Is Australia lying about the Bondi Beach attack?

Officials are blaming ISIS, which seems like a convenient scapegoat that shields state actors from consequences which could result in another Middle East war.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (center) giving a press conference following the Bondi Beach attack (photo: Anthony Albanese/X)

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In the immediate aftermath of the horrific terrorist attack targeting Sunday’s Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Australia, a striking report appeared in The Jerusalem Post: Israeli authorities, the article said, were investigating whether the attack may have involved foreign actors — specifically Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, or Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (a group linked to Al-Qaeda).

Shortly thereafter, another headline emerged in Israeli media: A senior U.S. official said that, if the Australian attack were determined to have been ordered by Iran, Washington, D.C. would fully support a direct Israeli strike on Iranian territory.¹

Then came a third narrative: Australian officials announced that the father-and-son perpetrators had filled their vehicle with various items, including homemade ISIS flags. They provided no photograph or video evidence and no corroboration of this claim. The message, essentially, was: “Believe us, because we said so.”

But why, exactly, should anyone (let alone Jews) believe the current Australian government?

Set aside, for a moment, the fact that just yesterday the Australian government allowed a pro-terror march — typically cloaked under the banner of “Palestine,” itself a well-worn Islamist terror guise — to take place near Bondi Beach, complete with police protection for the demonstrators. Set aside as well Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s statement immediately following Sunday’s attack, which conspicuously failed to mention Jews, Hanukkah, or Islamist terror at all.

Since October 7th, the Australian government has both implicitly and explicitly sided with Hamas, elevated “Islamophobia” to a central political talking point despite the absence of any serious threat to Australian Muslims, and repeatedly ignored credible threats and actual violence directed at Jews, Jewish communities, and Jewish institutions.

According to a senior Israeli intelligence official, Israel’s foreign intelligence service provided Australian authorities with concrete warnings well before the Bondi Beach attack. These warnings concerned what the official described as Iranian-directed terror activity operating inside Australia. The alerts were not specific to Bondi Beach itself, but rather to broader Iranian efforts to establish terror networks designed to target Jewish sites and communities.²

“We stopped a few ticking bombs,” the official said, meaning they prevented attacks as they were in the process or near the start.

The same official stated that Israeli intelligence identified Iranian guidance and coordination behind these efforts, including operatives allegedly in possession of weapons and operating “in the center of Jewish communities,” all while remaining undetected by local authorities. Australia, the official emphasized, is far from unique. Israeli intelligence has identified or disrupted similar Iranian-linked terror activity across Europe, Africa, and Asia, as well as alleged plots in South America, India, and Thailand.

“If you knew how many terror attacks the Mossad has prevented,” the Israeli official added, “you would drop your jaw.”

We also know, definitively, that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps was responsible for at least two antisemitic arson attacks on Jewish sites in Australia earlier this year. Hence why, in the months preceding the Bondi Beach attack, Australia expelled Iran’s ambassador after domestic security services publicly accused Tehran of directing or enabling attacks against Jewish targets on Australian soil.

So, if Iran were indeed behind the Bondi Beach attack, and Israel responded by striking Iran directly, the consequences would almost certainly not end there. Iranian retaliation against Israel would be all but inevitable, triggering a renewed direct confrontation between the two states. In practical terms, this would mean the resumption of the 12-day Israel–Iran war that unfolded this past summer — quite possibly on a wider and more destructive scale.

And yet, such escalation cuts sharply against the interests of many powerful actors. Qatar and Saudi Arabia, other Middle East countries, European governments, and even the United States all have compelling reasons to avoid another major Middle Eastern war. Whether due to energy markets, economic stability, regional power balances, or domestic political pressures, these actors overwhelmingly prefer containment over conflagration.

This is precisely why ISIS emerges as such a convenient scapegoat. The Islamic State once controlled vast territory across Syria and Iraq beginning in 2014, but it was eventually dismantled by the U.S. military and its allies. While its ideology has inspired sporadic attacks in Europe and elsewhere in recent years, ISIS today exists largely on the margins of Middle East and global geopolitics.

Even if ISIS flags were, in fact, found in the attackers’ vehicle, it does not automatically indicate that ISIS was responsible. Those flags could just as easily have been placed there intentionally to divert attention away from Iran. The Iranians are not naïve; they understand that if they are indisputably linked to an attack like Bondi Beach, Israel may feel compelled to strike Iranian territory directly.

And Iran has good reason to fear that outcome. In June, Israel demonstrated overwhelming superiority against Iran’s radar systems, air defenses, nuclear infrastructure, senior commanders, and ballistic missile capabilities. Iran is still reeling from that defeat, which has left it more exposed than at any point in recent memory.

In 2023, before October 7th, Israel would never have openly struck Iranian soil in response to a single terror attack against Jews or Israelis abroad. The fear of a catastrophic Iranian missile response was simply too great. At the time, no one doubted that a first Israeli strike would provoke a massive ballistic missile onslaught from Tehran.

Today, the calculus has changed. Iran knows that such an attack might be intercepted — and that Israel could respond by inflicting billions of dollars in additional damage on Iran’s military infrastructure, including killing many of the commanders who replaced the roughly thirty senior officials already eliminated by the IDF.

What makes this situation even more surreal is that an Iranian government official issued a statement following the Bondi Beach attack declaring that “terror violence and mass killing shall be condemned, wherever they’re committed, as unlawful and criminal.”

