On Bondi Beach

Terrorist actions do not occur because some students wear keffiyahs….

The cynical push now is to use this atrocity to silence our protest at the destruction of a people. The ‘kitsch’ anti-semitism that arises within such movements must always be acknowledged and tackled. Its occurrence is no reason to restrain our anger and resistance to Israel’s mass killing.

Have we ever had as much vision of any lethal event as the Bondi attack? Terrorist attacks, including 9-11, exist in pictures and pre-phone footage. The footage from October 7 is restricted, though maybe on the dark net somewhere. But in 2025, we have seen the attack from multiple angles, creating stories, many of them heroic. Yet still, the one thing missing is the core of the event itself; the bullets raining down on a Chanukah party on the beach. It has, as these things always do, put the emphasis on the life there, in surviving or resisting it, and not its dark core. In considering the event, one can neither let the spectacle, the rhetoric, and the storymaking around it dominate; nor sublimate its horror into analysis

The specific purpose of the event remains unknown, despite the usual sudden conversion of pundits into Middle East experts. Was it a generic attack on Jews by people who made contact with Islamic State? Was it an attack on Chabad - whose Chanukah party it was - intended to hit high-profile targets, as well as simply killing as many as possible? The Chabad group is a global Orthodox sect that has expanded vastly in the last few decades, as a comprehensive outreach group. Pro-Israel (unlike some other ultraorthodox groups),

since the October 7 Hamas attack, and the IDF attack on Gaza, Chabad has become more tightly bound with Israeli military purpose. Local leader Rabbi Eli Schlager, killed in the Bondi attack, has been frenetically busy going back and forth from Israel, and happy to pose among IDF soldiers with missiles, shells and, in one case, a sniper rifle. This raises the possibility that this was in part a targeted political assassination, with Schlager as the target.

Murkier possibilities remain. If the Akrams were on the ASIO radar - if the father was, then the son was - and nothing was done about their gun licenses, and they were under no tight surveillance then it means either that ASIO is running a very big list of possible suspects. Or, that ASIO had them on a long leash in order to track their movements and connections - and that ASIO made a very big mistake about their lethality.

That this appears to have been a planned suicide mission by a pair on ASIO’s radar since 2019, and possibly by Salafists, surely suggests that its occurrence of relatively independent of the protests, and their rhetoric, that have occurred since Israel’s destruction of Gaza began after October 7, 2023. But that cannot be said with anything like complete confidence. These two men, the father a greengrocer, appear to have hid their views from their family. How recently those views became committed and intense, before or after 7 October, will be a fairly crucial question to answer, if we ever get to see the answer.

But even if this transition to violence occurred after 7 October, the argument that it was caused by the protests themselves seems spurious. If people are responding to the destruction of Gaza with militancy and confrontation - some of which is clearly anti-semitic - it is not because someone is telling them to globalise the intifada, it is because the military of the world’s only Jewish state has been mass bombing and starving a population of a surrounded enclave, sequestered there since 1948. This is utterly obvious, but simply needs repeating for base clarity. The intifada is globalised by the mere witnessing of this around the world. It is globalised in the sense that millions of us respond with the feeling in our hearts that we must do something about this. For most, that is turning up to a march. For some, it will flow along pre-existing cultural pathways or residual, or recently developed, anti-semitism.

This is the obvious linkage that the worldwide zionist movement and its wider allies are trying to break at all costs. They are treating the global pro-Palestine movement as if it were a movement based on a pure fabrication - as if it were a movement against chemtrails or somesuch. By uncoupling the real global event from the representation of it in protest here, the authorities are turning the management of the protest movement into an amoral social and psychological management question. The event it is a response to, is put in brackets. The moral claim being made in the protests is removed from its manifestation. Internal ‘cohesion’ is separated from any global process.

With that, allegedly, a chain of influence is set up, circular in nature. No-one, it is claimed, is really doing this as a primary response to a global event. Everyone is influenced by someone else. The university campus encampments were influenced by the marches. The marches were influenced by Islamist groups. The students were influenced by Marxist academics. The marches were influenced by the students. The cause was trendy, it was anti-establishment, the keffiyah was cool, it was virtue signalling, it was influencing the students to make camps. Round and round it went. Anything but debate the propositions that the protests have been making.

There has undoubtedly been a rise in anti-semitism in the West, since Israel’s attack on Gaza, and especially since it became an indefinite destruction of the place, in which 2.5 million trapped between a fence and the sea, were told to evacuate their buildings, which were then bombed, and go to previously bombed places, which were then bombed again. Many people approved of, or were indifferent to it, taking the government line that Israel needed to, and was, eliminating Hamas. Some simply saw those barbaric Arab bastards getting what they deserved. But on the other side, what many of us saw was something unlike much we have seen in recent decades. This was not massacres arising from messy and somewhat autonomous territorial wars, as seen in Sudan - the whataboutery example that the zionist lobby is always trying to foist on us. This was the rule of death over a patch of land, a process which gave people no option but to wait and die. Coddled in groupthink and soothing phrases which keep them from a real encounter with what is being done in their name, Israel’s enthusiastic diaspora supporters appear to have no idea of the degree of moral anger and outrage many of us feel at this process. Not merely the bombing and death itself, but the cold sadism of procedure, the blithe and cynical PR associated with it.

