Bondi Beach, the Blame Game, and the Death of Human Empathy |
The callous justifications for the antisemitic massacre on Bondi Beach and the swiftness with which they were generated was shocking and disturbing, albeit not remotely surprising. This abject insensitivity, even cruelty, has become par for the course whenever violence against Jews, Muslims, and/or Arabs in the “West”¹ has become the subject of public discourse ever since the incursion of Palestinian militants into southern Israel, killing 1,200 people (mostly civilians) on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s subsequent response to the attack, which has resulted in the decimation of Gaza and the killing of at least 67,000 people (likely more, mostly civilians).
To be clear, an uptick in violence against Jews and apologism for it, as well as an uptick violence against Arabs and Muslims and apologism for it, parallel to violence in Israel/Palestine is a trend that has predated October 7,² though the intensity of this phenomenon has increased dramatically over the past two years. One of my own core memories of October 7 is of attending a student government meeting at UCLA (where I was a fourth year undergraduate student at the time) just days after the attack. A student government officer posted a statement lauding the attacks on their official student government Instagram, and an Israeli student gave a public comment to express her disgust towards the statement, sharing that her best friend’s brother had been murdered, and many of her family members were still missing. In response, the student government official shouted at the girl, indignant, defending the political praxis that “decolonization is not a metaphor” without uttering a word of sympathy for their constituent and peer—or even acknowledging what she had shared. This display of apathy was twofold: apathy towards the national trauma that Israelis had endured as a collective, which resulted in apathy towards the personal trauma that this girl had endured as an individual; any sense of compassion for either the collective or, worse, the individual standing right in front of them, was completely inaccessible, caged by their political dogmatism.
Something fundamental had been shattered here. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment the Rubicon was crossed on a broader societal level, but this paradigm shift meant that it would be impossible to claim bewilderment after logging onto Twitter that morning upon reading the news of the Bondi Beach shooting. Press TV correspondent Hadi Hoteit posted a picture of the suspect,........