Tragedy foretold How the rise in antisemitic incidents led to Bondi attack

Shortly after the mass shooting targeting Australia’s Jewish community last Sunday, Rabbi Levi Wolff of Central Sydney Synagogue told reporters that “the inevitable has happened now”.

- Jason Burke

Wolff was speaking in Bondi, close to where two men armed with powerful rifles or shotguns had just attacked an event celebrating Hanukah, the Jewish religious festival. At least 16 people were killed, including one alleged gunman, and dozens were injured in Australia’s deadliest mass shooting in almost three decades.

His words will resonate with representatives of the Jewish community in Australia and across the world. Experts point out that antisemitism was already widely prevalent before the bloody conflict in Gaza, provoked by the Hamas attack on Israel of October 2023, polarised opinions across the world.

The most lethal attack against the Jewish community in the US, for example, came in 2018, while in 2023, Michael O’Flaherty, the director of the EU’s agency for fundamental rights, described such hate as a “deeply ingrained racism in European society” that posed an existential threat to the continent’s Jewish community.

But there is no doubt that such trends were intensified dramatically by the conflict in the Middle East.

In the US, the Anti-Defamation League reported 9,354 antisemitic incidents in 2024, the highest since its records began in 1979.