A 10-year-old girl who should have been arguing about bedtime. A Holocaust survivor who thought history had finally let him go. A rabbi who spent his life building community. They came to light candles and were slaughtered.

Fifteen people who had gathered to celebrate Hanukkah at a Jewish gathering at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, on Sunday, December 14, 2025. Fifteen reasons Australia will never be the same again.

For 38 years, I trusted Australia with my life. I believed this was a country where anti-Semitism stopped short of murder, and the government did its most basic job: keeping its citizens safe. I believed Jews could live openly here.

That belief is gone. What remains is betrayal.

What happened at Bondi did not fall from the sky. It was preceded by two years of warnings to state and federal governments. We said anti-Semitism was escalating. We said the rhetoric was becoming more explicit, more chilling. We said the pattern was familiar. We said this would end in blood. The warnings were not subtle. They were constant.

“What this government does next will determine whether Bondi was simply a warning or a rehearsal.

No one listened.

Bondi was not a bolt from the blue. It was the end of a process. The predictable moment when a hostile climate cultivated through anti-Israel, anti-Zionist speech became a massacre.

In Melbourne and Sydney, weekly rallies have functioned as public indictments of Jews. Anyone who supported Israel’s right to exist, who identified as a Zionist, anyone with family in Israel was branded a genocidal baby killer, a Nazi, a war criminal. Radical Islamist preachers were allowed to preach hatred of Jews with little consequence. This language was shouted from pulpits, megaphones, printed on placards and repeated often enough to become regular noise in our cities.

And state governments, through inaction and a refusal to draw clear lines, allowed this poison to seep into public life until it became normalised.

You do not arrive at a massacre like Bondi overnight. You arrive there step by step. You arrive there when incitement against Jews is mainstreamed, when stomach-churning language is excused as passion, when people shout, “globalise the intifada”, a phrase that has always meant knives, bombs, shootings of Israelis and Jews, and are treated as activists.

This is how dehumanisation works. When a group is relentlessly portrayed as evil, violence against them becomes justified. You do not have to tell people to kill Jews explicitly if you have already convinced them that Jews are monsters.

Compounding this was the refusal by some pro-Palestinian community leaders and groups to condemn the October 7 atrocities, choosing instead to describe them as “legitimate Palestinian resistance”. It taught a dangerous lesson: that Australian Jews, like the Israeli victims of October 7, were fair game.

The federal government was not short of advice. It had a clear report from Jillian Segal, the anti-Semitism envoy, to confront this disease. Instead, months passed. The plan sat. Urgency vanished. Plans do not deter terrorists. Consequences do.

And while anti-Semitism was exploding at home, alarming foreign policy signals were sent abroad.

By recognising a Palestinian state and backing UN moves to condemn Israel, the government looked to extremists like it was rewarding Hamas and the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. A simple message was heard at home: violence works.

That perception is petrol. It doesn’t light the match. But it makes the fire easier to start, and harder to stop.

What makes Bondi unbearable is not only the scale of the killing, but the intimacy of it. This was not an embassy. Not a military site. It was families lighting candles by the sea, rejoicing, singing and loving.

The terrifying fact that the terrorists were father and son tells us that this was anti-Jewish hatred passed down at the dinner table.

For the first time, I am asking myself whether Jews have a future here. I start each day no longer certain I will make it home alive. That is not an emotional over-reaction. It is a cold reckoning.

When Jews are murdered while celebrating their faith, something foundational has failed.

The Prime Minister and his government have some soul-searching to do.

Either it slams the brakes on this death drive now and uses every measure and resource at its disposal to stop this madness now, or Jewish bodies lying lifeless on public ground will become the new Australian normal.

What this government does next will determine whether Bondi was simply a warning or a rehearsal.