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When a country is traumatised, leadership can be as simple as a hug. Nearly 30 years after the Port Arthur massacre, one of the defining images of the harrowing days which followed that tragedy is of John Howard embracing Dr Bryan Walpole, an emergency surgeon exhausted from attending to the wounded and the dead.

There was a tentativeness in the body language of Howard as he put his arm around the Hobart doctor – still wearing his white lab coat – on the cathedral steps of a memorial service. There was none from Dr Walpole, who buried his anguished face in the shoulder of the then-prime minister.

Anthony Albanese is a more instinctive hugger than Howard and a man more open with his emotions. Within hours of the mass shooting at Bondi Beach, he urged us to wrap our arms around the Jewish community. At a time when Jewish Australia and much of the nation is grieving for those murdered, the prime minister would have been a natural fit for the role of consoler-in-chief.

Instead, there is a coldness and a distance between Albanese and the family and friends of the Bondi victims. There is also a deep rift, unmended by the prime minister’s delayed, full-throated commitment to addressing antisemitism four days after the Bondi killings, between Albanese, his government, the Australian Labor Party and Jews who for the past two years asked for them to do more to stop the hate.

The father of the youngest of the Bondi victims, a 10 year-old-girl named Matilda who was shot dead as she was celebrating the first night of Hanukkah with her family on the beach, did not spare Albanese an ounce of his anger or his grief. “He failed Matilda,” he said of the prime minister.

Labor has a Jewish problem. If this wasn’t clear before Bondi, it is now. It runs much wider than the prime minister’s office and deeper than the normal partisan divide which cleaves nearly every issue in Australian public life. Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Peter Wertheim, asked to characterise the problem, is succinct: “It’s a moral paralysis.”

This is criticism from a friend. Sydney-based Wertheim, the son of an Auschwitz survivor, has an enduring relationship with Albanese. The pair famously campaigned together 24 years ago to stop the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions Movement from taking root at Marrickville Council in Albanese’s Sydney electorate and since then, have retained a mutual trust and respect.

Does he believe Albanese when the prime minister vows to eradicate antisemitism? “Nobody does. In his own mind, he is emotionally committed to that. But I think he is struggling. The nation is struggling, because the depth of evil we saw on Sunday is so far beyond the range of Australian life and experience.”

Inside the ALP, Jewish people who have dedicated much of their working lives to the party are dismayed, not just at the horrific events at Bondi, but how Labor has responded to a growing crisis within their community since October 7, 2023.

John Howard hugs Dr Bryan Walpole in the days after the Port Arthur massacre.Credit: Rick Stevens

“There is a very clear perception within the Jewish community that Labor governments, both state and federal, have not done enough to combat not just antisemitism but the normalisation of hate speech,” says Phil Dalidakis, a former minister in Victoria’s Andrews government. Michael Danby held the federal seat of Macnamara for Labor in Melbourne’s inner south, before current MP Josh Burns, for 21 years. “The cumulative effect of their policies is to create an atmosphere where people feel vulnerable,” he says.

On the night after the Bondi killings, this sense of vulnerability was palpable as Jews interrupted Hanukkah celebrations to attend impromptu vigils and community gatherings. In Melbourne, Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan, after chairing a meeting of cabinet, directed all of them to join her that night at the Caulfield........

© The Sydney Morning Herald