Posted on 12/20/2025 8:53:35 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Bondi Beach is meant to be neutral ground. A place without history. A democratic beautiful stretch of sand where politics dissolves into sunlight, surf, and families pushing strollers toward the water. That illusion died when Jews gathered there to light Hanukkah candles—and were slaughtered for it.
The massacre belongs to a broader pattern that has accelerated since Oct. 7, 2023: Jews targeted far from any battlefield, in the ordinary spaces of civic life. Synagogues, campuses, cafés, city streets—and now a beach—have become killing fields aimed not at a state, but at a people. The mass murder at Bondi did not occur in a war zone or at a political demonstration. It occurred at a religious gathering of the diaspora, in full public view, and in daylight.
Bondi beach is evidence that the prevailing theory is wrong.
For years, Western academics have argued that antisemitism is primarily a reaction to Israeli power, sharpened by Zionism’s transformation of Jews from a vulnerable minority into a sovereign people. Thus, Jewish vulnerability ends where the Jewish State begins, and hostility toward Jews is reframed as antipathy for a political project.
This intellectual architecture dominates elite universities, activist spaces, and progressive politics. It is elegant in its abstraction. And it collapses when confronted with Bondi Beach.
Nothing about the attack turned on Israeli policy or national identity. The victims were not selected for their politics, their citizenship, or their views on borders and settlements. The shooters bypassed diplomatic and military targets entirely. Their fire was aimed at something simpler and older: Jews celebrating as Jews.
They targeted Jewish people living peacefully 9,000 miles from Tel Aviv.
The horror exposed the foundational error in academic anti-Zionism: the treatment of antisemitism as secondary—derivative, contingent, and therefore negotiable. The violence is explained as if it is primarily political, as if it will recede once Jews accept the “right” constitutional arrangement. In the “anti-Zionists” framework, the Jew becomes less a human being than a category in a seminar: settler, native, citizen, majority, minority. The vocabulary is sophisticated. The substitution is not.
Bondi Beach supplies the missing variable: eliminationist hatred that does not require an Israeli policy dispute to ignite, and does not wait for the Knesset to act before it kills.
This hatred did not originate with the modern Israeli state. It culminated, catastrophically, in the Holocaust—an industrial-scale attempt to eradicate the Jewish people in Europe precisely because they lacked sovereignty or protection. The lesson drawn by Zionism was not triumphalist but defensive: that Jewish survival required political self-determination. That conclusion was tested immediately. In 1948, the moment Israel declared independence, it was invaded by neighboring Arab states that rejected not its borders or policies, but its existence.
The resulting war was not a response to “occupation” but to Jewish statehood itself. Any framework that treats antisemitism primarily as a reaction to Israeli power reverses cause and effect, mistaking a centuries-old, lethal hatred for a modern political grievance.
To ignore that is not merely an academic blind spot. It is a moral hazard.
And it is a moral hazard close to home—in New York City, of all places. The political rhetoric routinely employed by Zohran Mamdani offers a simplified public version of this move: “hierarchy,” “universal rights,” “decolonization.” The language sounds humane and hip. But it avoids the central fact that for Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS-style jihadism, and the father-son terrorists who opened fire at Bondi, the objection is not to a policy but to a people.
Bondi also undercut the most fashionable analogy in this debate: South Africa. The assumption is that Israel can dissolve into a single secular polity and follow a post-apartheid path. But that analogy rests on a false premise: that the conflict is primarily about citizenship rather than a religiously driven rejection of Jewish collective existence. In South Africa, the demand was for equality. In much of the antisemitic violence now spreading globally, the demand is erasure.
Since October 7, similar attacks and threats have multiplied across Western cities, routinely explained away with euphemism rather than named for what they are.
Bondi leaves little room for euphemism. Sand absorbs blood without consulting political theory.
This is why the Mamdani-style prescription that Jewish safety depends on relinquishing sovereignty is more than misguided. It amounts to a demand for unilateral disarmament at a moment, when antisemitism is not only resurging, but being normalize, rationalize, and operationalized across the west.
None of this denies Palestinian suffering or limits debate over Israeli policy. It merely insists on intellectual honesty. A framework that interprets every Jewish death as an echo of political grievance is not explanatory; it is evasive. It removes the victim from view so the theory can survive unchallenged.
As Bernard-Henri Lévy has warned, we are living through an undeclared state of intellectual emergency. Appeasement of violent radicalism does not restrain it; it instructs it. And the refusal to name Islamist antisemitism plainly—religious, ideological, and murderous—does not protect Muslims or Jews. It protects only the illusion that language can replace reality.
