The instrumentalisation of the Bondi Beach shooting

On December 14th, two antisemitic gunmen opened fire on a celebration marking the first night of Hanukkah at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, killing 15 and injuring more than 40. While we mourned and waited for the facts to emerge, bad-faith actors rushed in to claim the narrative. Exploiting tragedy to sow division and pit communities against each other.

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens blamed Palestinians. Right-wing Australian politicians Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce blamed Muslims and migrants. Josh Frydenberg, another right-winger, used the attack as a political relaunch opportunity. He gave a grief-stricken, but factually incorrect speech.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed the attack on Australia’s recognition of a Palestinian state. He also baselessly claimed that the hero who tackled one of the attackers was Jewish. Ahmed El Ahmed, it turned out, was not.

A Muslim man risking his life to save Jews challenges everything Netanyahu stands for. His clearly Islamophobic project aims to expel Muslims from Global North countries. So what did his media outriders do? They completely ignored the inconvenient fact. They carefully avoided mentioning Ahmed’s name or his faith. They even called him “spiritually Israeli.”

Another embattled politician twisting the attack to her own ends was Jillian Segal, Australia’s politically appointed “Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism”. Born in apartheid South Africa, she now lobbies for another apartheid state from her home in Sydney.

Things haven’t been going well for Segal recently. Her so-called “Plan to Combat Antisemitism” faced strong criticism. Many said it conflated antisemitism with pro-Palestine advocacy. Indeed, the definition of antisemitism she says must “be used across all levels of government and public institutions” is so discredited that even its lead author warns against using it in this way.

I drafted the definition of antisemitism. Rightwing Jews are weaponizing it.

Segal’s plan includes Trump-style funding cuts to universities she deems insufficiently deferential. It also crowns her as the arbiter of acceptable speech. These moves have faced heavy criticism. Segal herself has faced criticism for repeatedly refusing to speaking out against neo-Nazis. And lastly, her husband’s donations to a far-right group recently came to light.

Her plan was floundering, but in the Bondi Beach tragedy, Segal saw a chance to turn things around. She declared that her controversial proposals “can and should be accelerated,” and baselessly linked the attack to a peaceful Palestine solidarity march on August 3rd, which 300 thousand people attended. Sadly her cynical tactics appear to be working. The Australian government has said that it will speed up its response to Segal’s flawed recommendations and the New South Wales premier, Chris Minns, has vowed a crackdown on protests.

To be clear, the Bondi Beach tragedy had nothing to do with the Palestinian cause. Police say the gunmen were “driven by Islamic State ideology”. They carried ISIS flags.

Israel has long tried to link ISIS to the Palestinian cause. It’s an effective tactic that paints Palestinians as inhuman, irredeemably evil and therefore legitimate targets for savagery. But the truth is that the two groups are staunchly opposed.

The Palestinians, like every colonised people, demand their stolen land back and want their own state. Their objectives are local and they tolerate other religious groups, something that ISIS would never do.

ISIS is a theological movement with transnational ambitions. Rather than aspiring to be a member of the global community of nations, ISIS seeks to conquer. They want to destroy the United Nations, not join it.

The differences are clear and many. These groups hate each other so much that they frequently come to blows. None of this nuance matters to pro-Israel campaigners though. While you were reading that last paragraph they were busy mudding the waters. Seizing the Bondi Beach shooting as an opportunity, they have successfully framed “globalise the intifada” as a call for ISIS-style terrorism, but this is wildly misleading.

Intifada is an Arabic word for a rebellion or uprising. It’s been used, correctly and uncontroversially, for centuries. Even the US Holocaust Museum translated the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as “intifada” until bad-faith agitators kicked up a fuss. The Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic gives a rather lyrical definition:

to be shaken off, be dusted off; to shake; to shudder, shiver, tremble; to wake up, come to consciousness, to shake off one’s lethargy

The term gained popularity in 1986, during the Palestinian uprising against Israel’s illegal occupation. This first intifada was relatively peaceful, but met with shocking levels of violence and collective punishment. This led to the founding of Hamas and other armed groups, and eventually a second, more violent intifada.

It feels tasteless to even point out these distinctions at a time like this, but that’s precisely why we must. Our impulse is towards solemnity and restraint is being exploited by liars who hope to go unchallenged while we grieve. We cannot let them get away with it.

The ISIS/Palestine conflation campaign long predates the Bondi attacks. The thrust of their argument is that it’s a scary word used by hairy Arabs. Yes, it really is that crudely racist. You can see this because the bigots making this argument often erroneously substitute the word Jihad. New York Democratic senator Kirsten Gillibrand had to apologise to Zohran Mamdani for claiming he’d advocated “global jihad”. It really is just September 12^th 2001 all over again.

After Bondi, London’s institutionally racist Metropolitan Police force have started arresting people for using the word intifada (or “infitarda”, as Britain’s know-nothing politicians pronounce it). It’s a ludicrous escalation by a state that has lost hegemonic control of the narrative. The police are doing this despite advice from the Crown Prosecution Service that it doesn’t meet the threshold for prosecution. They’re pointing to the Bondi Beach mass shooting as the reason for this policy change, but we’ve shown it’s not connected.

Police are supposed to make arrests on reasonable grounds. Arrests that don’t meet prosecution standards waste resources. They also risk silencing legitimate opposition to genocide. I find it particularly demoralising, as the pro-Palestinian father of Jewish children, to be accused of supporting terrorism against my own kids. But demoralising pro-Palestinians is whole point. When the world needs to be held together, this lot reach for the crowbar.

Antisemitism and Islamophobia are clearly increasing. The question is what we should do about it?

Netanyahu and his ilk would tell you that the answer is to pick the side of Islamophobia. To build ever higher walls and to make isolation the default mode of Jewish being. They gain from the rise in antisemitism, which they help create by over enunciating the “Jewishness” of their genocide. Indeed, Israeli politicians describe overseas antisemitism as an “opportunity” for their ethnostate. Here’s what Israeli journalist Ben Caspit has to say on the matter:

I would have voted for Mamdani [because] I want everyone to make aliyah. I’m a long-time consistent supporter of antisemitism [because] I’m in favor of all the Jews coming here.

We do not have to accept this. Ahmed El Ahmed, the Muslim who risked his life to save Jews at Bondi Beach, shows that there’s another way: safety through solidarity. He embraced multiculturalism and shunned supremacy. We should be more like him. By rooting our anti-racism in mutual self-interest and collective liberation, we can defeat bigotry together.

• This article draws on a conversation between Jewish Currents editors Arielle Angel and Mari Cohen. They chatted with Sarah Schwartz, the Melbourne-based executive officer of the new progressive and independent Jewish Council of Australia.

• My prescription, safety through solidarity, is pilfered from a book of the same name. It’s by Shane Burley and Ben Lorber. Reading it, felt like sunlight breaking through dark clouds.

• If you’re interested in what safety through solidarity looks like in practice, I wrote about it here.

• The Jewish Council of Australia are accepting signatures on this petition “against politicians and lobbyists who are exploiting the Bondi Chanukah massacre to push a divisive agenda.” Please consider signing it.