to lay the blame for this attack at the feet of Labor.
Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said the attack was the ‘result of the anti-Semitic rampage in the streets of Australia over the past two years.’
‘The Australian government has failed this test. Even compared to the Western countries, the wave of antisemitism that has swept it, both in the virtual space and in the public sphere, is immense.’
‘Time and again we called on the Australian government to take action and fight against the enormous wave of antisemitism that is plaguing Australian society,’ President Isaac Herzog added.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went further and directly linked it to Labor’s decision to recognise Palestine as a state at the recent United Nations General Assembly.
It is not just the far-right Israeli goverment. The Jewish community in Australia has long been critical of the prime minister’s handling of acts of anti-Semitism witnessed in Australia since October 7.
This debate will only explode in the coming days as decisions and actions are all reexamined in the context of this attack.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps was later revealed by ASIO to have ordered the firebombings of a Jewish synagogue in Melbourne and a Kosher cafe in Sydney to intimidate Australia’s Jews and sow distrust in the society.
Mr Husic and co claimed they marched in front of the Ayatollah’s image unwittingly. But Mr Carr willingly promoted the image by posting it to his social media channels.
Last night, Carr said on X that it was: ‘Shocking to reflect that this could occur to Jewish people on Australian soil.’
Husic, who was dumped from Cabinet after the election, issued a statement that did not once mention the words ‘Jews’ or antisemitism.
When asked about the criticisms from the Israeli government, Albanese said it was time for ‘unity’ and vowed to eradicate anti-semitism.
‘Let me be clear – we will eradicate it,’ he said.
‘We will do whatever is necessary to stamp it out. Anti-Semitism is a scourge. It’s been around for a long period of time.
‘We need to do whatever we can to stamp it out.’
Aiming to eradicate the hatred that led to this violence is a noble ambition and a bold one. It also naturally invites the question that if it is something that is even capable of being eradicated, how has this not been attempted until now, and how was it allowed to get to this point in the first place?