On October 9, 2023—two days after the Hamas attacks on Israeli villages adjacent to Gaza—protesters gathered in front of the Sydney Opera House to chant angrily about the Jews. The chant sounded to many like Gas the Jews. But Australian authorities reviewed footage, and at a surreal press conference, they announced that while some members of the crowd were shouting “Fuck the Jews,” the crowd’s unison chant was “Where’s the Jews?” Australia has strict rules about hate speech, but merely inquiring about where to find Jews is not a crime, so the police closed the case. Australian Jews, needless to say, were not reassured.
In Sydney, the answer to Where’s the Jews? is Bondi, the area known simultaneously as a center of bikini culture and sun worship, and as a hub of Australian Orthodox Jewry. Yesterday two men, a father and son, emerged from their hatchback with rifles and fired at a crowd of Jews celebrating Hanukkah there. Some 15 are dead, and dozens have been hospitalized. The death toll could have been even worse. A fruit vendor abbreviated the massacre by tackling the younger killer and wresting away his gun. The father (also a fruiterer) was killed by police, and the son (an out-of-work bricklayer) was critically injured. Reports say that the two carried an Islamic State banner in their car, and that the son had been investigated for ties to an Islamic State cell in 2019. The father has owned guns legally for about a decade.
The Australian government’s incompetence in countering threats against Jews is obvious. In the coming days, the recriminations should focus not on the failure to prevent this single horrendous crime but on the feeble reaction to a whole wave of attempts to kill Jews and light their institutions on fire during the past year. Threats, assaults, vandalism, and intimidation against Jews tripled in the year after October 7, 2023. In Bondi Beach last year, a kosher deli was firebombed. A synagogue in Melbourne was torched. Jewish schools have been graffitied.
The minimum response to these incidents would involve assigning armed protection to Jews in Australia, so they feel no greater fear for their lives, property, and communal activity than any other Australian. The inadequacy of armed protection at Bondi suggests that this minimum was unmet, even though the Australian government has stated repeatedly that anti-Semitism is (in the words of Australia’s top spy, Mike Burgess) Australia’s “leading threat to life.” Today at a press conference, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who has condemned anti-Semitism repeatedly during the past year, suggested that Australians respond to the attack by lighting candles, and then by tightening rules about gun ownership.
Taking guns away from people with close family members associated with death cults seems like common sense to me, particularly if your country is already restricting citizens from gun ownership on much flimsier grounds. But other proposed responses to the rise in anti-Semitic attacks seem only slightly more effective than lighting candles. At the same press conference, Albanese updated reporters on his government’s progress in adopting the recommendations laid out by its anti-Semitism special envoy, Jillian Segal, in July. Albanese declared proudly that his government has “criminalized hate speech” and made it illegal to give the Nazi salute in public. Furthermore, he said, his government had taken measures to promote “Jewish inclusivity” at universities and had allocated millions of dollars to Jewish museums and Holocaust education. Eventually Albanese got around to mentioning recommendation No. 3.5, “the enhanced protection of Jewish communities through physical security measures.” This item merited only a sentence.
[Michael Fullilove: We will swim again at Bondi]
The mass murder of Jews puts the relative value of these proposals into perspective. Somehow I doubt that giving away free copies of Survival in Auschwitz would have had much effect on the killers who struck this weekend. The impulse to restrict speech is even less likely to help. Australia already prohibits anti-Semitic speech, to little discernible effect. Just this year, Australian Jewish leaders sued a Muslim cleric who had been holding forth on the treachery of the Jews. A judge ordered the cleric to take his lectures off the internet, and to keep his views private in the future. Do Jews really feel safer when anti-Semites are forced to whisper about them, rather than assert their hatred openly? Yesterday’s gunmen seem to have played the quiet game very well, at least since 2019. In retrospect one would prefer for them to have been more flagrant in their hatred, to raise the chance of foiling their plan.
With an attack like this, the only effective response is the zealous prosecution of anyone who planned or supported it, and the protection of those who might be targeted in similar attacks in the future. Museum education is nice, but if an attack is under way, a police officer with a rifle has more stopping power. Self-study to determine whether Jews are systematically excluded or vilified is worthwhile but will take time. Restrictions on speech are another matter, and a distraction from real police work. It should not be a crime to inquire about the whereabouts of Jews, or even to say you wish to gas them. But if you spray-paint a Jewish school or set a car on fire, a government with its resources properly ordered will find and charge you before you graduate to violent crime.
Another worthwhile Australian initiative in combatting this threat will be to determine whether the gunmen acted with the support of foreign terror groups. The two recently traveled to the Philippines, though it is not yet known whether they visited the Islamic State lairs in that country’s south. It’s also unclear what they might have gained from that visit: After all, their guns were legal in Australia, and it doesn’t take much training to shoot into a crowd of families.
Iran is the other suspect. The most dramatic gesture made thus far by Australia to combat anti-Semitic violence was the expulsion of the Iranian ambassador to Australia in August, after intelligence determined that Iran was behind the synagogue and deli firebombings in Melbourne and Bondi. The Telegraph reports that Israel suspects Iranian involvement in this weekend’s shooting. But it would be unusual for Iran to work with an Islamic State cell, given that the Islamic State has so enthusiastically slaughtered Shia, and so far no evidence has emerged linking the attack to Iran, other than the unignorable fact that Iran likes this kind of thing and has done it before.
Discovering that Iran or the Islamic State perpetrated this attack would change the situation drastically. But it would not erase the history of mismanagement that has marked the government’s response up to now.
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