This is the same regime that routinely denies the Holocaust. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s followers adhere to an ideology that explicitly casts world Jewry as an enemy of Islam, in no small part because of the Jewish Diaspora’s connection to Israel. According to Dr. Meir Javedanfar, an expert on Iranian politics at Israel’s Reichman University, Iran views harm to Diaspora Jews as a legitimate component of its wartime strategy. From the perspective of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Jewish Diaspora represents a soft target — one whose suffering pressures Israel, which sees itself as responsible for Jewish security worldwide.³

A former Israeli security official has similarly noted that, while striking Israel directly is difficult, the Diaspora is far more exposed and can be targeted both to exact revenge and to deter future Israeli action. Despite being severely weakened by Israel this past summer, the Iranian regime still retains the capacity to orchestrate conventional or mass-casualty terror attacks, precisely the kind of violence we just witnessed at Bondi Beach.

As is often the case, Iran typically relies on local proxies to carry out these operations. In Australia, this can include organized crime figures recruited to do the regime’s bidding. These actors, according to the former Israeli security official, are not always particularly competent and often require direct guidance (or pressure) from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps to act.

Ultimately, however, the most important question is not whether Iran is definitively behind the Bondi Beach attack. The deeper concern is the possibility that the Australian government, in coordination with other global leaders, is quietly shaping the public narrative behind closed doors. If that is the case, it represents antisemitism in its most insidious form: manipulation, distortion, and omission. The result is that Jewish communities, both in Australia and worldwide, are left even more exposed, as political convenience once again takes precedence over protecting citizens from organized, ideologically driven violence.

This is not fear-mongering. It is not conspiracy-building. It is a sober assessment of the available facts. Four days on, no credible evidence has been presented linking ISIS to the attack. What we have seen instead are press conferences and official statements from Australian leaders who, since October 7th, have repeatedly downplayed or ignored serious threats and real violence directed at Australian Jews.

And now Jews are being asked to simply trust those same officials, to believe that this time, they suddenly care about Jewish safety. Really?

We Jews do not have the luxury of giving questionable actors a benefit of the doubt. You can call that paranoia. I call it survival.

What makes the Bondi Beach attack especially alarming is not only its brutality, but how familiar the sequence already feels. Since October 7th, Jewish communities around the world have seen the same pattern repeat itself again and again: a violent attack or credible threat against Jews, followed by immediate downplaying, narrative deflection, and a rush to frame the incident as anything other than targeted antisemitic terror. Lone wolves. Mental health. Random extremism.

Anything except what it plainly is.

Jews are murdered, synagogues are firebombed, Jewish schools are threatened, community centers are vandalized, and Jewish gatherings require armed guards, yet officials consistently insist that these incidents are isolated, unrelated, or misunderstood. This repetition is not coincidence; it is pattern recognition. And Jews, more than most, have learned the cost of ignoring patterns simply because doing so makes others uncomfortable.

Too often, governments substitute authority for evidence and expect compliance rather than scrutiny. The logic goes something like this: “We are the state. We have access to intelligence you do not. Therefore, trust us.” But trust without transparency is not reassurance; it is a demand for silence.

This dynamic becomes especially pronounced when Jews are the victims. Assertions are made. Narratives are offered. Press conferences are held. Yet evidence is rarely presented, questions are deflected, and skepticism is framed as disloyal or irresponsible. When officials ask to be believed solely because of who they are, rather than what they can demonstrate, Jews are right to pause. History has taught us that institutional confidence has never been a substitute for truth.

There is a word often used to justify inaction in moments like this: restraint. Politicians speak of de-escalation, stability, and the need to avoid wider conflict. These goals may sound reasonable, until one asks who pays the price for that restraint.

Again and again, it is Jewish civilians who absorb the cost of geopolitical caution. When escalation is deemed too risky or too inconvenient, Jewish communities become the pressure-release valve. Violence against them is tolerated, minimized, or quietly reframed so that larger strategic balances can be preserved. Stability, in this formulation, is maintained not by preventing terror, but by managing its victims.

Jews both in Israel and the Diaspora do not assess risk the way others do — not because we are hysterical or conspiratorial, but because we are historically literate. Jews have learned, often painfully, that early warning signs are rarely taken seriously until catastrophe makes denial impossible. They know that protection promised by states is often conditional, delayed, or withdrawn when politically inconvenient.

This is why Jews notice shifts in tone, changes in enforcement, and patterns of selective outrage before others do. They understand that being told “you’re safe” has never been the same as being safe. What looks like overreaction to outsiders is, for Jews, accumulated memory: the instinct to recognize danger while there is still time to respond.

Critics inevitably ask, “What if this interpretation is wrong? What if the suspicions are misplaced?” The answer is simple: If Jews are wrong, the cost is embarrassment, discomfort, and perhaps political friction. If we are right, and ignored, the cost is lives. This asymmetry matters because rational risk assessment weighs consequences, not just probabilities. Jews are not demanding certainty; they are demanding seriousness. And history has shown that dismissing Jewish warnings has never been the safer bet.

The real question, then, is not whether Jews are being overly suspicious; it is how many times the same warning signs must appear — how many attacks must be minimized, how many threats must be ignored — before the world acknowledges what Jews have already learned to see.

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1. “Should Israel issue a military response if Iran was behind the Bondi attack? - analysis.” The Jerusalem Post.

2. “Intelligence warned Australia of Iranian-linked terror activity months before Bondi attack, officials say.” Fox News.

3. “Experts reveal why Iran is attacking Diaspora Jews, warn that West ‘doesn’t understand fanaticism’.” The Jerusalem Post.