Bondi’s profound meanings

I introduced our profoundly-insightful ‘After Bondi’ event on Wednesday evening by asking how the Middle East war connects with the massacre of Jews at Australia’s most famous beach. The question was taken up by first speaker, Josh Frydenberg, who noted that local discussion of the war downplays how Iran has been implicated in the Australian terrorist attack. “Now that is not a reason to go to war, but it is a relevant fact when you understand the enemy that America and Israel and others are dealing with,” Frydenberg told our event at the NSW parliament.

The point was taken up by our second speaker, Australian Human Rights Commissioner Lorraine Finlay, who suggested that most Australians simply don’t believe that foreign interference attacks are happening here. To many Australians, it sounds like something out of a Hollywood movie.

Our third speaker, retired Federal Court judge Ronald Sackville said the most important task for the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is to bring home to the broader Australian community the extent of antisemitism experienced by Australian Jews.  But he doubted whether the commission’s 14 December reporting deadline — the anniversary of the massacre — will give enough time to do that. The Disability Royal Commission that he chaired went for four-and-a-half years.

All our speakers agreed that antisemitism has become normalised in modern Australia. Sackville recalled how antisemitism forced him and five other Jewish boys to leave a Church of England school in the 1950s. Frydenberg recalled how, after surviving the Holocaust, his mother’s arrival card in Fremantle was stamped ‘stateless’. Decades later, her son became Treasurer of Australia. Now, her grandchildren’s Jewish school is protected by half a dozen armed guards.

Our panellists worried that antisemitic incidents are recurring, just months after Bondi. They mostly agreed that the solution is more deeply cultural and civic, rather than simply more laws.  Finlay said that some of the toughest hate speech laws in the world didn’t prevent the Bondi attack. Sackville argued that stating that Israel does not  have the right to exist — or chanting ‘from the river to the sea’ — is not necessarily antisemitic hate speech.

Finlay spoke in refreshing terms not usually associated with the Human Rights Commission. “I love Australia, and being Australian, and that’s something we don’t say often enough … ,” she said. “We talk a lot about human rights, but we don’t often talk about the responsibilities that come with that, and they’re two sides of the same coin.”

The event, moderated by the director of the CIS Culture, Prosperity and Civil Society program Peter Kurti, was part of our three-year antisemitism project. The audience included antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal and Arsen Ostrovsky, whose head was grazed by a terrorist bullet just over three months ago at Bondi.