The Bondi Beach Massacre
Murderous ideology does not stop at borders.
When I was growing up in Germany, I took it for granted that any Jewish institution—a museum or a synagogue, a school or a kindergarten—would need to be protected by armed guards. This made the security of Jewish life in New York City and other parts of the world all the more striking. How incredible that all of these Jewish institutions could just exist, without any apparent need for security!
Tragically, times have changed. That is why, over the last few years, I have sometimes talked about the Europeanization of American Jewry. A diaspora population that once lived in relative security has slowly had to adopt the practices which long characterized Jewish life in Europe.
After today’s awful terror attack, the same change will also come to Jews in Australia. As Claire Lehmann writes in this incisive piece, it doesn’t matter how far removed Jews are from the Middle East, geographically or ideologically: murderers intent on “globalizing the intifada” will always find an excuse to target them.
- Yascha
Tonight’s massacre on Bondi Beach is the deadliest terrorist attack ever carried out on Australian soil, and the worst attack on Jewish civilians since October 7. Images circulating from the scene show at least two men, armed with shotguns, positioned on a footpath and a pedestrian bridge, firing toward the beach where a Hanukkah celebration was taking place. At least fifteen people are confirmed dead, with dozens more hospitalized. Undetonated improvised explosive devices were found at the scene.
NSW Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon said police have authorized the use of special powers to help identify and detain anyone who may have connections to the attack, including investigating the possibility of further offenders and suspicious items. One of the shooters has been identified as Naveed Akram by a senior law enforcement source, with police reportedly conducting a raid on a property linked to him in Sydney’s southwest.
This attack has wrenched Australians. While various antisemitic incidents have occurred in Australia in recent years, they have largely taken the form of arson, graffiti, and vandalism. The atrocity carried out today represents an escalation of extreme proportions, resembling something that supposedly only happens overseas—not here.
Until tonight, Australia’s experience of terrorism had been defined by relatively low casualty counts. The deadliest recognized terrorist attack on Australian soil before Bondi was the Sydney Hilton Hotel bombing in 1978, which killed three people. More recent incidents—including the Lindt Café siege in Sydney in 2014, the Brighton siege in Melbourne in 2017, and the Bourke Street stabbing in 2018—claimed one or two lives each. Numerous other plots were disrupted before execution. By death toll alone, the Bondi Beach massacre now exceeds every previous terrorist attack in Australian history.
What compounds the shock is not only the scale of the violence, but its setting: Bondi Beach, an iconic landmark of Sydney, and a symbol of Australia’s laidback self-image.
Video footage from the attack shows a civilian confronting one of the gunmen and grappling with him at close range. During the struggle, the civilian succeeds in wresting the weapon from the attacker, even as a second gunman continues firing from a nearby pedestrian bridge.
For many Jewish Australians, tonight’s massacre represents the escalation of a pattern they have long warned about. While the shock is real, so too is the dismay that this day was long predicted. In the months following October 7, the trajectory of antisemitic violence in Australia was already becoming clear.
As I wrote in December 2024:
A timeline published by The Australian this weekend exposes the timid response from Australia’s leaders. [Prime Minister Anthony] Albanese said nothing when a mob descended upon Central Shule Chabad Synagogue in Melbourne’s East on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. He said nothing when an anti-Israel convoy drove through Sydney’s Eastern suburbs, home to many Jewish Australians. He remained silent when families of Israeli hostages fled from protesters who ambushed them, calling them “baby killers.” No response came when a Melbourne professor had his office stormed, protesters calling him a “war criminal” for working with an Israeli university. Silence again when former Olympian, Australian Senator, and Indigenous woman Nova Peris was surrounded by an intimidating mob at the Great Synagogue in Sydney.
This pattern of unrestrained Jew-hatred was followed, months later, by mass demonstrations in Sydney in which portraits of Iran’s Supreme Leader were carried across the Harbour Bridge, alongside symbols associated with Islamist extremist groups.
In the aftermath of October 7, historian Jeffrey Herf described the ideological logic that connects antisemitism to mass violence: “Its barbarity may be shocking to many observers,” he wrote, “but it will not have surprised those familiar with the ideology of the perpetrators. This latest outburst of violence is the logical outcome of the Jew-hatred.”
Despite the recency of October 7, there has been widespread denial of antisemitism—globally and in Australia. Violence against Jews in Israel is routinely rationalized as something Israelis must have brought upon themselves: the inevitable consequence of history or some kind of provocation. This logic treats mass murder not as an expression of hatred, but as a reaction. Yet, as Paul Berman has argued, Islamist violence is driven not by grievance alone but also by a death-cult ideology that treats the murder of Jews as a calling.
Jewish Australians celebrating Hanukkah on Bondi Beach could not be further removed from the politics of the Middle East. And yet they, too, have been targeted—evidence that murderous ideology does not stop at borders, and does not require proximity to Israel to find its victims.
Claire Lehmann is the Founder of Quillette.
A version of this essay first appeared in Quillette.
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Thank you, Yascha, for your words and for sharing Claire's excellent commentary.
I am almost beyond despair for our future as a civilization. Everything I grew up knowing was right is being turned upside down, and commonsense is being strangled. Today in the New York Times Bret Stephens' column was titled, "Bondi Beach Is What ‘Globalize the Intifada’ Looks Like" and the comments section was dominated by those criticizing Stephens for being presumptuous about the motives of the killers in Australia. We are being told to deny what we see with our own eyes.