What’s Coming in Australia Is Unimaginable

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On Sunday, father-and-son gunmen armed with shotguns killed 15 people and injured 40 more at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. Their target was Chanukah by the Sea, an annual event run by the Chabad of Bondi. The dead include a Holocaust survivor, a rabbi, and a 10-year-old girl. It is the deadliest mass shooting to occur in Australia since the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, a tragedy that reshaped the nation and led to the creation of gun laws that have, until now, prevented such violence from being a regular occurrence.

It is hard to parse this violence as a person from a country where it is abnormal. It is impossible not to personalize the grief, shock, and confusion. I was scrolling Instagram Stories on a sleepy Sunday arvo when I saw a friend post “just heard what I think are gunshots at Bondi - what’s going on?” The events unfolded so rapidly and brutally that it has shocked Australia into a whiplash of the soul that we will be grappling with for years to come.

We are in shock. This does not happen here. And yet, it has. It is difficult to reconcile that reality with who we are and who we imagine ourselves to be as a nation.

In the worst ways possible, the early response to the attack has taken on contours that would be familiar to Americans. That’s partly because authorities have said the shooters were motivated by “Islamic State ideology,” and because Israel’s genocide in Gaza—and the Australian complicity in it, mostly at the hands of Americans—has been a roiling issue here.

In the immediate aftermath of this attack, Benjamin Netanyahu blamed the tragedy on Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese of the Australian Labor Party, for recognizing an independent state of Palestine back in September. In his early career, Albanese was an ally of Palestine, co-founding the Parliamentary Friends of Palestine in 1999, but as prime minister he has tacitly supported Israel, Netanyahu, and the genocide in every material sense beyond a few empty gestures and hollow statements. This has divided Labor’s moderate base and beyond, and the government’s unwillingness to criticize Israel, let alone stop selling them arms, has been a major reason for the mass protests that have had hundreds of thousands of Australians marching through the streets of our major cities every weekend since Oct. 7, 2023.

Earlier this year, Albanese controversially appointed an “Antisemitism envoy” to appease Zionist interest groups. Jillian Segal, whose husband had donated to the Nazi-adjacent far-right group Advance Australia, used this position to put forth a highly censorious and constitutionally dubious list of proposed reforms framed as a “plan to combat antisemitism” that would all but outlaw criticism of Israel in Australia if adopted (which they weren’t, but likely will be in the wake of this weekend’s events). Segal has done little else in this perfunctory role other than push the narrative that the boom in antisemitism stems from the peaceful........

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