It felt like an attack on Australia as a physical refuge and mental retreat from political violence

Bondi Beach as it is known for in Sydney. In an overwhelmingly secular nation, beaches represent something close to a sacred space. Photo / Getty Images

As the sun sank on the first day of Hanukkah on Sunday, people gathered at a playground facing Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach for an event melding characteristically Jewish and Australian traditions: Free donuts, ice cream, kosher food, a petting zoo, face painting - and the main event, a menorah lighting.

What happened instead was unthinkable violence.

Two gunmen stalked the beachside park raining gunfire into the crowd for more than 10 minutes, leaving 15 dead and 42 in hospital.

Among those killed were a 10-year-old girl and Rabbi Eli Schlanger, head of Bondi’s Chabad mission.

The alleged shooters were a father and son. Sajid Akram, 50, was shot by police at the scene. Naveed Akram, 24, was taken to hospital in a critical condition.

Naveed Akram had been investigated six years ago over links to a Sydney-based self-proclaimed Isis terror cell, Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported without saying where it got the information.

Bondi - a suburb of low-rise apartments, multi-million dollar family homes, and surfers strung between cliffs and sand on the azure waters of the Pacific - has been a centre of Jewish life in Australia for more than a century.

As early as 1921, about a third of Sydney’s Jewish community lived there and in neighbouring suburbs in the city’s east, then a solidly working-class area.

Thousands of migrants fleeing rising European anti-Semitism in the 1930s and 1940s joined them, building synagogues, social clubs, and businesses.

In the years after World War II, billionaire property developers Frank Lowy and Harry Triguboff rose from, respectively, a Hungarian ghetto and Tianjin’s Russo-Jewish community to become two of Australia’s five richest people.

Each has long-standing connections to the area and built up much of the neighbouring suburb of Bondi Junction.

One of the country’s most famous swimwear brands, Seafolly, was started in Bondi in 1975 by a Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor.

Bondi Beach has broader meaning to Australia, too.

In an overwhelmingly secular nation, beaches represent something close to a sacred space.

On the sand, there are no divisions of race, class or creed, and people from every corner of the planet can come together to barbecue, swim, sunbathe and socialise.

Mourners gather by floral tributes at the Bondi Pavillion in memory of the victims of the Bondi terror attack. Photo / AFP

Sunday’s shootings feel like a conscious attack on both sides of that escapism: Australia as a physical refuge from political violence, and as a mental retreat from a world where polarisation and hatred seem to be relentlessly rising.

The flip side was always a certain complacency.

Jews fleeing the rise of Nazism in Europe weren’t always welcomed in a society whose official migration policy favoured white Northern Europeans until the 1970s.

The country has become increasingly polarised since the Hamas attack on a music festival in Israel on October 7, 2023, killing 1200 and taking 251 hostages, and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza that’s so far killed more than 70,000 Palestinians.

A report released this month by the Executive Council for Australian Jewry found there had been more anti-Jewish incidents in the past two years than in the previous 10 put together, including the torching of cars, graffiti sprayed on synagogues and homes, windows smashed, and myriad incidents of verbal and physical abuse. In the last 12 months alone there have been 1654 such incidents.

Just last month, police authorised a neo-Nazi rally on the steps of the New South Wales parliament building in which black-shirted thugs hoisted a flag reading: “Abolish the Jewish Lobby”.

Such hatred is spreading on every side.

Australia’s Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese presides over a comfortable centre-left hegemony that seems a world away from the far-right politics on the rise in Chile, France, Germany, Britain, and the United States.

And yet the One Nation party, whose founder Pauline Hanson has vilified Asian, Indigenous and Muslim people since the 1990s, would be the third-biggest faction in Australia’s House of Representatives if an election were held tomorrow, according to one recent poll.

There were 309 Islamophobic incidents in roughly two years through November 2024, roughly double the rate of previous years.

Even Australia’s vaunted gun laws - passed in the wake of the 1996 Port Arthur shootings, in which a lone gunman killed 35 people - are looking increasingly threadbare.

There are now more guns in the country than there were back then. The older of Sunday’s Bondi attackers had six firearms licensed to him.

The Government has worked hard to halt the rising tide of anti-Semitic attacks, despite what some of its critics have alleged.

It expelled Iran’s ambassador and three other diplomats in August after concluding the country’s Revolutionary Guard directed at least two attacks, including the firebombing of a Jewish restaurant a few minute’s walk from Bondi Beach. Clearly, though, it’s not been enough.

More can be done to investigate and prevent that, without violating Australia’s guarantees on free speech and civil liberties.

A country that has just implemented a ban on most social media usage by under-16s also needs to take a hard look at how online platforms are being used to spread prejudice.

Let’s not throw out the promise of safety and optimism that led people to gather at Sunday’s Hanukkah festival in the first place, though.

If that tradition represents the triumph of light over darkness - the rededication of a sacred space despoiled by violence - then upholding that spirit now seems a fitting rebuke to this vile attack.

- David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change and energy. Previously, he worked for Bloomberg News, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.

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