Some thoughts on the Bondi shootings

Anybody who knows me knows that at some stage I’ll mention that I’m Jewish. Or Jew-ish as the case may be. A little over a quarter if Ancestry.com is to be believed, though I suspect they saw that I used an online discount code and took a stab in the dark. The link is tenuous – I’m a Christian and it’s on my grandfather’s side, but there is something very stereotypically Jewish about that side of the family. Only relatively recently did I learn that my great-great-granddad Gustus Luber was central to the early Jewish community in Perth and brought over the first Torah scroll. His house – Rosetta Lodge – in Mount Lawley hosted many immigrants’ bar mitzvahs and weddings.

All that to say that while my Jewish background isn’t formative to who I am, it perhaps gives me a sensitivity to the ways antisemitism masks itself (in its current iteration as social justice/ anticolonialism) and why yesterday’s attack at Bondi beach is completely unsurprising. For me and many others who could see which way the wind was blowing, it was never a question of if, but when.

Since October 7, I’ve watched with increasing incredulity as many have offered if not outright, then tacit support for the murder of Jewish civilians—importantly, those living in the most peace-loving, left-wing, tie-dye-adjacent quarters of Israel. First, and significantly prior to any retaliatory bombs falling, came the Palestinian flags on Facebook. Feel free to linger here for a moment: after just hearing (and in many cases seeing) that over a thousand people, among them children, had been butchered in broad daylight, people thought that clicking on a watermelon emoji was the most morally apropos response.

Then came the protests, and vox pops, with swathes of keffiyeh-clad individuals calling for Jews to be expelled—though from between which river and which sea, they couldn’t quite recall. Either way, it didn’t matter, because what they lacked in geography and baseline historical literacy, they more than made up for in religious fervour.

This particular cohort I found somewhat forgivable, even bleakly amusing. They were generally young, impressionable and like all of us at that age desperate to be liked/at the forefront of whatever the current zeitgeist is. Less forgivable were the brazen celebrations of Hamas among many academics who should have known better.

I have a friend who thinks that anyone who is pro-Hamas is an idiot. I’m not convinced. After having been in an academic environment for a good chunk of time, I can tell you that some of the smartest people I’ve met (or read) are the least wise. Why? Partly because they have the ability to rationalise the irrational and defend the indefensible. And God forbid they fall foul of popular opinion. We’d do well to remember that it’s a small child who eventually reveals the emperor has no clothes.

The claim that October 7 was an act of noble resistance against decades of oppression collapses under even the mildest scrutiny. This blindness to reality goes some way towards explaining the unholy alliance between the left and radical Islam. No two groups are more diametrically opposed in kind, yet united in purpose: one seeks the literal destruction of the West and the other, it’s symbolic destruction.

I digress. The simple fact that the United Nations took as long as they did to admit that rape and sexual violence occurred on October 7 should in itself be alarming. Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls (a person who you’d think would… I don’t know… care about women and girls) still won’t admit it. During #MeToo we were urged to #BelieveAllWomen, yet so many self-professed feminists have refused to accept the eyewitness testimonies of myriad Jewish women. And don’t get me started on the moral grandstanding and “luxury beliefs” of smug Hollywood elites and well-known activists. Watching Greta and her merry band of morons roll into Israel safe in the knowledge that they were never in any real danger irked me no end. The only crime against humanity that I observed was committed by a hairdresser in Sweden months previous.

In what was probably the most egregious instance of cowardice (though there were many worthy contenders) the president of a little-known university called Harvard couldn’t bring herself to acknowledge that calling for the genocide of Jews by students on campus – the same ones who could spot a microaggression from miles away – constituted a hate crime. Not the state of Israel, note. Just Jews.

