AARON PATRICK: Before the Bondi Beach massacre, Jews tried to warn Australians they were under attack

Before Sunday’s terrorist attack on Bondi Beach, Sydney’s Jewish community was angry, resentful and afraid.

For two years Jewish leaders complained that Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong refused to provide them with political, legal and rhetorical protection from extremist elements in the Muslim community.

From verbal abuse and graffiti to the firebombing of a synagogue in Melbourne and a cafe in Sydney, Jews felt they were being singled out for violence and intimidation unlike any other Australian religious or racial group.

Despite decades of building relationships with the Labor Party, Jews felt abandoned when the Federal Government appeared to take sides against the Jewish state three months ago by granting diplomatic representation to what it regards as a Palestinian state.

Some Jews feel the Prime Minister and Ms Wong exacerbated the hostile environment towards them by stoking the grievances of Australian Muslims, who outnumber Jews in Sydney and elsewhere about eight to one.

Mr Albanese accused Israel — which lost a citizen in Bondi on Sunday — of deliberately starving children in the Gaza Strip during the war against Hamas, a contestable and morally questionable allocation of blame for the Gazans’ wretched plight.

“The situation in Gaza has gone beyond the world’s worst fears,” the Prime Minister said on August 11. “The Israeli Government continues to defy international law and deny sufficient aid, food and water to desperate people, including children.”

A Jew who pleaded with the Prime Minister to be less critical of Israel, Eli Schlanger, was shot dead on Sunday. The 41-year-old rabbi was an organiser of Chanukah by the Sea, the event where the massacre took place.

“Jews have been torn from their land again and again by leaders who are now remembered with contempt in the pages of history,” he wrote in a letter several weeks ago published in the Israeli press Monday. “You have an opportunity to stand on the side of truth and justice.”

‘We told you so’

Young Muslim men and women raised in a culture of permanent hostility towards Jews will always embrace the demonisation of Israel, and feel their prejudice reinforced when their views are endorsed by high political office.

As Jews and others gunned down in Sunday’s terror attack struggle to live, some of their families must be thinking: we told you so. We told you that anti-Jewish hate lives on the streets of Australian cities. That pandering to the anti-Israeli lobby would come to be seen as a shameful betrayal. That the war in Gaza was not about good versus evil, but a complex clash of interests requiring compromise to resolve.

Australia heard but did not listen to the warnings. Tel Aviv felt too far away for the murderous violence to reach its shores. Australia was naturally peaceful. Extremism was a phenomenon of Europe, America and the Middle East, Australians thought. Activists on the far left and far right (especially Mark Latham) argued Jews exaggerated anti-Semitism for sympathy.

Now that Jewish and Gentile blood has been shed, in the cause of an ancient hatred, within sight of a beach that represents Australia’s very identity, the nation finds itself with a defining choice: are we with or against the Jews?