Of all the difficult emotions I’ve been forced to grapple with in the hours since two gunmen, a father and son, carried out a massacre of Jews at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, the most complicated is a bitter, dark sense of vindication.
“Now do you believe us?” I imagine screaming at Australia’s progressive intelligentsia, political, and media class. Do you believe Jew-hatred is out of control, after the most lethal terror attack on the nation’s soil has claimed at least 16 lives, including a rabbi, a Holocaust survivor, and a 10-year-old girl, and wounded dozens more?
The setting for the largest massacre of Jews since October 7 tells a brutal story. Australia’s Jewish community, numbering around 120,000, has long been acclimated to heavily fortified communal buildings, with security guards on every door, and to the politicians courting us in election season with money for yet more fortifications. The Jewish victims in Manchester, England, were killed outside a shul; the young Israeli diplomats in Washington, D.C., outside a Jewish museum. But it would take some imagination to predict Jews would be picked off here, at this famous, democratic stretch of sand. If we can’t exhale at Bondi Beach, then where in the country can we be safe?
