The anti-immigrant fallout from the Bondi shooting will be ugly ...Middle East

For years I looked upon Bondi Beach as a safe haven. A happy place to go for an early morning walk or late afternoon swim. A golden crescent of sand and surf that confirmed Australia’s status as the lifestyle superpower of the world.

On sunny days, Australia gathers here en masse. The so-called Lucky Country at play. One of the reasons we came as a family four years ago to live in Bondi was to escape the gun violence of America, and the scourge of mass shootings. As the Governor General of Australia, Sam Mostyn, put it: “Bondi is the symbol of everything we say is great about Australia.”

In recent times, as community tensions rose after the 7 October Hamas terror atrocities and Sydney’s prosperous Eastern Suburbs were targeted in a spate of antisemitic attacks, you could not fail to notice the beefed-up security outside synagogues and Jewish schools. Nor the concrete bollards placed along the roadside at Bondi in 2020, to guard against the kind of vehicle attacks carried by Islamist terrorists in Nice, London and New York.

If you listened closely to Jewish members of the community – something we failed sufficiently to do – they were warning that it could happen here, that the unthinkable could become real.

Only last year, a 40-year-old experiencing mental health issues killed six people at the nearby shopping mall in Bondi Junction, an attack evidently targeting women shoppers which many initially thought was an antisemitic attack.

Eleven years ago, almost to the day, a lone gunman carried out an attack on Lindt Cafe in the centre of Sydney, brandishing a jihadist flag. That 16-hour siege ended with the deaths of two hostages.

In the days after Hamas’ 2023 attacks on Israel, a pro-Palestinian protest erupted on the steps of the Sydney Opera House, chanting anti-Jewish chants. In the six months after the Hamas attack, the number of anti-Jewish incidents increased by 427 per cent, according to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. In the first month alone, there were 221 incidents. Nor was it solely the Jewish community that was targeted. There were 133 incidents of Islamophobia in the month after 7 October.

This year has witnessed neo-Nazi protests in Sydney and Melbourne. At anti-immigration March for Australia rallies, the antisemitic National Socialist Network (NSN) has become a more visible presence.

The massacre at Bondi is surreal. It is stupefying. It is shocking. In ways it is unbelievable. But, alas, it was by no means inconceivable. Australia’s national threat level was at “probable”, a “greater than 50 per cent chance of an onshore attack”. “Chanukah by the Sea,” a Hanukkah celebration on a perfect Sydney Sunday evening, offered a soft target.

It is especially tragic that the horror should unfold in a suburb of Sydney that so many Holocaust survivors made their home at the end of the Second World War, partly because it was about as geographically distant as it was possible to get from the the gas chambers of Nazi Germany. Alexander Kleytman, an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor who was born in Ukraine, was among the first named victims. The youngest victim, a 10-year-old, was called Matilda, the most Australian of names.

Modern Australia had always taken pride in its detachment from old-world tensions and rivalries. This immigrant nation is based on a social compact that new arrivals do not fight the battles of their homelands on Australian soil.Stringent gun laws brought in after the massacre at Port Arthur in 1996, when a gunman killed 35 people in Tasmania, maybe lulled us into a false sense of safety that mass shootings could not happen here. When in late August 2025 the Albanese government alleged the Iranian regime was behind arson attacks at a synagogue in Melbourne and a kosher deli in Sydney, maybe the community downplayed the extent to which the antisemitic attacks were a homegrown threat.

An obvious area of investigation will be on how one of the shooters, Sajid Akram, 50, who lived in suburban Sydney, managed to legally amass an arsenal of six lethal weapons. His son, Naveed Akram, 24, the other alleged shooter who is in hospital under police guard, had been investigated in 2019 by Australia’s domestic intelligence agency, ASIO, for suspected links with Islamic State.Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, has already promised to strengthen the country’s gun laws, to limit the number of firearms a single person can legally own and review existing gun licenses. But already he is facing criticism for not implementing in full the recommendations of Jillian Segal, the antisemitism envoy he appointed to counter hate against the Jewish community. “I have to say that I’ve been holding my breath, fearing that something like this would happen, because it hasn’t come without warning,” Segal told the ABC.

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In his defence, an ashen-faced Albanese said his government had strengthened hate speech laws – such as increasing maximum penalties for offences related to the display of Nazi symbols, the Nazi salute and prohibited terrorist organisation symbols – and also tried to curb antisemitism on university campuses. He pledged to dedicate “every single resource required” to stamp out antisemitism.But a senior Jewish member of the opposition Liberal party, the former Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, has accused the government of “hollow words”.“The massacre we have seen at one of our nation’s most iconic landmarks is the culmination of an unprecedented failure of leadership to heed the warning signs,” said Frydenberg, who was widely seen as a prospective prime minister until losing his seat at the 2022 election. He complained that those warning signs were “so obvious to every Australian who opened their eyes”.

In dampening communal tensions, it may help that the hero of the hour is 43-year-old Ahmed Al Ahmed, a Muslim fruit shop owner who came to Australia from Syria, who overpowered one of the gunmen. But at a time when the hard-right anti-immigration party One Nation has been surging in the polls, the politics of the Bondi attack will be ugly.

This country and this coastal community is in shock and pain. Aside the sands of the country’s most charismatic and much-loved beach, terror turned the Jewish festival of light into the darkest of Australian days.

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