Bondi Beach is meant to be neutral ground. A place without history. A democratic stretch of sand where politics dissolves into sunlight, surf, and families pushing strollers toward the water. That illusion died when Jews gathered there to light Hanukkah candles – and were slaughtered for it.
The massacre belongs to a broader pattern that has accelerated since Oct. 7, 2023: Jews targeted far from any battlefield, in the ordinary spaces of civic life. Synagogues, campuses, cafés, city streets – and now a beach – have become killing fields aimed not at a state, but at a people. The mass murder at Bondi did not occur in a war zone or at a political demonstration. It occurred at a religious gathering of the diaspora, in full public view, and in daylight.
Bondi is evidence that the prevailing theory is wrong.
For years, Western academics have argued that antisemitism is primarily a reaction to Israeli power, sharpened by Zionism’s transformation of Jews from a vulnerable minority into a sovereign people. Thus, Jewish vulnerability ends where the Jewish State begins, and hostility toward Jews is reframed as antipathy for a political project.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member