It’s an important distinction. We are constantly told that antizionism is not antisemitism. Well, first of all I’d say that it depends on your definition of zionism. I’d also question why the majority gets to define the term rather than the minority group to which it pertains. That definitional landmine aside, I’ve noticed that the use of the term antizionism often functions as a kind of rhetorical sleight of hand, allowing for obvious antipathy towards Jewish people to go unchecked.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that every pro-palestinian is antisemitic. Many of them are just grieved at the loss of life in Gaza. And rightly so. That being said, they either fail to recognise or completely ignore the potential for slippage between those terms and the way that allows for and in many instances enables actual antisemitism. I can’t imagine how elated the Neo Nazi community must be with this unforeseen but welcome loophole. In the past they’d say they hated Jews and everyone would be appalled. Now they say they hate Zionists and are celebrated for their compassion and solidarity with the vulnerable.

I thought being so far removed from the rest of the world might have inoculated Aussies from the hysteria, but I was sadly mistaken. Self-identified “progressives” over here saw the rest of the world hating on Jews and said, hold my beer. Vis a vis the “March for Humanity” (or 99.8% of it) which—if you saw the images, or were in my opinion demented enough to attend—featured protesters on Sydney harbour bridge marching beneath a giant flag of everyone’s favourite peacenik, Ali Khamenei. Further back in the crowd, in a video which I initially assumed was AI, a group of people chanted “the IDF are terrorists” while holding an Al Qaeda flag. You couldn’t write it.

I’m quite happy to accept charges of whataboutism here, and I’m in no way saying that you need to care about everything in order to care about something—but where are the rallies being organised for Yemen, Syria and Sudan? These eclipse the war in Gaza in both scale and severity. And why are there crickets in response to the widely-circulated videos of Hamas (sorry, freedom fighters) torturing and executing their own citizens in the wake of a ceasefire?

I’ve listened to and read a lot about the Israel/Palestine conflict. I have my own opinions which are too detailed to go into here and frankly I don’t have the time with two toddlers who enact their own brand of terrorism on me every day, particularly between the hours of 3 and 6am. What I do know is that Israel has become the tabula rasa onto which we project our own colonial sins – we reduce a complex, decades-old conflict with millennia-old roots to catchy slogans, all from the comfort of our own living room in a land we colonised not too long ago and to which we have absolutely zero historical ties.

As many have observed, antisemitism is a protean beast, assuming different forms in different eras. The persecution is consistent, but the rationale shifts: Jews are both too powerful and too weak; too white and too brown; parasites when stateless and colonisers when sovereign. I don’t blame Israel for no longer giving a flying gefilte fish about public perception. If the game is rigged, why bother playing.

I’ve already seen posts suggesting that in the wake of this attack people’s immediate response should be to worry about how this will affect Islamic communities. While it goes without saying that of course I hope this doesn’t result in further violence – it would be tragic if there was reciprocation of any kind – it bothers me that this is the kneejerk response. I find it extremely telling that people have prioritised the potential violence of one group over the actual violence perpetrated on another. On literally the day it occurred.

This is a terrorist attack that has killed 15 people, amongst them a Holocaust survivor. This man survived WW2, and because we refuse to learn from history – because ‘never forget’ clearly has an expiry date – he was gunned down on a beach in Australia 80 years later. And Jews are asked—yet again—to absorb the violence quietly, contextualise it generously, and above all to be the “bigger man,” while being treated (as they so often are) as the lesser one.

I used to work at a petrol station with a lady named Rhona who I lovingly referred to as a full-blown Jew—matzah balls, fluent Yiddish, the lot. She assured me I was Jewish despite all that pesky matrilineal nonsense, so we got along fine. One day, an elderly English man who I’d served multiple times previously and who seemed otherwise compos mentis came up to the counter to pay for his petrol. For the life of me I can’t remember how this transpired, but I mentioned that Rhona was Jewish when she went to the staff room. His response, crowbarred in between “pump no.7” and “cheers” after I’d handed him his change, was: “My dad was right, Hitler should have gassed the lot of them.” Casual. Unprompted. An outlier I thought, though that was many years ago.

Yesterday’s attack is not an aberration; it is precisely why the state of Israel exists. Elie Wiesel warned us that suffering and persecution often begin with the Jews, but never ends there. Jews are the proverbial canary in the coalmine, alerting us to hatred and indifference around the world. I can’t think of a timelier observation. We just got a glimpse of the global intifada protesters were so desperately calling for – it just may not play out in quite the way they expected.