SYDNEY — As they gathered on Monday near the site of Australia’s worst terrorist attack, where two gunmen had opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration the previous evening, Jewish Australians expressed both grief and rage.
“Nothing has been done to protect us,” said Tyssen Gokyildirim, wearing a kippah and swim shorts near the Bondi Beach footbridge where the gunmen — a father and son, authorities say — dressed in black and wielding rifles opened fire at one of Australia’s most iconic tourist spots. The 27-year-old cited a litany of recent antisemitic incidents that he said preceded Sunday’s events — including arson attacks on synagogues and Jewish shops, and a spate of antisemitic graffiti.
“The prime minister says he’s working hard, but that’s what he’s said for the past two years, and now here we are,” Gokyildirim said.
Australia’s deadliest mass shooting in almost 30 years has sparked an outpouring of grief, anger and solidarity for the country’s roughly 120,000 Jews, which include the highest per capita population of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel. It has also sparked calls for even tighter gun restrictions in a nation already known for them.
Fifteen people attending the Hanukkah celebration, ranging from a 10-year-old girl to an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, were killed in the attack. More than 40 were hospitalized, with 27 remaining in Sydney hospitals on Monday evening.
Police said the two gunmen were a 50-year-old father and his 24-year-old son, who they have not publicly identified. The father was fatally shot by police while the son was also shot but was arrested and is expected to survive and face criminal charges.
The father, an immigrant who arrived in Australia in 1998 on a student visa, owned six firearms and had a license through his membership in a local gun club, authorities said Monday.
His Australian-born son was investigated by the Australian Security Intelligence Organization — akin to the FBI in the United States — in 2019 for his “associations” with extremists but it was determined that there was no indication of any ongoing threat of him engaging in violence, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Monday.
The shootings have led to calls for reforms to Australia’s already strict gun control laws, which were tightened after another mass shooting in 1996.
Albanese Monday said he would put the idea to his cabinet, including limits on the number of guns that can be licensed by individuals and a review of licenses over a period of time. “The government is prepared to take whatever action is necessary,” he said. “If we need to toughen these [laws] up, if there’s anything we can do. I’m certainly up for it.”
Antisemitism has been rising
The attack has also deepened an already bitter divide between Australia’s center-left Labor government and the Israeli government, which has repeatedly blamed Canberra for not doing more to protect Jewish people.
“Your government did nothing to stop the spread of antisemitism in Australia,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a blistering statement directed at Albanese on Sunday. “You took no action. You let the disease spread and the result is the horrific attacks on Jews we saw today.”
Albanese has declined to respond to Netanyahu, instead calling for “national unity” in the face of what he called “an act of evil.”
The attack comes amid a spike in antisemitic incidents in Australia that, according to some researchers, is the sharpest increase anywhere in the world.
There were more than 1,650 anti-Jewish incidents between October 2024 and September of this year, a fivefold increase in the average annual number before the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, according to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. Homes and cars in Jewish neighborhoods have been sprayed with antisemitic graffiti, with some vehicles set ablaze. A year ago, a Melbourne synagoguewas burned to the ground. And a Jewish deli in Bondi was also firebombed.
Albanese announced in August that the Iranian government had “directed” the synagogue and deli attacks, and he expelled the Iranian ambassador and three other Iranian diplomats. He also created an antisemitism task force and appointed the country’s first special envoy for the issue.
But some Jewish community leaders and opposition figures have complained that the government has not gone far enough, and Sunday’s deadly attack amplified their criticism.
“When you have attacks coordinated by the Iranian regime taking place on domestic soil, when you have a slaughter of innocent people observing a religious festival at Bondi Beach, there’s a failure there,” said Alex Ryvchin, the Executive Council’s co-CEO. “There’s no question about that. And I think there’s going to have to be a reckoning and the government will have to honestly take responsibility for its failures.”
Dave Sharma, a senator from the opposition Liberal Party and a former ambassador to Israel, also called the government’s handling of the rise in antisemitism “a failure.”
“I don’t think the government is taking antisemitism seriously and I don’t think they’ve prioritized it enough,” he said. “They have always been reacting to events rather than seeking to lead or shape them. And I just don’t think they’ve seen it as a first order of business.”
Albanese has tried to address the rising tide of antisemitism in Australia while also criticizing Israel for its handling of the war in Gaza, which has killed almost 70,000 Palestinians.
Australia recognized a Palestinian state in September, alongside the United Kingdom and Canada.
That decision drew a rebuke from Netanyahu, who accused Albanese of “rewarding” Hamas and “betraying” Israel.
Sharma, the opposition senator, said the government had “terribly mishandled the relationship with Israel,” including by blaming it for a strike in Gaza that killed an Australian aid worker in April last year.
“I don’t think this government should have provided unquestioning, 100 percent support for Israel and everything it did,” he said. “But I think they went out of their way to actually put Israel in the dock.”
Gaza war backdrop
Australia has also seen a series of large protests over the war in Gaza, including tens of thousands of people marching over the Sydney Harbour Bridge in August.
Matteo Vergani, an extremism expert at Deakin University, said quantifying the surge in antisemitism was difficult, but that the uptick since Hamas’s 2023 attack on Israel and Israel’s war in Gaza was real and significant.
At the same time, he said it was too early to condemn the Australian government for failing to prevent the attack.
“It’s incredible and unbelievable that Australia hasn’t experienced a large-scale terrorist attack like this before,” he said. “How many plots have happened in Europe and the U.S.? Many.”
But Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, said his organization and others had pressed Australia to do more to combat rising antisemitism, including a warning just a few days before the attack.
“We were shocked and saddened but certainly not surprised” by the attack, Greenblatt said. “We could see the pattern emerging. We could sense that things were combustible, and it’s unfortunate that it got to this point where the violence literally exploded.”
Some Jewish community leaders told The Washington Post that they did not think the Hanukkah event was properly protected, a criticism shared by Yossi Kuperwasser, head of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security and former head of Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate.
“They were not aware of this cell that carried out the attack … I would expect intelligence to know more about a cell like that,” he said. Also, there needed to be more security for such a well-publicized event, he said.
New South Wales Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon declined Monday to say exactly how many officers were in the area, but praised law enforcement for what he said was a quick response that saved lives. He said there will be an investigation to determine if there were any failures.
Standing about 100 yards from the site of the attack, Rabbi Zalman Kastel said Monday was not the time to criticize the police response, or for international dustups.
“Today it’s about real people, real families, and a country that is mourning,” he said. “It’s not about global politics.”
Among those real families affected was his own: Kastel’s brother-in-law was killed in the attack.
“My family’s really struggling here as well, but as a community, we’re holding together,” he said, gesturing to the crowd of people around him, many of whom were hugging or crying. “As you can see, there’s hundreds of people here just putting their arms around saying we’re with you, which is encouraging.”
Some local cafes were serving free coffee. Instead of the usual bright athleisure, most people wore dark and less revealing clothes.
But the somber scene had a bitter edge.
“They have blood on their hands,” one local Jewish man said of government officials, including Albanese. He gave his name only as Lawrence for fear of antisemitic reprisals.
His daughter stood nearby, draped in an Israel flag.
Not far away, Gokyildirim was also angry and scared. He had been on his way to the beach when the shooting erupted. A friend was shot in the arm but survived.
“I’ve never felt like this before, not even after Oct. 7,” he said. “Not like this.”
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