The Australian Left has an antisemitism problem.

The Left claims to abhor racism, but antisemitism is the one form of racism that it does not consider intellectually disgraceful.

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

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This is a guest essay by David Free, an Australian writer.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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The Bondi Beach massacre of December 14th happened in the long twilight of what had been a dazzlingly wholesome Australian summer’s day.

The horror lasted 10 minutes from start to finish, and every moment of it was phone-filmed from at least one angle, so that it’s possible to watch a stitched-together video compilation that documents the entire atrocity.

For many days I steered clear of watching this footage. When I finally nerved myself to sit through it, I was struck by the grimly matter-of-fact way the shooters went about their work that evening — especially the younger one, the apparent brains of the operation, who looked weirdly calm as he applied himself to his obscene task, like a man who had rehearsed the scene many times in his head.

Around two-and-a-half minutes after the shooting started, something quite instructive happened. The younger gunman noticed that some bystander in the area off to his left, located slightly behind the footbridge, had moved a little too close to his position for comfort. Instead of pointing his rifle at this interloper, the gunman did something interesting: He angrily shooed the person away, and sort of mimed the act of starting to level the weapon at him — as if to emphasize that he didn’t especially want to shoot him, and would do so only if given no choice.

The meaning of this gesture seemed chillingly clear. It meant: “I’m not here to shoot people like you. I’m here to shoot those Jews over there — those unarmed men, women and children who have committed the unforgivable offence of attempting to celebrate the first night of Hanukkah on a public beach. And if you stay back and let me get on with shooting them, you and I need have no beef.”

That sordid little moment summed up the starkly racist nature of the Bondi attack. This wasn’t an Australian version of the Bataclan shootings. The gunmen weren’t there to shoot members of the public indiscriminately. They were there to shoot Jewish members of the public indiscriminately. Or maybe “discriminately” is the more grimly appropriate word.

It later emerged that the person the gunman had shooed away from the bridge was a Bondi lifeguard, who was himself filming the proceedings with his phone. I don’t blame the lifeguard for heeding the gunman’s warning to stay back, of course. If he hadn’t, he would undoubtedly have got himself shot.

But for those of us who were lucky enough not to have been there that day, the gunman’s gesture lingers as a kind of challenge or reproach. It’s been needling my conscience since the moment I saw it. What the gesture meant was: “If you’re not a Jew, this isn’t your fight.” Well, I’m not a Jew, but I’d say that any fight that has racist barbarians with firearms on one side of it, and picnicking Australian families on the other side, is my fight — and I’m not on the side of the armed racist barbarians.

This doesn’t strike me as a hard call to make. But how can a humble writer like me contribute to the fight? There’s not much I can do, except write as honestly as I can about the facts that are staring all of us in the face. The temptation not to write about them at all, or to write about them in a mealy-mouthed way, is strong. But this impulse is cowardly, and it must be resisted.

One fact that’s been staring us in the face for a while now is that antisemitism in this country has been allowed to run dangerously out of control. I say that it’s been “allowed” to run out of control because antisemitism, in certain circles, is tolerated and indulged in a way that no other form of racism is. It was bad enough that people refused to admit this before the Bondi atrocity occurred. To stay silent about it in the wake of such an event is simply not on.

Australia is routinely accused, by members of its academic elite, of being a racist country. But I’d say that antisemitism is at least as rife in the Australian academy, and in the ranks of our so-called intelligentsia, as it is in the broader community. On the whole, I think ordinary Australians have done a pretty good job of registering their unqualified disgust about what happened at Bondi.

Recently, the Federal Government finally announced that it will, in response to the massacre, establish a Royal Commission of inquiry into antisemitism in Australia. The government initially didn’t want to do this. It capitulated only when the public clamor for a Royal Commission had become deafening.

Whether a Royal Commission will do any good remains to be seen. But for a while there, it seemed that calling for a Royal Commission was the best practical way for ordinary Australians to demonstrate that they found the Bondi massacre intolerable. Things finally came to a head for the government when more than 60 of the nation’s most famous sporting stars — from Dawn Fraser to Ian Thorpe to Lleyton Hewitt — signed an open letter urging the Prime Minister to “show decisive national leadership by confronting extremism and terrorism in all its forms, without fear or hesitation.”

I wish I could say that Australia’s intellectual elite responded to the Bondi massacre with as much moral clarity as Lleyton Hewitt did. But the local intelligentsia’s response to the Bondi outrage has been worse than useless. The Australian intelligentsia is a small, second-rate, and amazingly spineless community of sheepish group-thinkers, whose members live in constant fear of being thought insufficiently progressive. And in progressive circles, the rules about antisemitism are strangely complicated.

Generally speaking, the Left claims to abhor racism. It’s the worst intellectual sin you can possibly be accused of. And the Left’s ability to sniff out racism at all levels is, in general, incredibly well-honed. Not content to stamp out all visible and audible expressions of racism, the Left has lately started cracking down on “systemic” forms of racism that exist below the level of consciousness, and are invisible to the naked eye.

But when it comes to antisemitism, the Left’s nostrils are considerably less sensitive. Antisemitism is the one form of racism that the modern Left does not consider intellectually disgraceful. Indeed, if you want to qualify as a cutting-edge intellectual in this country, you’re better off positively flirting with antisemitism than daring to say that you consider it an unequivocally bad thing.

