On Bondi

On Sunday evening, 14 December 2025, Bondi Beach, one of Australia’s most public, most symbolically “open” places, became the scene of a terrorist attack targeting a Jewish Hanukkah gathering, the “Chanukah by the Sea” event. NSW Police declared it a terrorist incident; the Prime Minister described it as a targeted attack on Jewish Australians.

For many Australians, the shock comes in layers –  the violence itself; the violation of a civic space associated with ordinary life; and the recognition that the target was not abstract. It was a community, visible, local, woven into the fabric of Sydney’s eastern suburbs, and present in Bondi in a way that is both ordinary and, now, newly vulnerable. Waverley, the local government area that contains Bondi, has the largest Jewish population of any LGA in NSW, with over 10,000 Jewish residents.

So, we should speak carefully.

We should be precise about what happened, and cautious about what we claim we already know. We should not sensationalise the violence, or make the suffering of Jewish Australians a rhetorical device. We should resist the opportunism that always arrives in the wake of blood –  the people who want to recruit tragedy for their preferred argument, or expand a crime into a license to suspect entire communities.

But careful does not mean quiet. It means responsible.

And responsible public speech begins with one distinction that modern societies are increasingly forgetting: stability is the capacity to endure shock without political distortion, without losing proportion, without abandoning standards, without rewriting the rules in a moment of fear.

A stable society is not one in which nothing happens. It is one in which events do not rewrite the rules.

It is impossible to write about this moment without recognising something that many Australians only intermittently understand –  for Jewish people, public life often carries a background question of safety, even in countries that are otherwise tolerant and law-governed.

That question is historical memory, reinforced by present facts.

In the week before Bondi, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry reported 1,654 anti-Jewish incidents recorded in the 12 months to 1 October, and described levels of incident reporting that remain near record highs. And in July 2025, Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism delivered a plan to government that explicitly frames antisemitism as a democratic corrosion requiring coordinated response, not merely private sympathy.

So, when a Jewish celebration at Bondi is attacked, it is not received as “a random tragedy that happened to Jews.” It lands as an assault on the premise that Jewish Australians can live openly, religiously, communally, visibly, without the public sphere turning hostile.

That is why the most urgent moral task in the aftermath is not performative unity but rather credible protection, and the restoration of civic confidence that Jewish life can be lived in public without being punished for being public.

But here is where the broader society must also be honest about itself –  our political culture has been drifting toward a dangerous misunderstanding of stability.

A mature polity assumes three unromantic truths:

• Shocks will occur.
• Disorder is intermittent.
• Violence is never fully preventable.

This is realism. And realism is the beginning of public discourse, because it prevents us from demanding impossible guarantees, and then panicking when reality refuses them.

An immature polity treats each shock differently –

• each shock is taken as evidence of systemic failure;
• each rupture is treated as proof of fragility;
• each tragedy becomes a referendum on the legitimacy of the order itself.

When that happens, grief is quickly converted into political demand –  rewrite the rules, tighten everything, treat everyone as suspect, suspend constraints, widen the net. It feels like seriousness. It often isn’t.

Because a society that cannot absorb shock without distorting itself is not stable. It is brittle.

And brittleness is precisely what violent actors, especially those who target minorities, are trying to expose.

Preserve proportion

Proportion is not indifference. Proportion is judgment.

It means we can hold multiple truths at once –

• That a targeted attack on Jewish Australians is a profound violation of our civic life.
• That Jewish Australians have good reason to demand protection and solidarity grounded in action, not slogans.
• That the country must respond with strength without expanding suspicion to whole communities, because collective blame is itself a form of civic collapse.
• That institutions must be allowed to investigate and prosecute with evidentiary discipline, not media-driven certainty.

Proportion is the ability to resist what I would call narrative inflation –  the urge to turn every shocking event into a total story about “what Australia has become,” or a permission slip for whatever agenda we already wanted.

A polity that loses proportion begins to treat fear as an argument. And once fear becomes an argument, argument itself becomes optional.

Don’t turn grief into a political instrument

There are two symmetrical moral failures that often appear after antisemitic violence.

The first is minimisation –  euphemism, deflection, a refusal to name antisemitism as antisemitism, and a tendency to treat Jewish fear as merely one grievance among many. That posture is not “balance.” It is abandonment.

The second is instrumentalisation –  the attempt to convert Jewish grief into permission for indiscriminate suspicion, for communal retaliation, or for domestic culture war. That posture is not solidarity. It is exploitation.

This was an attack on Jewish Australians; and the response must make Jewish Australians safer, without making anyone else less safe through scapegoating.

