Eleven Jews were murdered celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach on December 14, 2025. Among the dead: Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who had served Sydney’s Jewish community for eighteen years. Police later found Improvised Explosive Devices in the attackers’ vehicle. This was Australia’s deadliest mass shooting since Port Arthur—and the most predictable terrorist attack in the nation’s history.
For twenty-six months, the warning signs accumulated. For twenty-six months, the Albanese government treated a developing terrorist campaign as a community relations problem. The result now lies on the blood-stained sand of Australia’s most iconic beach.
The trajectory was unmistakable. On October 9, 2023, two days after Hamas’s massacre in Israel, a mob descended on the Sydney Opera House, burning Israeli flags and chanting threats against Jews while police advised the Jewish community to stay away rather than dispersing the crowd. That failure to enforce basic public order established the permissive environment for everything that followed.
For twenty-six months, the Albanese government treated a developing terrorist campaign as a community relations problem.
What followed was systematic escalation. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry documented a 316 percent surge in antisemitic incidents in the year after October 7. Harassment of visibly Jewish individuals became routine. Jewish businesses were vandalized. Then came the arson campaign: Lewis’ Continental Kitchen, a kosher café in Bondi, firebombed in October 2024. The Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne, set ablaze in December 2024.
By August 2025, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was forced to acknowledge what Australian Security Intelligence Organisation had concluded: Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had directed both attacks, using local criminals as proxies. Australia expelled the Iranian ambassador, the first such expulsion since World War II. But the operational networks remained largely intact, and the escalation continued.
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Director-General Mike Burgess could not have been clearer. In February 2025, he declared that “in terms of threats to life, our number one priority now is investigating antisemitic acts in this country”—the first time any form of racism had been named the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation’s highest threat category. He warned that threats had “transitioned from harassment and intimidation to specific targeting of Jewish communities, places of worship, and prominent figures.”
Israeli officials delivered the same warnings repeatedly. After Bondi, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar stated bluntly: “The Australian government, which received countless warning signs, must come to its senses.” The warnings were heard, but they were not heeded.
“The Australian government, which received countless warning signs, must come to its senses.”
The government’s response framework remained fundamentally inadequate. It appointed a Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism and established “social cohesion” task forces. It funded training programs. Meanwhile, Hizb ut-Tahrir—banned in the United Kingdom, Germany, and across much of Europe for glorifying terrorism—continued operating openly in Australia, recruiting on university campuses and injecting revolutionary Islamist ideology into what had been broader protest movements.
This institutional failure reflects a deeper paralysis. The Albanese government has been willing to ban right-wing extremist symbols but unwilling to confront Islamist extremism with equivalent force. Whether this stems from fear of “Islamophobia” accusations, electoral calculations in Western Sydney, or simple diplomatic timidity regarding Iran, the effect has been the same: a permissive environment where hatred of Jews can escalate from chants to arson to mass murder.
Australia has demonstrated before that it can respond to national trauma with transformative action. After Port Arthur in 1996, Prime Minister John Howard secured unanimous agreement on the National Firearms Agreement within twelve days. He traveled to hostile communities wearing a bulletproof vest. He spent political capital because he understood that decisive moments require decisive leadership.
The Bondi massacre demands an equivalent response, not against guns, which are already tightly controlled, but against the ideological and institutional infrastructure that produced the killers.
Australia has demonstrated before that it can respond to national trauma with transformative action.
This means immediate proscription of Hizb ut-Tahrir and any organization meeting the threshold for glorification of terrorism. It means weaponizing the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme to expose and sever funding flows from Iran, Qatar, and other hostile state actors to Australian religious institutions and universities. It means making federal funding conditional on universities enforcing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism. It means providing permanent security funding for Jewish schools and synagogues, acknowledging that the threat to these institutions is a national security failure, not a private burden.
If investigation confirms Iranian involvement in the Bondi massacre, and the hallmarks of state-sponsored terrorism are unmistakable, Australia must support allied kinetic action against Islamic Revolutionary Guard facilities and sever diplomatic relations with Tehran.
Terrorists murdered eleven Australians who were lighting Hanukkah candles and wounded twenty-nine more. The time for expressions of solidarity and incremental measures has passed.
In 1996, Howard understood that inherited political capital depletes whether or not you spend it; the only question is whether it depletes through action or inaction. Albanese now faces the same test. Not only the Australian nation is watching, but so is the world.
