Mourning the Bondi Beach massacre while visiting Montreal is particularly painful. During three Australian jaunts since 2019, I’ve noticed many similarities uniting these two post-Holocaust communities. They range from their impressive proportion of kids in Jewish schools to their deep Zionist commitments, from their great prosperity to their greater generosity.
Visiting Sydney this September, I was struck by how both Canadian and Australian Jews were reeling from the Broken Covenant, their sense that the street and the elites turned on them – as their respective governments dithered.
“Yes, it’s bad here in Australia, but it’s really bad in Canada,” Australians said, empathetically. “O, you’re visiting Sydney. Be careful. It’s bad here in Canada, but it’s far worse in Australia,” Canadians warned, equally empathetically.
Antisemitism in Canada
As moved as I am by the concern Jews have for each other thousands of miles away, I am alarmed by our trouble seeing up close what others see clearly from afar.
Familiarity breeds complacency, not just contempt. The more we know, the more likely we are to accept the unacceptable. Multiple metaphors warn against collective delusions: the creeping normality of landscape amnesia… shifting baseline syndrome… the camel’s nose in the tent (it rarely stops there)… and, the most popular cliché regarding antisemitism, the frog boiled in ever-hotter water.
Yet anti-Zionist antisemitism exploded after October 7 – without subtlety. The threats resounded as bullets hit schools in Montreal and Toronto, and Molotov cocktails blasted Montreal and Vancouver synagogues. And we heard it in the Sydney Opera House celebrations on October 9, as some kibbutzim still smoldered.
That barbarians’ jamboree triggered a controversy so unreal, it captures the West’s moral decline. Some Jews claimed pro-Palestinian protesters shouted “gas the Jews.” Their defense – confirmed by a forensic analysis the New South Wales Police bothered conducting – was that they only yelled “Where’s the Jews?” and “F*** the Jews.”
Threatening an Australian Auschwitz still crossed a line. Yet, suddenly, it was okay to menace a group and curse them. The seeds of the Bondi Beach massacre were planted that day. They were replanted repeatedly as the rhetoric demonizing Israel, Zionism, and the Jews escalated wildly, as police and politicians froze, and as Canada and Australia validated the Jew-hating mob by recognizing a non-existent Palestinian state.
LET’S GO back to basics: zero-tolerance of intolerance means zero-tolerance. Can anyone claim surprise that the demonization of Israel, tapping the poisoned reservoir of traditional Jew-hating accusations, spilled over onto Jews?
It’s time to confront the Palestinian national movement’s longstanding, intentional antisemitism. Jews didn’t concoct the antisemitism charge to discourage Israel’s critics. It’s the opposite. Many Bash-Israel-Firsters, especially the most influential Palestinian leaders including Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, integrated their anti-Zionism into traditional antisemitism. In short: it’s not our fault they attack our synagogues, our day schools, our people, our Hanukkah celebrations – it’s theirs.
My Australian and Canadian friends know that if shooters had attacked a synagogue Hanukkah party, the slaughter would have been a one-day story. But the killers violated Bondi Beach – Australians’ Statue of Liberty, Washington Monument, Grand Canyon, Disneyland, and Times Square wrapped into one glorious oceanfront playground. Its natural beauty and fun, relaxed vibe make it the iconic Aussie paradise.
These Jihadists have one admirable trait – they’re honest. They attacked Australia as well as the Jews, because they hate us all, and they are relentless.
That’s why it’s so unnerving to see this all from Montreal. You watch admiringly as Chabad rabbis demonstrated the courage of the Maccabees and the IDF, making their Hanukkah celebrations bigger, louder and prouder, defying the terrorists. You note that finally, the authorities worried, dispatching police cruisers past synagogues and other Jewish targets more frequently. It makes you “grangry” – grateful and angry: thankful for the support, but furious that it’s needed – and so long delayed.
MOST AUSTRALIAN and Canadian Jews remain too British and too liberal to admit the ugly truth: their countries changed not because of what Israel did to defend itself but because Australia and Canada failed to defend themselves. Both countries welcomed waves of immigrants uninterested in respecting liberal values and their adopted homelands precisely when these o-so-progressive countries abandoned the national pride and grit essential to maintaining a healthy liberal-nationalism.
The result was a culture of elite breast-beating, of hostile new-comers, especially Islamists, as former prime minister Justin Trudeau pursued his misguided vision of making Canada the world’s first “post-national state.” “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada,” he boasted to The New York Times in 2015. The result was headlines this week proclaiming “Three Toronto men arrested for hate-motivated attacks, ISIS-related terrorism” – once again obscuring the targeting of the Jews.
Everyone knows Bondi Beach could have happened in Montreal, Toronto, or Ottawa – where a woman was stabbed simply for shopping in the kosher section in Loblaws – an iconic Canadian supermarket.
Moral clarity and Zionist pride must continue shaping our response. Enough with “hardening the target,” hiding behind thicker synagogue walls with ever-updated security systems. Invest more in “broadening the target,” helping our neighbors recognize that when they target “us” they target “you.” And we must keep transcending the targeting, having kids, having fun, living well, and building up our core Zionist and Jewish identities.
Let’s be clear. We do this all not to spite them, and not despite them, but because of us, our needs, our community, our tradition, our heritage, our values, our homeland, our story, our sanity. Am Yisrael Chai.
The writer is an American presidential historian and Zionist activist born in Queens, living in Jerusalem. Last year he published, To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream and The Essential Guide to October 7th and its Aftermath. His latest e-book, The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism and Jew-hatred, was just published and can be downloaded on the Jewish People Policy Institute’s website.