by Eric Felten
Bondi Beach shattered the lie that antisemitism is merely anti-Israel politics, revealing an older, eliminationist hatred aimed at Jews as Jews, far from any battlefield.
Bondi Beach is meant to be neutral ground. A place without history. A democratic stretch of sand where politics dissolves into sunlight, surf, and families pushing strollers toward the water. That illusion died when Jews gathered there to light Hanukkah candles—and were slaughtered for it.
The massacre belongs to a broader pattern that has accelerated since Oct. 7, 2023: Jews targeted far from any battlefield, in the ordinary spaces of civic life. Synagogues, campuses, cafés, city streets—and now a beach—have become killing fields aimed not at a state, but at a people. The mass murder at Bondi did not occur in a war zone or at a political demonstration. It occurred at a religious gathering of the diaspora, in full public view, and in daylight.
Bondi is evidence that the prevailing theory is wrong.
For years, Western academics have argued that antisemitism is primarily a reaction to Israeli power, sharpened by Zionism’s transformation of Jews from a vulnerable minority into a sovereign people. Thus, Jewish vulnerability ends where the Jewish State begins, and hostility toward Jews is reframed as antipathy for a political project.
This intellectual architecture dominates elite universities, activist spaces, and progressive politics. It is elegant in its abstraction. And it collapses when confronted with Bondi Beach.
Nothing about the attack turned on Israeli policy or national identity. The victims were not selected for their politics, their citizenship, or their views on borders and settlements. The shooters bypassed diplomatic and military targets entirely. Their fire was aimed at something simpler and older: Jews celebrating as Jews.
They targeted Jewish people living peacefully 9,000 miles from Tel Aviv.
The horror exposed the foundational error in academic anti-Zionism: the treatment of antisemitism as secondary—derivative, contingent, and therefore negotiable. The violence is explained as if it is primarily political, as if it will recede once Jews accept the “right” constitutional arrangement. In the “anti-Zionists” framework, the Jew becomes less a human being than a category in a seminar: settler, native, citizen, majority, minority. The vocabulary is sophisticated. The substitution is not.
Bondi Beach supplies the missing variable: eliminationist hatred that does not require an Israeli policy dispute to ignite, and does not wait for the Knesset to act before it kills.
This hatred did not originate with the modern Israeli state. It culminated, catastrophically, in the Holocaust—an industrial-scale attempt to eradicate the Jewish people in Europe precisely because they lacked sovereignty or protection. The lesson drawn by Zionism was not triumphalist but defensive: that Jewish survival required political self-determination. That conclusion was tested immediately. In 1948, the moment Israel declared independence, it was invaded by neighboring Arab states that rejected not its borders or policies, but its existence.
The resulting war was not a response to “occupation” but to Jewish statehood itself. Any framework that treats antisemitism primarily as a reaction to Israeli power reverses cause and effect, mistaking a centuries-old, lethal hatred for a modern political grievance.
To ignore that is not merely an academic blind spot. It is a moral hazard.
And it is a moral hazard close to home—in New York City, of all places. The political rhetoric routinely employed by Zohran Mamdani offers a simplified public version of this move: “hierarchy,” “universal rights,” “decolonization.” The language sounds humane and hip. But it avoids the central fact that for Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS-style jihadism, and the father-son terrorists who opened fire at Bondi, the objection is not to a policy but to a people.
Bondi also undercut the most fashionable analogy in this debate: South Africa. The assumption is that Israel can dissolve into a single secular polity and follow a post-apartheid path. But that analogy rests on a false premise: that the conflict is primarily about citizenship rather than a religiously driven rejection of Jewish collective existence. In South Africa, the demand was for equality. In much of the antisemitic violence now spreading globally, the demand is erasure.
Since October 7, similar attacks and threats have multiplied across Western cities, routinely explained away with euphemism rather than named for what they are.
Bondi leaves little room for euphemism. Sand absorbs blood without consulting political theory.
This is why the Mamdani-style prescription that Jewish safety depends on relinquishing sovereignty is more than misguided. It amounts to a demand for unilateral disarmament at a moment when antisemitism is not merely resurging but being rationalized, normalized, and operationalized across the West.
None of this denies Palestinian suffering or limits debate over Israeli policy. It merely insists on intellectual honesty. A framework that interprets every Jewish death as an echo of political grievance is not explanatory; it is evasive. It removes the victim from view so the theory can survive unchallenged.
As Bernard-Henri Lévy has warned, we are living through an undeclared state of intellectual emergency. Appeasement of violent radicalism does not restrain it; it instructs it. And the refusal to name Islamist antisemitism plainly—religious, ideological, and murderous—does not protect Muslims or Jews. It protects only the illusion that language can replace reality.
Bondi Beach exposed that illusion for what it is. The men who opened fire were not responding to a policy or a border. They were acting on an older hatred, aimed at a visible people gathered in public.
Any framework that cannot begin with that fact is not merely incomplete. It is complicit.
***
Photo: SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - DECEMBER 15: An Israeli flag and flowers are laid outside Bondi Pavilion at Bondi Beach as people gather to mourn in the wake of a mass shooting on December 15, 2025 in Sydney, Australia. Police say at least 16 people, including one suspected gunman, were killed and more than a dozen others injured when two attackers opened fire near a Hanukkah celebration at the world-famous Bondi Beach, in what authorities have declared a terrorist incident. (Photo by Audrey Richardson/Getty Images)
Eric Felten is a writer and reporter for RealClearInvestigations.
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/12/20/blood-on-the-sand-australian-massacre-exposes-hollow-core-of-anti-zionism/
No comments:
Post a Comment