Bondi terror attack will leave communities fearful of what comes next ...Middle East

SYDNEY — In the air-conditioned assembly halls across Sydney this week, pupils, teachers and parents are marking the end of the school year.

It is the same every December – a moment of celebration and relief, before the start of the long summer holidays. But Monday’s ceremonies, taking place just hours after the country’s worst mass shooting in almost 30 years, were markedly different. 

Principals and local leaders, some wiping away tears, paid tribute to the lives horrifically lost at Bondi Beach and made emotional pleas – for people to remember to foster a sense of community, to reach out, to listen to others, before they began addressing the achievements of the latest cohort. 

The sense of “the lucky country” still resonates in Australia. A place where there is, generally, a feeling that – when horrors elsewhere unfold – war, massacres, terrorism – “it doesn’t happen here”.

Parents worry about social media and e-bikes, not school shootings. Beach goers think about sunburn, jellyfish and the strength of the rip current in the surf. Not this.

Australia is often seen as a place where people come to live a better life. The journey made by one of the named victims, Alexander Kleytman – a Holocaust survivor – spoke to this.

Recalling his experiences of escaping Siberia and Ukraine, Kleytman and his wife Larisa had told a Jewish care provider several years ago how the “scars of the past…did not deter them from seeking a brighter future,” adding that they “made the move to Australia, immigrating from Ukraine.”

But Australians also know there is another truth to living here.  

Despite being so geographically far from many of the world’s conflict hotspots, it is no stranger to community tensions, racism or extreme violence.

Almost exactly 20 years ago, the world saw that ugly side when a series of fierce race riots erupted on a sweltering beach – this time in Cronulla, Sydney’s south – before spilling across the city’s suburbs.

Dozens of people were injured after thousands of predominantly Anglo-Australian locals gathered to “reclaim the beach from outsiders” and attacked people of Middle Eastern appearance.

Fears of a repeat have been high on the news agenda over the past week, as community leaders reflect on how far the country still has to go for immigrant communities to feel welcome and integrated in society.

Anti-immigration rallies – similar to the ones seen in Britain – have stoked those worries in recent months.

Just as in the UK and US, tensions over the war in Gaza have been felt keenly in Australia too, and there have been cases of racial abuse directed at Palestinians and Muslims.

But there has been a dramatic rise in the number of anti-semitic attacks, primarily in Sydney and Melbourne, over the last 18 months.

Jewish businesses, including a school, a bakery, a deli have been defaced with anti-semitic slurs and symbols. Synagogues in both cities, and a childcare centre in Sydney, have been targeted in arson and firebombing attacks.

Two public hospital nurses were sacked after being captured on a social media video saying they would turn away Israeli patients. Last year cars were set on fire and homes were vandalised in the suburb of Woollahra, which sits near Bondi and has a large Jewish community.

The attacks, some of which Australia has blamed Iran for directing, had seen Jewish leaders call for better protections.

Now Benjamin Netanyahu has said he warned Prime Minister Anthony Albanese that Australia’s support for Palestinian statehood would fuel attacks like these.

“Three months ago I wrote to the Australian prime minister that your policy is pouring oil on the fire of antisemitism,” he said.

Albanese, who visited the site on Monday morning, called the atrocity “an act of pure evil” that “deliberately targeted” the Jewish community and described it as “an act of terrorism on our shores”.

“We will dedicate every single resource that is requited in responding to this,” he said. Later, in a post on X, he wrote: “Australia will not be divided by hate or violence. We will confront it head on. And we will stand together in solidarity with Jewish Australians and with one another.”

In the aftermath of the attack, Foreign Minister Penny Wong said: “The terror attack at Bondi at the start of Chanukah is abhorrent. Terrorism, antisemitism, violence and hate have no place in Australia.”

While the nation reels from this, many communities will be fearful of what comes next.

“The inevitable has happened now,” Rabbi Levi Wolff of Central Sydney Synagogue, said from Bondi, adding that as a Jew in Australia, “you’re always looking behind you.”

Political leaders will be under pressure to provide more direction, more assurances and a way of healing divisions, or face a new – much darker chapter.

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