EDITORIAL: Bloody toll of the failure to tackle anti-Semitism

For most Australians, the carnage that unfolded in Bondi on Sunday afternoon was unthinkable. Unimaginable.

The sound of gunshots piercing the soporific early summer calm is something that is simply not part of our reality. Terror doesn’t happen here. Not in Australia.

Jewish Australians were under no such delusion.

For more than two years, their lives have been infected by anxiety; their eyes wide open to the creeping tide of anti-Semitism which roiled around them.

They saw their synagogues firebombed. Cars set alight, homes scrawled with vile graffiti.

They gave voice to their fear that we were sleepwalking our way toward tragedy. They implored authorities to take those fears seriously.

They were assured they were safe.

On Sunday, that tide spilled over, as they warned it would.

Fifteen innocents dead, including a 10 year old girl. Easy pickings as they gathered to celebrate the first night of Hanukkah, one of the most holy dates on the Jewish calendar.

We have a dangerous culture of silence which is permitting the hatred of Jews

This is what Jewish Australians had feared, ever since they watched in horror as ghouls were allowed to mass on the steps of the Sydney Opera House to rejoice in the deaths of 1200 Israelis in the aftermath of the October 7 massacre.

Instead of condemning hatred, our leaders prevaricated. References to anti-Semitism had to be followed in the next breath by a reference to Islamophobia as they sought to appease those for whom such things can be viewed only through an adversarial lens.

In their calls for “restraint” by Israel as our long time ally sought to defend itself against the existential threat posed to it by Hamas, our Prime Minister and Foreign Minister drew a false equivalence between a liberal democracy and a group of radical Islamist terrorists.

The recognition of Palestinian sovereignty in September — a direct reward for the murderous actions of those terrorists — was the final indignity, a dismissal by Australia of the deepest Jewish suffering.

In the vacuum left by this failure of leadership, a culture of silence permissive of the hatred of Jews took root.

It fomented the most foul anti-Semitism, the type that sees little girls as targets for destruction.

Those of us who are not part of the Jewish community cannot pretend to fully understand the grief they are today suffering. Not only for this injury, but for the myriad other insults they have endured as their sense of belonging was eroded by a collective indifference to their plight.

Our leaders have been quick to tell Jewish Australians that this was an attack on us all, that their pain is the nation’s pain. But where were they when those same Jewish Australians screamed out for help in the months and years leading up to this atrocity?

In Deuteronomy, the final shared book of the Jewish Torah and Christian Old Testament, the prophet Moses tells the Israelites that evil is a choice. So too is goodness.

On Sunday, amid the grief and the chaos, so many ordinary Australians chose goodness in the face of overwhelming evil.

Beachgoers, still wet from the surf, who leapt into action to provide first aid and CPR to victims. Lifeguards who continued to rescue distressed swimmers from the waves, even as gunshots rang out behind them.

And most astonishingly of all, 43-year-old tobacco shop owner Ahmed al Ahmed whose extraordinary courage in disarming one of the gunmen saved untold lives, at enormous risk to his own.

Our choices — and significantly, the choices of our leaders — have led us here. We must now choose a way out.

Responsibility for editorial comment is taken by Editor-in-Chief Christopher Dore