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As families in Sydney gathered for a public menorah lighting at Bondi Beach on December 14, two gunmen opened fire in what Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called "an act of pure evil," an attack targeting Jews during Hanukkah. At least 15 people were killed. Police and officials described the attack as antisemitic terrorism; the elder gunman was killed, and his son was taken into custody. Vigils swelled along the sand the next day.
The shock was visceral, but not wholly surprising to those tracking anti-Jewish hate since October 7, 2023. In two annual reports spanning the period before Bondi, an Australian Jewish organization recorded unprecedented numbers of incidents: 2,062 in the 12 months to September 30, 2024, and 1,654 in the year to September 30, 2025. The 2025 figure was about three times higher than any prior annual total before the Gaza war, according to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ).
And the nature of those incidents has been changing: even as the total number of incidents fell from 2024 to 2025, the most serious categories—arson and other violent attacks, including synagogue and preschool attacks—rose to record levels, culminating in a mass-casualty shooting.
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What makes it more alarming still is that some of the ugliest activity wasn’t purely domestic. In August, Australia expelled Iran’s ambassador after the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) concluded Tehran—specifically the Revolutionary Guard—directed at least two antisemitic arson attacks in 2024: the firebombing of Melbourne’s Adass Israel Synagogue and an attack on a Jewish-owned business in Sydney. Canberra said it had "credible intelligence" Iran likely directed others.
Common Knowledge
The Australian debate is like a mirror of the American debate. Opposition figures had been warning for months that antisemitism was intensifying. "It escalates because it starts with the graffiti, and then the firebombings come, and then the attempted terrorist attacks take place, and it’s unacceptable," Liberal leader Peter Dutton said earlier this year while pushing tougher penalties. After Bondi, conservative leaders demanded the government implement every recommendation from its antisemitism envoy "from today."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Albanese of having "done nothing" to curb an antisemitism surge since 2023—remarks that fed Australia’s domestic argument over whether Labor had been too slow or too cautious. Albanese responded that his government had already criminalized Nazi salutes and hate incitement, boosted security funding, and was prepared "to take whatever action is necessary," including tightening gun laws.
Jewish communal leaders echoed those concerns. "The inevitable has happened now," Rabbi Levi Wolff of Central Sydney Synagogue said at the scene. ECAJ’s co-CEO Alex Ryvchin told reporters, "This is the worst fears of the Jewish community… it’s been bubbling under the surface for a long time."
The counternarrative from the left has absolutely not been a defense of the attackers—Amnesty International Australia condemned the "shocking, targeted" Bondi terrorism the next morning—but previously it did challenge the political response to the broader surge, especially the push to police protest and redefine antisemitism on campuses. "Criticism of state actions is not hate—it is the exercise of freedom of expression," Amnesty argued last year when officials floated protest bans.
The Greens—Australia’s most left-leaning major party—likewise warned against blurring anti-Zionism with antisemitism. After universities adopted a broader definition of antisemitism, Greens deputy leader Mehreen Faruqi accused administrators of "weaponizing antisemitism to sanitize campuses."
Uncommon Knowledge
The facts are stark. In the year to September 30, 2024, ECAJ recorded 2,062 anti-Jewish incidents—by far the highest since its records began—across categories ranging from abuse to assault, graffiti, and arson. In the year to September 30, 2025, the total dropped to 1,654, but far above levels before the Gaza war. Before the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, annual totals were in the low hundreds. Incidents spiked in the weeks after the October 7 attacks, peaked again around October–November 2024 as the Gaza war ground on, and never returned to the prewar baseline.
What changed was the severity of the incidents. By late 2024 and into 2025, the worst categories—arsons and violent attacks—were increasingly common. The 2025 ECAJ report cataloged the firebombing of the Adass Israel Synagogue (later ruled a terrorist act) and a spate of attacks on Sydney Jewish businesses and institutions. It warned that violent attacks and street abuse had become "the norm."
Australia’s security services say part of that escalation came from overseas. In August, ASIO said publicly that Iran’s IRGC directed at least two antisemitic arson attacks in 2024; the government expelled Iran’s ambassador and signaled a terrorism listing for the IRGC. What started as a domestic spike included foreign-directed attacks on synagogues and Jewish sites in Australia. Intelligence chief Mike Burgess described a "layer cake" of intermediaries—IRGC direction funneled through overseas "cut-outs" to local coordinators who then tasked Australians in an effort intended to disguise Iranian involvement.
The 2024 ECAJ report’s list of incidents—spanning October 2023 to September 2024—includes: a 44-year-old Jewish man beaten by three assailants in Arncliffe, Sydney, after being asked if he supported Israel; a Jewish schoolboy slapped and called a "dirty Jew" at a Perth trampoline venue; a Melbourne assault where an attacker threatened to kill a Jewish man while screaming obscenities; a Rose Bay driver yelling "Death to the Jews!" at a kippah-wearing man; and a Year-10 student telling a Jewish classmate to "go back to the gas chambers" while giving a Nazi salute.
The Bondi attack was Australia’s deadliest mass shooting in almost three decades. The country has since 1996 prided itself on dramatic reductions in gun violence. The political system had already been arguing over whether to harden laws on hate crimes, protests near places of worship, and campus speech—debates that will now accelerate, for better or worse.
Australia now has to navigate a complicate situation: pursue the arsonists and would-be gunmen with zeal, decide whether to better guard potential targets such as synagogues, and still keep faith with the liberties that make candlelit vigils possible in the first place.
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