A Hanukkah massacre of Australian Jews

December 14, 2025, 12:20 PM ET

It’s long past time to stop saying “Anti-Semitic violence has no place in our society.” Outrage upon outrage confirms that anti-Semitic violence has a large and expanding place in Western societies—that it is supported by many, that it is tolerated by many more, and that it is often appeased or even enabled by governments fearful of confronting large and militant factions within their populations.

For months before today’s mass killing on Sydney’s Bondi Beach, Australia has been afflicted by repeated incidents of anti-Jewish harassment and intimidation. The outrages began just two days after the October 7 Hamas terror attacks in Israel, with a demonstration at the Sydney Opera House that included a chant of “Fuck the Jews.” Dozens more such demonstrations followed across the country.

Curses soon escalated into crimes. There was an arson attack on a synagogue and another at a day-care center. Protesters stormed into an Israeli restaurant, and police foiled a plot for mass bombings of Jewish targets.

In September, a social-media influencer carrying a Palestinian flag on horseback across Bondi Beach got off with a warning. “I cannot believe we can fine a cocker spaniel for being off leash, we can fine a restaurant owner for having a chair on a footpath, we can move people on for drinking in our public parks, but there is no power whatsoever for us to fine someone for riding a horse in an intimidating manner on a beach,” Waverley Councillor Steven Lewis said at the time.

The beach, which is proximate to a large Jewish community, has been repeatedly targeted by pro-Palestinian demonstrators, leading to counter-protests and clashes.

When people chant “intifada revolution,” they are revealing something important about their goals and methods. Yet in many Western countries, public authorities have been reluctant—or unwilling—to hear the message.

In August 2025, a pro-Palestinian activist assassinated two people in downtown Washington, D.C. “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza,” he told police according to his federal indictment. The same message appeared on a prescheduled post on his social-media accounts.

In October, two men were killed and three injured in a car-ramming and stabbing attack directed against Yom Kippur worshippers in Manchester, England.

Yet there has remained, until now, terrible reluctance by Western governments to accept the appearance on their soil of deadly threats to their Jewish citizens from people motivated by anti-Israel ideology. Those movements have progressively tested what used to be red lines: blocking access to synagogues, for example, as happened in recent weeks in Los Angeles and New York City. (In New York, the incident drew a statement from Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani that apportioned blame to both the protesters and the synagogue itself.)

After the mass killing in Sydney, facing reality is not merely urgent—it’s inescapable. Symbolic violence is a rehearsal for actual violence. Many in the Western world have interpreted post**–**October 7 anti-Israel actions within the framework of free speech. Ten days after the terror attacks, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education posted a statement: “Let every participant in the debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict show their cards, even those with the most extreme views. And let others marshal arguments and evidence to refute or discredit those views.”

But what if the “extreme view” in question is that Jews should be made to fear death, and the best way to spread that fear is by killing them? How do you marshal arguments and evidence against that proposition? In a 2021 essay, the prominent anti-Israel academic Steve Salaita rejected those who “speak of rights and democracy and civil liberties and then superimpose those categories onto Palestine. It doesn’t occur to them that Palestine has its own vocabularies of freedom worth forcing into the American conversation.”

It is helpful to possess a lexicon of what is typically intended by these vocabularies. Armed struggle means shooting people or blowing them up with bombs. By any means necessary means targeting the most defenseless: children, the elderly, other civilians. Globalize the intifada means shooting or bombing people in Sydney, London, Paris, Toronto, Los Angeles, and New York City, as well as in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. From the river to the sea means the annihilation of a sovereign democratic state and the mass murder, expulsion, and enslavement of much of its population.

Of course, there is the irony that the one place on Earth where Jews most resolutely meet such threats is precisely the same State of Israel marked for annihilation by its enemies. The more dangerous the anti-Israel movement makes the diaspora for Jews, the more Jews will leave the diaspora for the state that exists to protect them.

People who dress up like Hamas terrorists and brandish their insignia and chant their slogans are not merely opining. They are propagating, recruiting, and inciting the actions they believe in.

Among Western liberals is a strong impulse to show respect to people from other cultures—or who hold other beliefs—by interpreting their words and actions in the most benign way. But sometimes the way to show the deepest respect is by taking people seriously, believing their words as they are spoken, heeding their own accounts of their intentions.

The massacre on Bondi Beach is an ultimate consequence of this well-meaning condescension, but there were a lot of stops along the way—and more ahead.

About the Author

David Frum is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

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