A mass shooting at a public Hanukkah festival at Bondi Beach is a hate crime. It is antisemitic violence, full stop.
The legal process will do what legal processes do: charges, briefs, court dates, technical definitions. But morally, socially, and journalistically, this is not complicated.
Jews gathered in public to celebrate a Jewish holiday, and they were hunted for it. When a minority community is attacked in the middle of its religious celebration, the country does not get to hide behind “wait for more information” as a substitute for moral clarity.
Australia has failed its Jews time and time again. This latest horror did not appear out of nowhere. It came after two years in which antisemitism surged to levels Jewish Australians have never seen, and too many institutions responded with hesitation, euphemisms, and excuses.
According to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, antisemitic incidents jumped to record highs after October 7, 2023, with more than 2,000 incidents recorded in 2023-2024, followed by another 1,654 in 2024-2025. Even if the number dipped slightly from the first post-October 7 spike, the message on the ground was the same: Jewish life became a target, and the severity escalated.
Failure started with the 'normalization of the abnormal'
This is not only a failure of government; it is a failure of law enforcement culture, university leadership, media judgment, and national nerve.
It started with the normalization of the abnormal. When crowds gathered at the Sydney Opera House days after October 7 and the country spent months arguing over the precise wording of chants instead of confronting the apparent reality, a public demonstration became a warning sign. Whatever the audio analysis concluded later, Jewish Australians heard the message in real time: you are fair game.
Then it moved online and into workplaces. Doxxing campaigns turned Jewish names into targets, not for debate but for intimidation. People went quiet, not because they changed their minds but because they feared the consequences of being publicly Jewish, publicly Zionist, and publicly visible.
Then it arrived on campus. The moment universities tolerated “no-go zones” in practice – even when they refused the phrase in public – they taught young Jews a brutal lesson: your safety is negotiable if the politics are fashionable enough.
Then it turned into fire.
Kosher businesses were attacked. Synagogues were firebombed. Graffiti, threats, and attempted arson became common. The progression matters because it demolishes the comforting fiction that antisemitism is mostly “unpleasant speech.” It is not. It is organized and escalating, and in Australia, it has already crossed into terrorism.
Australians were told, explicitly, that foreign actors were involved in targeting Jewish institutions. That should have detonated the remaining illusions. This was not just about social cohesion. This was about a community being treated as a soft target.
And through it all, the media too often failed the simplest test: naming reality.
When a minority community is attacked, the first responsibility is to describe what happened clearly. Not to tiptoe. Not to dilute. Not to hide the identity of the victims behind vague language that makes everyone comfortable except the people who were attacked. A Hanukkah event is a Jewish event. An attack on a Jewish event is antisemitic violence. Say it quickly. Say it plainly. Say it without fear of offending the people who are busy justifying why Jews should expect less protection than everyone else.
Australia was once a haven for Jews. Melbourne is home to one of the highest per capita populations of Holocaust survivors outside Israel. That is not a trivia fact. It is a moral obligation. A country that gave survivors safety does not get to watch their descendants return to fear and pretend it is just the temperature of online discourse.
So what does an honest response look like?
It looks like treating antisemitic violence as a national security priority, not a community relations issue.
It looks like consequences, consistent policing, real prosecutions, real sentences, and zero tolerance for threats and incitement.
It looks like universities being held accountable when Jewish students cannot safely exist as Jews on campus.
It looks like media outlets refusing to outsource their language to activists and refusing to delay the obvious.
Most of all, it looks like national leadership that stops asking Jews to prove that they are under attack and starts acting like it.
Hanukkah is about light in public. That is the point. Jews do not light candles to hide them. They light them to be seen.
If Australia cannot protect Jews when they are visible, then Australia is not the country it claims to be.