Australia’s expanding migration programme has fuelled growth but also sharpened cultural and political tensions. Photo / Jay Wennington, Unsplash
Bondi Beach has a special place in the stories Australia tells about itself.
In a country where almost 90% of people live within 50km of the coast, beaches symbolise the central tenet of the Australian faith: open to all, with everyone equal on the sand.
A place of sun and horizons, befitting the nation’s optimistic spirit.
Bondi is the poster child of this credo.
Artists and photographers have long used its half-mile golden crescent as a canvas, through which either to celebrate or question this narrative.
But the December 14 massacre has torn at the very fibre of this canvas.
It will force Australians to ask deep and urgent questions about who they are, and what their society is, or should be.
At least 16 people are dead and 42 injured after two black-clad gunmen opened fire on a beachside celebration marking the start of the Jewish festival of Chanukah.
The age of social media has already brought extraordinary footage of this event into the public domain.
There is the man whom Australian television is identifying as Ahmed El Ahmed, a middle-aged shopkeeper and father-of-two, who single-handedly brought down a gunman.
Then there’s the footage of the police apprehending the attackers, which shows officers having to keep off an incensed crowd of bystanders, ready to dispense vigilante justice.
These scenes give a foretaste of how raw and emotional many Australians will be feeling right now – and none more so than the Jewish community itself.
Most Britons would likely imagine Bondi as almost entirely populated by British backpackers and sun-bronzed surfers.
But it has also been the epicentre of Sydney’s Jewish community ever since refugees started arriving from Europe – fleeing first the Nazis, later the Communists – in the decades before and after World War II.
Bondi sits about 6.5km east of the city centre. In between, near the south side of Sydney Harbour, lies a pocket of hilly, affluent suburbs, in which much of the Jewish community has traditionally resided.
The gunmen have struck at the very heart of this world – one that for decades was open, relaxed and entirely integrated into Sydney society, to the point where even using a term like “integration” barely made sense.
Even before this attack, however, Sydney Jews’ relatively uncomplicated existence had begun to unravel.
Only a fortnight ago, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry issued a report tallying a growing tide of anti-Semitic attacks, ranging from graffiti and posters to arson and assaults.
After the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist onslaught in Israel, and the Israeli defence force’s subsequent war in Gaza, the number of anti-Semitic incidents has soared.
Across Australia, it went from a steady annual rate in the mid-400s earlier this decade to 2062 incidents last year, and 1654 in the 12 months to September 30 this year. New South Wales accounted for about 40% of these.
The report runs through a chilling litany of events. Jewish people have received Nazi salutes, or people screaming “f*** the Jews”.
A Bondi eatery was burned, a car was torched and a childcare centre was set on fire. Nazi symbols and slogans were repeatedly painted on the walls and windows of synagogues and Jewish schools.
Then, in early November, 60 black-clad protesters lined up outside the New South Wales Parliament House, holding a banner that said “abolish the Jewish lobby”.
“There is a sickness in modern Australian society, and it is hatred of Jews,” said Daniel Aghion, of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, as he launched the report.
But even he could not have begun to imagine the horror that lay in wait.
This is not just the most grievous anti-Semitic attack Australia has ever experienced. It is also the most lethal terrorist attack yet perpetrated on Australian soil.
It is also by far the worst mass shooting since 1996, when Martin Bryant killed 35 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania, prompting a conservative government to rewrite the country’s gun laws.
With a few notable exceptions, Australian cities have seldom seen race riots. Its voters rarely rally in numbers to the kind of trenchant anti-immigrant populists now topping the polls in Europe.
Australians will now be asking themselves what has happened to transform a society that has long had an open door to migration, and prided itself on the tolerance that comes with it.
The country first welcomed waves of Italian and Greek migrants in the 1960s, whose imprint on everything from coffee to comedy has been profound and far-reaching, and is now embedded in the heart of Australian culture.
Then came the Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s and 1980s, along with Lebanese escapees from civil war.
Like the southern Europeans, they initially encountered significant local suspicion and even hostility before finding their niche in Australia’s flexible, adaptive culture.
The Chinese and South Koreans were next during the 1990s. At about this time, the red-headed, populist firebrand Pauline Hanson burst on to the scene, saying Australia was taking too many Asian migrants.
The then conservative government, led by John Howard, managed to assuage rising concern about immigration by “stopping the boats” – illegal arrivals from the north.
This gave the Government the licence to open the legitimate migration gateway much wider.
A boom of skilled and family immigration followed, most recently led by migrants from the Indian subcontinent.
Since the turn of the century, the proportion of Australia’s now 27 million-strong population that was born overseas has increased from 23% to almost 32%.
Muslim migration began to pick up during the various Middle East conflicts, and prompted perhaps the fiercest cultural clashes to date, even though the proportion of Australians identifying as Muslim is barely more than 3%.
In December 2005, young white and ethnic-Lebanese men clashed on Sydney’s Cronulla Beach – another blow against that image of the beach as a bastion of egalitarian openness. “We grew here, you flew here” was the white catchphrase.
Hanson has belatedly switched focus from Asians to Muslims. The senator recently wore a burqa on to the floor of the Australian parliament’s upper house, prompting worldwide attention.
The Jewish emigration wave preceded all of this, as did the original anti-Semitic backlash against it. Jews now make up about 0.4% of the population, about the same proportion as in Britain.
Like everyone else, the Australian Jewish community is caught up in the great questions of our era: the future of migration and multiculturalism, and the seemingly unbridgeable polarisation that these questions inspire.
The focus of the debate may swing very quickly from anti-Semitism to a discussion about Islamism in Australia.
This debate will be nuanced by the exploits on Sunday of the have-a-go hero, Ahmed El Ahmed.
He will serve as a reminder to his fellow Australians that it is wrong-headed to conflate an entire community with the actions of a few troubled men.
Nobody knows this better than the Jewish community. They are daily victims of the potential for pro-Palestine or anti-Israel sentiment to slip across the blurred line into anti-Semitism.
“The phrase ‘globalise the Intifada’ is not a chant – it’s a call to action. It has consequences,” said a Jewish man, who lives near Bondi, in the hours after the attack.
Another Sydney local lamented the fact that some of his old schoolmates’ social media accounts had become “deranged with ‘anti-Zionist’ obsession”.
The Jews’ position is unusual in that they are almost politically encircled.
Even if the anger from the mostly left-leaning, pro-Palestinian camp does not spill into anti-Semitism, it creates a climate in which neo-Nazi groups – such as the black-clad parliament protesters – can advance their own, more sinister conspiracy theories.
Jews in almost any Western country will recognise the Australian predicament, but few will have felt quite as much of a shock.
In Sydney’s eastern suburbs, the wartime refugees and their descendants long assumed that they had well and truly left the shadow of anti-Semitism behind, on the wintry continent they’d fled.
Now, it has cast a pall over Bondi’s sun-kissed sands. The local Jewish community, with all Australians, now face the same question: are the tides of geopolitics eroding the national mythos of the open, co-equal beach?
Although it’s a question with Australian peculiarities, it’s not one that should interest only Australia.
European governments, including Britain’s, are already reviewing the security of Hanukkah celebrations.
As Marina Rosenberg, of the Anti-Defamation League, said even before the horrific events of Sunday: “What is happening in Australia is a wake-up call worldwide”.
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