Australia is struggling to respond proportionately to violence, fear and political pressure in the wake of the Bondi attacks, October 7 and Israel’s war in Gaza. The result has been a contraction of democratic debate, heavy-handed political responses and an unwillingness to confront the scale of civilian suffering now unfolding in Gaza.

Following news of the Bondi massacre, my wife Anne and I barely slept. The depth of the tragedy for all the families was unbearable; the optimistic face of the young girl, named Matilda for the promise offered by Australia, is haunting; the implications for our politics, for Australian Jewry and all Australians are unpredictable and immense.

Before the monstrous Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israeli civilians and the pitiless Israeli two years of war in Gaza in response, Australia was possibly the country least affected by the scourge of antisemitism, even in comparison with the United States, where antisemitism was a powerful current in politics until 1945. That happy Australian chapter is now over.

The massacre was perpetrated by a father and son who were supporters of ISIS, a movement founded in the Sunni-Shi’a civil war following the needless US-UK-Australian invasion of Iraq. To build the Caliphate that will redeem the world, ISIS commands its followers across the globe to murder all Jews and Christians – that it calls Zionists and Crusaders – and all Shi’a Muslims, and the Druze and Yazidi peoples.

We do not yet know when the Bondi murderers began to follow ISIS. Nor do we know why there was no red flag when the Bondi murderers, the younger of whom had been of interest to ASIO some years earlier, the elder of whom held a licence to carry guns, decided to holiday in Mindanao, the territory in the Philippines with an ISIS history. In intelligence matters, especially, it is of course easy to be wise after the event. Let us hope that the Royal Commission into Bondi and antisemitism will discover answers to these obvious questions.

The initial political response to the Bondi massacre was seriously strange. It is almost a law of Australian politics that following a loss of lives – in a bushfire, a mine collapse, a shooting spree – the political weaponisation of the tragedy is forbidden, at least for a decent interval. In the case of Bondi, weaponisation occurred almost immediately, with the creation of a de facto alliance of the Coalition, the Murdoch media, and the most powerful parts of the Israel/Jewish lobby, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the Zionist Federation and so on.

Almost as one, this alliance claimed, in my view nonsensically, that the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, bore considerable responsibility for the massacre. He had the power, they claimed, to combat the growth of antisemitism in Australia after October 7. And yet he had done almost nothing. These domestic forces were soon joined by the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, who claimed, absurdly, that there was a causative connection between the massacre and the decision of the Albanese government to recognise the state of Palestine. Such recognition, according to Netanyahu, rewarded Hamas for the murders on October 7. It was obvious that the Albanese government was only doing what the governments of the United Kingdom, Canada, several European countries had already done.

The first responses of the Albanese government to the charges of the post-Bondi, anti-Albanese alliance were both clumsy and rather pathetic. It sought not to answer but to appease (it is the only word) the hostile political forces swiftly gathered against it.

To prove his support for Israel, Albanese agreed to invite the President of Israel, Isaac Herzog, to visit Australia. President Herzog is a head of state but also an active Israeli politician. A defender of what the Government of Israel has done in Gaza since October 7, he famously blamed the entire Gazan population for the October 7 murders, a statement that will feature in the prosecution case in all forthcoming genocide trials of Israel.

Absurdly enough, Albanese has argued that the Herzog visit will help to unify the nation. We soon will learn how the Albanese Government and the state governments of Chris Minns and Jacinta Allen plan to control the massive demonstrations that can be anticipated when President Herzog visits Sydney or Melbourne. Will Minns use his newfound power to ban protests while President Herzog is visiting Australia? Will Albanese and Allen follow his lead?

At the moment of the Bondi massacre the Albanese government had been sitting on the radical report into antisemitism written by “the envoy” it had appointed, Jillian Segal, the former President of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. Following Bondi, Albanese announced that it would accept and, presumably, implement the Segal suggestions. One of her suggestions is for unprecedented interventions into the performance of Commonwealth-funded institutions, like the ABC and Australia’s universities. Segal claims that certain common arguments about Israel and Zionism are antisemitic and must not be permitted; and that certain kinds of public protests against Israel’s war in Gaza are also antisemitic and must be forbidden. If these institutions failed to meet her standards, presumably according to some still undetermined government-appointed board, they would lose part of their funding. Such actions will most likely add to the pro-Palestine, anti-Israel mood of Australia’s academic and literary communities.

We already know what kinds of discussions the Israel/Jewish lobbies want to forbid. Since October 7 one part of the lobby successfully removed the Lebanese-Australian, Antoinette Lattouf, from ABC local radio in Sydney because of an accurate re-tweet about Israel’s weaponisation of starvation in Gaza. Another group was responsible for the decision of the administration at the Fiona Stanley Hospital in Fremantle to cancel a forum where the wonderful ex-Gaza doctor, Mohammed Mustafa, “Dr Mo”, was to speak while seeking funds for a children’s hospital in Gaza. Professor Stanley, who has no role in the running of the hospital, was infuriated. There are many additional examples of this kind, the strangest of which, perhaps, was the several weeks’ suspension from St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney of the eminent heart surgeon, Professor Peter MacDonald, merely because of a cynical question about Mossad’s possible involvement in the fire bombings against Jewish targets that he asked at a pro-Palestinian forum.

