All those wondering what the slogan “globalize the intifada” means need look no further than Bondi Beach.
Terrorists calmly firing into a crowd at a Hanukkah celebration. Screams. Panic. Parents fleeing with hysterical children. Victims lying dead on the sand.
That is the “globalized intifada” that tens of thousands of people around the world have been chanting for since the October 7 massacre – on the streets of Sydney, San Francisco, London, New York, and elsewhere – including by political figures who either embraced the phrase or refused to condemn it.
On Sunday night, the first night of Hanukkah – a holiday commemorating a Jewish victory over an earlier incarnation of the same kind of Jew-hatred that spilled onto Sydney’s iconic beach – the world saw, with horrifying clarity, what it means to globalize the intifada.
This was not an isolated act of violence. It was the logical endpoint of a process that has been unfolding in plain sight for two years in Australia and across much of the Western world: the normalization of radicalized anti-Israel rhetoric, the erosion of moral clarity by political leaders, and the repeated decision to treat antisemitic incitement as something abstract, contextual, or manageable – until it metastasized into bloodshed.
Bondi Beach shooting shows how mainstream antisemitism has become
Once antisemitism moved from the margins into the mainstream of protest culture, it did not remain a purely local phenomenon.
Australian intelligence agencies warned that Iran was playing a role in antisemitic incidents in the country, warnings serious enough that over the summer, Canberra expelled Tehran’s ambassador – an extraordinary step that illustrated how far the threat had moved beyond anti-Israel protests and into a national security issue.
Those conclusions placed the violence in a broader context. Iran has spent decades exporting attacks against Jewish and Israeli targets far from the Middle East – including Buenos Aires, Burgas in Bulgaria, elsewhere in Europe, and North America – and Israeli actions against Hezbollah targets led to heightened concerns that Iran would retaliate by hitting Jewish targets abroad.
“Globalize the intifada” was never just a metaphor. It was a call for action.
Since October 7, Australian streets have echoed with chants that would once have been politically toxic. The day after the Hamas massacre, “protesters” at Sydney’s Opera House yelled, “F**k the Jews.” Protesters have marched through the streets shouting, “Death to the IDF,” and calling for the eradication of Israel.
Jewish community leaders warned that these were not harmless expressions of anger, that language matters, and that words associated with violence against Jews tend to lead to – yes – violence against Jews. Those warnings were often brushed aside.
University administrators debated whether such chants constituted antisemitism at all. Politicians condemned hatred in general terms, while stressing the need for balance. Law enforcement frequently treated incidents as public-order problems rather than ideological threats.
Australia’s sharp pro-Palestinian turn since the election of Labor’s Anthony Albanese in 2022 strained relations with Israel. And when, during the Israel-Hamas War, Canberra increasingly aligned itself with international initiatives hostile to Israel, barred Israeli officials from entering the country, and adopted increasingly one-sided diplomatic positions, many in Australia’s 120,000-strong Jewish community heard a message that went beyond foreign policy: We don’t care about your concerns.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said as much explicitly in August, accusing the Albanese government – after it barred the visit of Knesset Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee chairman Simcha Rothman – of nothing less than abandoning Australia’s Jews.
“History will remember Albanese for what he is: A weak politician who betrayed Israel and abandoned Australia’s Jews,” Netanyahu wrote in markedly undiplomatic language.
On Sunday, he echoed those words when commenting Sunday on the Bondi massacre: “Antisemitism is a cancer. It spreads when leaders remain silent, and they must replace weakness with strength in confronting it. That did not happen in Australia.”
Sunday’s massacre did not erupt in a vacuum. Antisemitism has surged across Australia for two years – not as a series of isolated incidents, but as a sustained pattern. Synagogues have been targeted with arson attacks. Jewish schools and institutions have been vandalized. Jewish-owned businesses have been attacked. Intelligence warnings accumulated.
This attack was Australian Jewry’s October 7, Chabad Rabbi Moshe David Gutnik told Army Radio on Sunday.
“We never thought there could be something like this in Australia,” he said.
Australian Jews grew up believing they lived in one of the safest Jewish communities in the Diaspora: far from Europe’s ghosts; far from the Middle East’s wars; a place where antisemitism existed but was marginal and containable.
The attack at Bondi Beach shattered that belief on the first night of Hanukkah.
Two months earlier, two Jews were murdered at a synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur. In June, an 82-year-old Holocaust survivor was killed while marching for the release of the hostages in Boulder, Colorado. In May, two Israeli embassy employees were killed by terrorists after an American Jewish Committee event in Washington.
This is what those chanting about globalizing the intifada are saying: Jews everywhere are legitimate targets. Synagogues are fair game. Community events are battlegrounds. Geography offers no protection.
Israel may be the front line, but it is no longer the only one. Against no other people or community can people walk through the streets of major capitals calling for their murder. Except when it comes to the Jews – then the chants are explained as just being a metaphor for something else.
Australia’s leaders condemned Sunday’s attack – as they have following previous, less fatal attacks against Jews in the country – saying that “antisemitism has no place in Australian society.”
That claim rings hollow, however, because it is there, and it is deadly. The problem is not the words spoken after tragedy, but what came before it – years of equivocation, minimization, and moral evasions as warning signs multiplied.
Leadership is tested not in statements issued after blood has been spilled but in the decisions taken before it.
There will be a temptation to treat the Bondi attack as an aberration, an act of terrorism that landed on Australia as if from nowhere. That temptation must be resisted. This was the foreseeable outcome of years in which antisemitism was laundered through politics, activism, and academia, discussed abstractly until it became brutally concrete.
Australia is not unique. What happened there is a warning to every Western democracy that has convinced itself it can indulge antisemitism disguised as anti-Zionism and hate-filled rhetoric without paying a price.
This process can be confronted, or it can be downplayed. Australia did the latter, and on Sunday, its Jewish community paid the price.