The pro-Palestine movement has been run by people who know how raw that anger is. They also know that this issue does draw out anti-semites of various types - Nazis who admire the noble Arab, conspiracy theory cranks, and some degree of residual ‘unreconstructed’ anti-semitism of Middle Eastern groups - who attach themselves to the movement. Though they were possibly a little slow off the mark, they have managed to chase them away, expel them from the marches, prevent banners or slogans being chanted. Some nasty stickers on Jewish-owned shops, some missteps, have been steadily eliminated.

But one gets the impression that this was not the target of the zionist lobby, ready to treat such as the usual anti-semitic kitsch. The real target has been that part of the movement which has been effective in stirring the global conscience, and keeping the ruthless amoralism, the wanton killing of Gaza, in the public mind. As Jeff Sparrow has noted, the dominant slogan in the marches has been ‘stop the genocide’.

But it is the more militant slogans that have become targets: ‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free’; ‘Death to the IDF’ ‘Globalise the Intifada’ and ‘All Zionists are Terrorists’. The last of these only got an airing during some marches, and was explicitly objected to by some groups. One understood the passion behind it, the desire to confront the establishment with the real implications of what they were supporting. But its ‘everyone is a combatant’ logic is false. ‘Death to the IDF’? The IDF is an army representing a state, waging what it declares to be a war. How on earth can it be illegitimate to call for the death of its members, if one is supportive of the side fighting it? ‘Death to [the other side’s army]’ is kinda implicit in the idea of war. Condemning this slogan asked us to regard Israel’s cause as implicitly right, and the IDF’s action a restoration of civil order.

‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, raised an interesting issue, because it has multiple interpretations. One is simply that there will be a one-state multinational entity where Israel and the Occupied territories now are. Another is simply a more amorphous idea that a clearly oppressed people will be free, eventually. There were others, all the way to the annihilatory notion that Israel will be abolished, and six million Jews descended from zionist arrivers will be tipped into the sea. Well, one can see how that interpretation is disturbing and discomfiting. But given that more generic versions are equally ‘robust’ interpretations, the demand by zionists was for the banning or policing of a slogan based on one interpretation being the ‘real’ one. It was/is thus a proposal for an extension of speech controls to a quite shocking degree - all the way inside the head.

The most complex case has been ‘globalise the intifada’ and that has become complicated. ‘Globalise the intifada’ is defended with reference to both its etymology and recent use. It’s a construction arising from the verb ‘nafada’ meaning to ‘shake the dust off’. It had come to refer to the 1987 and 2000 more-or-less grassroots uprisings in the West Bank against tightening Israeli rule. With civil disobedience and stones, and some small arms, against a modern army, it was explicitly different to the organised guerrilla/terror campaigns of the Fatah and other groups, with their pitiless lethality. Support for it was as much an affirmation of the grassroots against the ossified, compromised and fundamentalist character of the organised Palestinian leadership. Such groups hadn’t launched organised terror for a decade or more, so support of it was a dead debate.

But that has changed since October 7, in which a mixed guerrilla/terror attack became the most significant event in the conflict for some time. People carved out a certain way of talking about it, as ‘resistance’, and the notion that no act of resistance could be morally questioned. That got many out of having to get into moral condemnation of the event. But the price of the ticket was that it became folded into the notion of ‘intifada’, as a general global campaign, inside which means could not be judged. ‘Globalise the Intifada’ has acquired a degree of menace that it did not previously have.

But it’s a long way from there to the notion that such slogans have any causal relationship to the sort of clearly planned and operational violence of the Bondi Beach attack. This writer felt some disquiet at a certain swagger and menace in some of these slogans by some participants on these marches, part of the complexity of street politics. In part it’s compensatory. A people are being pummelled towards destruction with no way to strike back. To ‘take’ the city is one way to feel some way of striking back.

But the sort of violence I thought might issue from that - casual assaults or low-level ‘squaddism’ directed at Jews - has not occurred. There are no recorded politicised/ethnic assaults against Jewish people of that type in the last two years. There has been an increase in menace, shouting in the street, business intimidation, which is nasty and threatening. But once again, it is often isolated from the actual pro-Palestine movement itself. People who call up bagel bakeries to abuse them seem to me to be living off the dark energy of an older type of anti-semitism - from both gentile Christian/secular and Muslim populations - that has more to do with the Jews status as the residual target of hatred, the people whose separate solidarity, and originary nature within the Abrahamic religions, becomes an attractor for paranoia and hate, especially among the isolated and resentful.