A hitherto unknown Zionist academic lobby caused the Palestinian-Australian novelist and academic, Randa Abdel-Fattah, a fierce critic of Israel, to withdraw from the Bendigo Writers Festival. The Festival then collapsed. The lesson was not learned. With the encouragement of the South Australian Premier, Peter Malinauskas, after Bondi the Adelaide Festival Board rescinded their Fattah-Abdel invitation. The withdrawal of almost the all the literary invitees was enough to destroy the 2026 Adelaide Writers Festival, to force the Adelaide Board to resign, and then lead its replacement to issue an apology to Randa Abdel-Fattah and invite her to appear in the 2027 Festival. Perhaps a cultural tide has turned.

Such interventions from the Israel lobbies have been part of a strange atmosphere of strictly enforced unreality that has accompanied the growth of antisemitic sentiment in Australia since October 7. The sharp rise in antisemitic acts – insults, tweets, graffiti, doxxing, arson, but no physical violence so far as I am aware before Bondi – did not occur for no reason. They are self-evidently connected, in ways we must try to understand in open, non-censorious discussion, to the character of Israel’s war in Gaza following the murder of 1200 and the kidnapping of 250 of its innocent citizens at the hands of Hamas.

For some two years Israel has been responsible for the deaths of an estimated 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza, some 80 per cent of whom are civilians. The Gazan Ministry of Health has the names of 70,000 of the dead but according to several expert studies the death toll is much higher. Recently Israel has accepted the 70,000 figure it once contested.

The Gaza dead include at least 20,000 children. They also include some 200 journalists whose only crime was to report honestly on what was happening in Gaza. Israel’s forces have destroyed hospitals, universities and schools and, in whole or in part, an estimated 80 per cent of the buildings in Gaza. Body parts lie strewn under the millions of tons of rubble. The Gazan Palestinians have faced daily fear of death by bombing while scrambling without dignity for food or sheltering in scraps of tents without protection from heat or cold or rain.

During these two years the Israeli public and diaspora Jewry were rightly exercised by the situation of the hostages taken by Hamas and Islamic Jihad that many believed had been abandoned by Netanyahu. They were largely indifferent, to judge by the protests in Israel and the opinion of dozens of observers, to the suffering of the people of Gaza.

And yet none of this can even be mentioned when discussing the reasons for the growth of an ugly and dangerous current on the fringes of the massive pro-Palestinian movement in Australia, as seen in the 200,000 Sydney Harbour Bridge marchers. It especially cannot be mentioned when attention turns to the now very real threat of Islamist terrorism in Australia and the existence here of followers of ISIS, the most murderous movement in contemporary Islam. By combining a bill to fight “hate speech” with new gun control measures that were certain to be opposed by sections of the Coalition, at first the Albanese succumbed to the temptation to play post-Bondi politics. More recently it was forced to divide the bills and, in the hope of gaining the support of the Coalition, to dilute the new hate speech legislation. Unexpectedly, even that was enough to temporarily destroy the Liberal-National Party Coalition. The diluted bill still gave ASIO new unprecedented power. The speed at which it passed through the parliament, almost unread, was shameful.

Australians were profoundly shocked by the murder of 15 people at Bondi. There was not even one day before the recent ceasefire when as few as fifteen innocent people were killed in Gaza by Israeli force of arms. During the so-called ceasefire since October 2025 the IDF has slaughtered more than five hundred Gazan Palestinians. Two days ago, there were 30 killings. As a civilisation we have lost our way when we no longer consider every single human being as equally precious.

The troubles between the Jewish people of Israel and the Gazan Palestinians did not begin on October 7 2023 with the Hamas atrocity. They did not begin in 2005 when Israel withdrew from its settlements in Gaza but left it in the condition of what has famously been described as “an open-air prison” and when, shortly after, Hamas, a party at that time committed to the destruction of Israel, won a Palestinian election. They did not begin in 1967 when Israel began its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and briefly Sinai, following its victory in the “Six Day War”. They did not begin in 1948, when the world was becoming aware of the Holocaust, when the United Nations accepted the creation of Israel, when the surrounding Arab states declared war on the new state, and when this new state caused the flight or death of 700,000 Palestinians that the survivors call “the Nakba”, the Catastrophe. They did not even begin in the First World War when the British Empire, “Perfidious Albion”, promised the Jews a homeland in Palestine and, simultaneously, the Arabs freedom from their Ottoman overlords. They began in the late nineteenth century when Jews, some the followers of the new ideology of Jewish national self-determination, Zionism, fled in significant numbers from the pogroms in Czarist Russia to their ancestral “Promised Land” in Ottoman-controlled Palestine.

The rights and wrongs of this history are unresolvable and neverendingly debatable. Nonetheless two things seem clear to me. After the atrocity of October 7, Israel had no alternative but to go to war against Hamas. However, it had no right to turn this war into the annihilation of a people, their cities, towns and market gardens, and their culture.

I do not write any of this with calmness. For the past two years I have spent one or two hours each morning, as a kind of duty, reading the Gaza coverage of the courageous and, in the true sense, the patriotic Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz. I was born to Jewish refugee parents three years after the conclusion of the Holocaust, the attempt to remove the Jewish people from the face of the Earth. My writing and teaching have been dominated by study of those anti-human ideological movements that scar the history of the past one hundred years – Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, Pol Pot-ism, Jihadist Islamism. My life has been devoted to the call to action of my generation: “Never Again”. As we have watched Israel’s pitiless destruction of Gaza, we have all learned that for both a large part of Israeli society and the Jewish diaspora the call to action is the morally and perhaps politically catastrophic: “Never Again, To Us.”

Republished from Robert Manne Substack, 3rd February 2026