I haven’t been to Bondi in decades. I was on that beach in 1981. That’s a long time ago now. But it’s one of those places you don’t entirely forget—and one of those places a lot of us have been taught to file under safe.

Earlier this month, on sand Australians treat as shorthand for innocence—Bondi’s bright strip of summer and salt and stroller-wheels—Jews were hunted at a Chanukah celebration. An ordinary night, in an ordinary park, beside an ordinary playground. Face paint and plastic cups and the soft chaos of kids. And then the sound that doesn’t belong there: gunfire.

I’m not sure I’m going to say anything new below. Probably not. What I’m offering is a lament. If you’ll indulge me, read it not for novelty but for the human thing it is: an attempt to name a pain, and to find a little relief in the act of writing it down.

Bondi is a postcard in the world’s imagination, but for locals it’s errands. It’s the route you take when you want to clear your head. It’s the place you walk when you’re trying to remember you’re lucky. That’s part of what makes this kind of attack feel so destabilizing: it violates not only bodies, but the human bargain we keep trying to believe in—that some places remain ordinary.

Within minutes, the familiar tempo of normal life was replaced by the other tempo: phones vibrating too often, names repeating, the kind of punctuation people use when they’re trying not to panic. Friends messaging friends. Families checking on families. Rumor thickening before facts can arrive.

And in the middle of all that, the same question always appears—sometimes spoken aloud, sometimes only as a thought you can’t shake: how can anything catastrophic be happening in a place this familiar? That’s the seduction of places like Bondi. They teach you, without words, that the world’s ugliness is something that happens elsewhere, to other people, on other screens.

Then you watch the ugliness race into the most ordinary frame you have.

The shock is in the body—how could this happen here, like this, with children present—and the lack of surprise is in the mind, the part of you that has been watching the temperature rise for a long time.

Later came the stories that make you proud of strangers.
A man tackled one of the attackers unarmed. He fought for the gun. He saved lives. His name—Ahmed Al-Ahmed—landed with an almost unbearable symbolism. If you were trying to script an antidote to the reflex to scapegoat Muslims—if you wanted a clean, human rebuke to the cartoon of “Muslim versus Jew”—you could not have written it better than a man with an unmistakably Arab name risking his life for Jews on Australia’s most iconic beach.

The police and paramedics and surf lifesavers and bystanders who ran toward danger deserve more than a throwaway........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)