Bondi Beach exposed that illusion for what it is. The men who opened fire were not responding to a policy or a border. They were acting on an older hatred, aimed at a visible people gathered in public.
Any framework that cannot begin with that fact is not merely incomplete. It is complicit.
First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.
its been like that for more than 40 years now....killing zionists is so 1970’s...
It’s always been about the elimination of the Jew. Then the christians.
God help us for being so ignorant that we help our enemies kill us.
Good piece.
Since Oct 7 (and before) it has been trendy to say that there is some sort of separation between the nation of Israel and the Jews, and that the real problem is the political policies of the nation of Israel. That government, you see, is the problem. But this is obviously not the case. The Muslims hate the Jews. All Jews. Always have. Always will.
The left also, along with the skinheads.
Jews are not a race. Any one can become a Jew.
Good essay.
Jews are not a race in the modern biological or social sense; rather, Jewish identity is a complex combination of an ethnicity, a religion, and a shared culture and history. Many Jews prefer to describe themselves as a “people” or an “ethnoreligious group”.
Key Distinctions
<><?Ethnicity: Most Jews share a common ancestry and a strong sense of collective history and cultural heritage, tracing their origins back to the ancient Israelites in the Levant. This is a primary reason why even secular or atheist individuals can still identify as ethnically Jewish.
<><>Religion: Judaism is the religion of the Jewish people. However, not all people who are ethnically Jewish are religiously observant, and adherence to the faith is not a prerequisite for being considered Jewish by the community or Jewish law (halakha).
<><>Conversion: A key factor that differentiates Jewish identity from a biological “race” is the ability to convert to Judaism. Converts are fully accepted into the Jewish people and are considered just as Jewish as those born into the community, regardless of their original background or physical appearance.
<><>Diversity: Jewish people exhibit enormous diversity in physical appearance and come from all parts of the world, including Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, India, and Africa. This wide variety of backgrounds makes a single racial classification impossible.
The modern scientific consensus is that “race” itself is a social construct, not a biological fact. Historically, some antisemites have treated Jews as an inferior race to justify persecution, most notably during the Holocaust. However, within the Jewish community, identity is rooted in the concepts of peoplehood and shared heritage rather than racial categories.
Do modern day Jews know what tribe they’re in? Are converts assigned a tribe?
I would say that I have heard a noticeable uptick in the number of casual semi-public negative references to Jews.
Australia, like the U.S, UK, and most EU countries, have become UNCIVILIZED due to the fact that in any really civilized country murderers, terrorists, and traitors when apprehended would be convicted, summarily executed, and their demise telecast worldwide.
Until Islam is properly dealt with, this will continue. The leaders of these countries are absolute morons.
You control your sexual appetites, you control your emotions, you control your actions and God sees all, can not be fooled and can not be manipulated.
People who are not inclined to self control see this as an attack and want not only the rules gone so they can rage and rape freely but all memory of the people who taught this lesson gone as well to make sure it never returns.
Correct. And kudos to the author. (But a lot more action is needed to Correct and reverse the damage caused from the billions of dollars of Big Lie Nazi- style propaganda smearing the Jewish and Christian people in the West. All that Qatari and Saudi $$$ has really screwed up many good people’s minds.
It’s better to be hated and alive than dead and loved. It’s okay for the world to be antisemitic but don’t dare to be islamophobic.
Depends on what you call "race".
Anything that included the word "consensus" should never be confused with "science" or "Scientific" because it just means, we took a poll of certain people and shouted the others down.
That the Irish descend from a different haplotype than the Basque is science.
What that means is subject to debate because certain people get their panties in a wad over reality.
But reality remains.
RE: Jews are not a race. Any one can become a Jew.
So Sammy Davis Jr. ( a black guy ) is a Jew?
So is Ivanka Trump?
How about Ruth ( a Moabite), and Rahab ( a Canaanite ), were they considered Jews?
If one is an antisemite, would that include hatred of Sammy and Ivanka? ( who aren’t Semitic in any sense )
It’s not just about the Jews.
Palestinians and all Muslims everywhere, won’t rest until ALL non-Muslims are eliminated.
Jews are the closest to their ‘home’, but the intifada is world-wide. If there were no Jews, Christians and all other religious would be just as much targeted.
Let’s face it. Jews are not the problem. Muslims are the problem.
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