There is, it must be said in parts of the pro-Palestine movement, perhaps among younger members, a slippage, wilful to a degree, from zionists to Jews, which is in part directed at the prominence and power of Jewish communities in the West. It’s a punk move, a way of daring someone to call you out. When the zionist lobby says that anti-zionism is anti-semitism - which is going to be tough news to break to the Adass synagogue rabbis, originating from the very anti-zionist Satmar tradition - and uses the whole power of the state as its megaphone, the punk instinct is to take it on and say ‘yeah, so what?’ One suspects the new word ‘Zios’ serves as a transitional term in this, targeting something more than zionist, less than simply Jewish.

But there is no reason to suppose that this sort of drift - which has to be, and is, pushed back against - has any sort of role in the actions of people who appear to have been connected to the radical Islamist networks for years. There is an obvious difference between a consciously enacted lethal operation, and the messy and nasty occasional occurrences that arise from this sort of political mega-event. Everyone, at some level, knows this of course. But the wider mainstream Jewish groups - almost but not fully co-extensive with the zionist lobby - want the removal of any social conflict or discomfit from social life, and for free speech and free political activity to be the price of that.

Sorry we can’t. Acknowledging that all effort, and perhaps more effort, must be made to tackle the ‘kitsch’ anti-semitism which might at times occur in the pro-Palestine movement, we cannot subordinate our politics to the imperative of total ‘cultural safety, because of the very event that Gaza is. This is the pitiless destruction of a people, with a death toll at the very least in the high tens of thousands, and possibly many many more. If 125,000 people have died in Gaza, that would be 5% of the population. 250,000 would be 10% and it may well be more. That is like nothing we have seen in recent decades.

We can’t curb our actions precisely because of the phrase being bandied around by our opponents: ‘never again’. It is because of ‘never again’ that we must bear witness to this, and do what we can to resist its unimpeded progress and normalisation. Those in the zionist lobby who want us to elevate total social harmony above global politics use a model of national ‘interiority’ are simply using the chauvinist imperative that was used against the Jews, when Australia, and others, refused entry to Jewish refugee ships in the last 1930s - sending their passengers back to end up in Auschwitz and Treblinka.

We are particularly not going to do it in the face of the vast cynicism deployed around Bondi Beach - a sort of double cynicism, first of the zionist lobby, and then of the Liberal party and its supporters, in trying to open up a front against Labor (whose handling admittedly has been stumbling and reactive, and who may have been indolent in policing security threats). A friend asked me if I was surprised at this level of cynical use. I realised I was not, simply because we are in a period of absolute struggle in the realm of the political. The ‘enemy’ model of Carl Schmitt has taken over, as a shared public sphere has collapsed. Much has become a proxy war for the great ‘class’ struggle - between those who run the knowledge-capital economy, and its inherent progressive culture, and those excluded and blindsided by it. In the old era of the public sphere, the Liberals, Newscorpse, and other such agencies would have stopped well short of the vampiric use of the Bondi dead for narrow political aims. Now, nothing restrains them.

These events and the possibility of others does demand a change on the left in our attitude to the state. We are going to have to enter the discourse of ‘better’ and ‘worse’ domestic security, and to urge the government to be attentive to the real presence of groups formed around the nihilistic politics of death contained within an Islamist or Neo-Nazi framework. Elected politicians have to periodically, as much as they can, carpet ASIO heads - busy doing their fundraising ‘three major threats we can’t tell you about’ fundraising tours - and point them at real and proximate threats, which may diverge from the organisation’s prime motive. Which is of course the continued existence, power and expansion of the organisation itself. We need to be able to be unrestrained in demanding that these politically compromised organisations - ASIO and AFP - do at least the semblance of a job. That is not always going to be to our advantage.

Those who seek to make this attack unprecedented, the loss of our innocence have had one piece of great ‘good luck’. A worse massacre was perpetrated against Muslims by an Australian, Brendon Tarrant several years ago. He did it in New Zealand, because he happened to be there, and he claimed to be fighting on behalf of an undistinguishable anglo white Australasian civilisation. Had he done it in Springvale or Lakemba, the symmetry of the threat would now be obvious. Yet it has barely been acknowledged, by the simple and spurious use of a national boundary

But we are not, and cannot be stampeded into the surrender of free speech, pluralism, and a robust public sphere, by the ghastly spectacle recorded on a thousand CCTVs, phones and dashcams. Should the government try and impose UK style laws - banning the word ‘intifada’! - we will simply have to break the law en masse. That is not only to fight for free speech and the public sphere, but to bear witness to one of the great crimes against humanity of our time. We have become a world centre of protests and resistance to the normalisation of this. However limited our impact, we did not desert the people of Gaza, and we will not do so now. We are the people for whom ‘never again’ means something.