Bondi Beach is not merely a place. It is an idea. To Australians and to many of us who have lived in the country, it represented an unguarded openness: A shared public space where difference dissolved into routine civility, where the rituals of everyday life unfolded without fear. When terror and violence intrude upon such a space, it is not just innocent lives that are lost. Something more elemental is shaken, tied to the assumption that public life can be conducted without dread.

That rupture came on Sunday, December 14, when an attack during a Hanukkah gathering at Bondi Beach turned a moment of communal celebration into one of horror. Several people have been killed, many more injured, and what had been an emblem of ease and coexistence became, briefly, a site of terror. Australian authorities described the terrorist attack as fuelled by antisemitic intent, a stark reminder that ideological and religious hatred still seeks expression through indiscriminate violence.

The details are still being pieced together, but their cumulative meaning is already clear. Violence directed at a religious community, in one of the country’s most cherished public spaces, strikes at the core of plural life. That it occurred during a festival centred on light, renewal and resilience only deepens the sense of moral revulsion. Terrorism and extremism are not distorted forms of politics or belief; they are assaults on the very possibility of shared civic life and deserve unequivocal moral repudiation.

I write this not as a distant........

© Indian Express