In Bondi attack, echoes of age-old anti-Semitism

Rising hatred for the global Jewish community is rooted in the failure to draw a distinction between Israel’s actions in Gaza and the depoliticised lives of ordinary Jews

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Among the victims of the deadly terrorist attack on a Jewish gathering at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, was 87-year-old Alexander Kleytman.

Born in 1938, he survived the Nazi occupation of his native Ukraine and fled to frosty Siberia in a risky train journey, endured decades of religious persecution in the Soviet Union, and ultimately made it to a welcoming, multicultural Australia in 1992. His story, of having escaped the Holocaust only to be gunned down in Australia by terrorists owing allegiance to the Islamic State (IS), underlines the scourge that has haunted the Jewish community for a long time.

Anti-Semitism — hatred, discrimination and violence against Jews — has a long pedigree, dating back to the ancient empires of Babylonia, Greece, and Rome. This owed to the distinct cultural identity of the Jews and their unwillingness to act according to the diktats of conquerors. After the advent and spread of Christianity and Islam, the other two Abrahamic faiths, anti-Semitism intensified as State policy across Europe and West Asia, with the Jews being singled out and blamed for all sorts of socioeconomic problems due to their relative economic success and opposition to assimilation.

It bears reminding that this phenomenon — linked by some to present actions and policies of the State of Israel towards Palestinians — predates the creation of Israel in 1948 by several millennia. Adolf Hitler's Holocaust, which killed six million Jews, drew upon preexisting biases against the Jewish minority in Germany, long before they got a homeland or sanctuary in the form of the Israeli nation-State.