I watched the Prime Minister announce a federal royal commission into anti-Semitism from my own home and felt something unfamiliar wash over me.

Relief. Exhaustion. Gratitude. And vindication that was sharp and aching, the kind that arrives only after too much has already been lost.

For three weeks I carried one question like a stone in my chest: would this Prime Minister truly look at what happened, or would he tidy it up and move us on before the truth had time to breathe? Would he examine not only the massacre at Bondi, but the long trail of red flags that were there for anyone willing to look? When the words finally came, I exhaled. Not in celebration. In survival.

This decision matters. Royal commissions are not symbols. They are instruments of national accountability and self-examination. They exist for moments when the truth is painful, but avoidance is worse.

But it took three weeks too long.

“It came at the end of a long season of looking away.

It should never have taken families of the murdered pleading publicly, or athletes, judges, business leaders, faith groups and thousands of ordinary Australians dragging this atrocity into the open.

Delay is not neutral. When a community is already frightened, every day of hesitation deepens the damage.

That anger still sits with me.

And still, I welcome this royal commission. Because for Jewish Australians, this inquiry is not about process or politics. It is about being believed. About finally hearing the country say: what you have been living with since October 7, 2023 was real. It was cumulative. And it was deadly.

Anti-Semitism didn't explode overnight. It crept. It seeped. It was brushed off as passion, excused as context, laundered into something called activism.

This royal commission must examine how anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism were softened until they sounded reasonable. How chants like "From the river to the sea" and "Globalise the Intifada" were defended as politics. It must also confront the role of Islamic extremism.

For the families who buried their loved ones, this is not closure. Australia has taken a necessary step.

Bondi did not come out of nowhere. It came at the end of a long season of looking away.

I am still grieving. But for the first time, I feel heard. Now, the work begins.