Resist the politics of permanent exception

In the wake of Bondi, there will be calls for reform, some justified, some opportunistic. There will be arguments about security, licensing, radicalisation, policing, intelligence, and public events. Government leaders are already signalling changes, including around firearms and security.

But reforms need a framework. Otherwise, the country drifts into a politics where each shock triggers an “exception” that never quite expires. Over time –

• the exceptional becomes normal;
• emergency language becomes default;
• restraints are treated as naïve;
• and minority communities end up living inside a permanent securitised mood.

This is a bitter paradox –  the more we govern by exception, the more anxious we become, because the very act of treating life as emergency trains the public to experience life as emergency.

A stable society does not deny danger. It refuses to let danger rewrite its identity.

Bondi is a civic symbol –  a place marketed as Australia’s informal commons, a postcard for “togetherness,” a stage on which the nation performs itself.

That is precisely why the attack lands with such force. It feels like a message –  not only “you are unsafe,” but “there is no truly public place for you.”

And it is exactly here that the rest of Australia faces a decision.

Because there is a cheap way to respond to symbolic attack –  symbolic response. Loud statements, maximal language, a week of flags and speeches, followed by a return to drift.

And there is a serious way –  restore the conditions of ordinary Jewish public life. Not only by mourning, but by making it possible for the next Jewish gathering to occur without being shadowed by dread.

That requires practical security measures, yes. But it also requires moral clarity about what must not happen next.

What must not happen next

• The spread of communal suspicion

After Islamist-inspired violence, some will try to convert grief into suspicion of Muslim Australians as a whole. That is morally wrong and politically self-destructive. It punishes innocents and produces exactly the fractured civic environment violent extremists want.

The Australian public has already seen gestures of solidarity that point in the opposite direction –  stories of bystanders acting with courage, including Muslims, and faith leaders urging calm and unity.

A mature polity does not outsource moral judgment to rage. It refuses the false comfort of scapegoats.

• The laundering of antisemitism into “complexity”

Equally, antisemitism must not be dissolved into vague language about “tensions” or “both sides.” Jewish Australians are not a proxy for overseas conflicts. They are citizens, neighbours, communities with a right to live openly.

When the target is a Jewish celebration, the moral responsibility of the country is to say so, clearly, and then act accordingly.

• The replacement of public reason with moral theatre

A country cannot be governed by vibes. It must be governed by evidence, law, and proportion. It is the discipline that prevents tragedy from being followed by injustice.

Restoring Stability

If stability is endurance without distortion, what does endurance look like in practice, right now?

• Credible protection of Jewish institutions and events

This is the minimum standard of a decent state. Increased policing around Jewish schools, synagogues, and community sites as a response to demonstrable risk and recorded incidents.

• Serious implementation of the antisemitism plan

Australia has already produced frameworks to combat antisemitism. The test is whether they become operational, across education, public institutions, law enforcement coordination, and online harms, rather than remaining a document we cite after each tragedy.

• Protection against backlash and retaliatory hate

Stability also requires that Muslim Australians, Arab Australians, and visibly “other” communities are protected from backlash. A state that protects one minority by tolerating violence against another is not stable; it is merely rearranging fear.

• A new standard for public speech

The most underrated element of security is public language. Inflammatory generalisations, opportunistic insinuations, and conspiratorial claims can produce real-world harm as surely as any pamphlet or preacher. Leaders have a duty to lower the temperature, not farm it.

Why do modern societies overreact? Why does every shock produce an urge to redesign the entire social contract?

Because beneath the fear of violence sits a deeper fear –  that our order is not durable, that it exists only so long as it is not tested.

That belief is more destabilising than any single incident. It turns each tragedy into an existential referendum. It makes calm look like denial and restraint look like weakness.

A confident polity does not need to narrate its own survival after every shock. It proves its durability by continuing, by protecting its people, enforcing its laws, and refusing to become what violence wants it to become.

A stable society is not one in which nothing happens.

It is one in which events do not rewrite the rules.

And the rules worth preserving after Bondi are not merely procedural. They are moral –

• Jews belong here, openly, safely, permanently.
• No minority community should pay the price for another’s victimhood.
• Fear is real, but fear is not policy.
• Justice must be swift, lawful, and non-theatrical.
• Solidarity must be measured in protection, not performance.

The measure of Australia after Bondi will not be our ability to feel. We will feel.

It will be our ability to remain a society –  capable of grief without panic; capable of protection without scapegoating; capable of strength without distortion.

That is what stability is. And right now, it is what the Jewish community most needs the country to demonstrate.