This point was depressingly borne out in recent weeks, when the Adelaide Writers’ Week affair reached its shabby conclusion. The story began when the Palestinian-Australian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah was disinvited from the event, owing to certain problematic “past statements” she’d made on the Israel-Palestinian conflict. She had made these controversial remarks before the Bondi attack occurred; and if that atrocity hadn’t happened, one has no doubt that Abdel-Fattah would never have been scratched from the Writers’ Week lineup, and her name would still be as deservedly obscure today as it was a month ago.

But in the aftermath of Bondi, the Writers’ Week Board decided that it would no longer be “culturally sensitive” to give Abdel-Fattah a platform at this year’s event. The Board made this decision after being pressured to do so by the South Australian government, which is a major funder of Writers’ Week. The South Australian Premier had told the Board that he thought it “a bad idea,” in the post-Bondi climate, to keep Abdel-Fattah on the program.

After the news of Abdel-Fattah’s cancelation broke, other writers slated to appear in Adelaide began to withdraw from the festival in protest. The boycott snowballed, until more than 180 writers had pulled out. Finally the Writers’ Week Board had no option but to cancel the entire event. The Board then resigned en masse, and a new one was installed. As its first order of business, the new Board issued an “unreserved apology” to Abdel-Fattah, and immediately invited her to appear at next year’s event.

So what exactly did Dr Abdel-Fattah say and do to lay the groundwork for all this fuss? For starters, after the Hamas-led atrocities of October 7, 2023, she changed her Facebook profile picture to an image of a gallant freedom fighter on a hang-glider, with the colors of the Palestinian flag superimposed on the wings of his craft.

Abdel-Fattah wasn’t the only person who used this image on social media at the time. There was a minor craze for doing so, just as there was a minor craze for taking to the streets and orgiastically celebrating what Hamas had done. These unashamed public endorsements of the October 7th pogrom were, in their own way, almost as nauseating as the attacks themselves. Antisemitism is a notoriously difficult thing to define. But if openly celebrating the murder of over a thousand Jewish men, women and children does not qualify as obviously antisemitic, then what the hell does?

I needn’t labor this point, because even Dr Abdel-Fattah herself has publicly stipulated that it would have been wrong, dreadfully wrong, to celebrate the events of October 7th. She said as much to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation recently, while complaining that it was “very disingenuous” of people to imply that she’d engaged in any such celebrations herself. Yes, she had used the paraglider image on social media, but her use of the symbol had been entirely innocent, according to her:

“It was very, very early days, we still did not know what was happening. At that point, I had no idea about the death toll, I had no idea about what was happening on the ground. So it was just a celebration of Palestinians who have been living under siege for multiple years breaking out of their prison. … Of course I do not support the killing of civilians.”

I wish I could give Dr Abdel-Fattah the benefit of the doubt on this one. Unfortunately, I have a functioning memory, which tells me that it did not take “days” to understand that Jewish civilians had been murdered and raped and kidnapped on October 7th. It’s true enough that the death toll was not immediately established. But the barbaric nature of the attacks was instantly plain. After all, the perpetrators never made the slightest attempt to disguise what they were up to. Many of them had live-streamed their handiwork.

Is it really possible that Dr Abdel-Fattah — a sociologist specializing in Middle Eastern affairs, or anyway in “race” and “Islamophobia” — took longer than the rest of us to work out what had happened? At the very least, she did seem to have grasped that certain Palestinians had flown into Israel on hang-gliders that day. So what did she think they’d done when they got there?

Another social media post of Dr Abdel-Fattah’s that belatedly struck the Adelaide organizers as troubling was this effort, hailing from November 2024:

“If you are a Zionist you have no claim or right to cultural safety. … It is the duty of all those who oppose racism, misogyny, homophobia and all forms of oppressive harm to ensure that every space Zionists enter is culturally unsafe for them.”

But I suppose I shouldn’t speculate about exactly why the Left finds the whiff of antisemitism to be so much less offensive than the whiff of any other form of racism. It’s really up to the Left to explain why it exercises this double-standard. I will confine myself to observing that the double-standard exists.

It strikes me as embarrassingly obvious — so obvious that it hardly needs pointing out — that if Randa Abdel-Fattah had sailed so close to the wind of any form of racism other than antisemitism, her career as an Australian writer and intellectual would have hit the wall years ago. She would have been thrown out of the academy and the literary community on her ear. She wouldn’t currently be enjoying a career as a published novelist. Nor would she be getting canceled from any literary festivals, for the simple reason that she wouldn’t be getting invited to them in the first place.

Admittedly, the nominal target of Dr Abdel-Fattah’s contempt is not a race, but a political category: “The Zionists.” Hating and harassing such people isn’t just permissible, in Abdel-Fattah’s view; it’s mandatory. It’s a measure of how fanatical the Left has become on the Israel question that this kind of hardcore anti-Zionism is now seen as a perfectly respectable position. “I’m not antisemitic,” the argument runs, “I just want to wipe the world’s only Jewish state off the map.”

But in the world of reality, the State of Israel is not about to stop existing. To keep calling for its complete eradication is a recipe for grievance and violence without end. (And it will always end up being Palestinians, rather than Israelis, who suffer the overwhelming brunt of this violence.)

Besides, if the State of Israel is to be abolished, where are the 7.8 million Jews who currently live in it supposed to go? Where else on earth can they and their children feel physically safe — assuming, for a moment, that they do have that right? If they can’t feel safe on a beach on the other side of the world, it would seem that they don’t have all that many options.

Or are we supposed to believe that, if the State of Israel stopped existing tomorrow, all acts of harassment and violence against Jews would cease? Doesn’t anyone recall why the State of Israel was established in the first place?

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