On the first night of Hanukkah, the Jewish community was thrust into another nightmare, when at least 15 people were killed and more than 40 wounded in a mass shooting by a father-son duo at a Chabad event in Bondi Beach. Those killed in the attack included a 10-year-old named Matilda Bee Britvan, whose family moved to Australia to escape the war in Ukraine, and Alex Kleytman, a Holocaust survivor killed while trying to shield his wife. Australian authorities later confirmed that the gathering had been deliberately targeted and meticulously planned, marking one of the deadliest antisemitic attacks in the country’s history.
In the hours and days that followed, one story quickly rose above the rest. Footage circulating online showed a heroic bystander, later identified as Ahmed al-Ahmed, rushing toward one of the attackers and wrestling a gun out of the terrorist’s hands.
As the footage spread rapidly across social media and news broadcasts, it soon came to dominate the public conversation, increasingly framing the attack as a story of Muslim-Jewish reconciliation rather than an act of antisemitic violence, with Ahmed al-Ahmed becoming the central figure through which the massacre was understood. This reframing allows Australia to look away from its deeper failures that made the attack possible. It also obscures another critical fact: that there were many Jews at the event who also behaved with unbelievable heroism and bravery, whose names have been largely absent from the narrative.
It is obvious that the Australian state failed in its fundamental responsibility to protect its people. For one, the attack was perpetuated by an Indian national and his son who had documented ties to ISIS and were on Australia’s intelligence agency radar since 2019—yet had somehow been allowed to stay in the country. For another, missing from most of the coverage is the past two years of increasingly explicit antisemitic rhetoric in Australia, including pro-Palestinian demonstrations featuring chants such as “Gas the Jews” and “Long live the intifada,” alongside repeated acts of vandalism against Jewish places of worship. There are also allegations that the police failed to act with adequate haste to protect the Jews at the event.
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