The New Anusim: Bondi and the West’s Abandonment of Its Jews

The condemnations of the massacre at Bondi Beach in Sydney were sweeping. Governments around the world publicly expressed shock at the murder, also in an effort to draw a clear line between the heinous act and the growing accusations that the security of Jews worldwide is being abandoned by their own governments.

The Australian government cannot wash its hands of responsibility. Even before the massacre, the Jewish community in Australia repeatedly warned that it was experiencing a growing sense of insecurity and that the government was not acting with sufficient resolve. The government ignored the report submitted last August by the Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism on the state of antisemitism at universities. Previous incidents of violence, such as the arson attack on a synagogue in Melbourne in August 2025, were met with a weak response.

The harshest criticism was directed at Australia’s foreign policy, which appeared to reward the perpetrators of the October 7 massacre and included wholesale support for anti-Israel resolutions at the UN; Australia’s foreign minister was sharply criticized for refusing, during her visit to Israel, to visit the massacre sites of October 7 in the south.

While the Australian government did not encourage violence against Jews and Israelis (something that can no longer be taken for granted, as in the case of Spain’s prime minister who praised violent demonstrators in his country who disrupted the Vuelta a España), the combination of these factors created a sense of hostility toward the Jewish community. First, because there was a feeling that the ground for the Sydney massacre had been prepared by a government policy hostile to Israel and indifferent to the security of Australian Jews; and second, because these dynamics created a delegitimization of basic components of Jewish identity, including identification with the State of Israel and Zionism.

In a book published about a year ago in Gaza, titled “The Al-Aqsa Flood: Contexts and Consequences,” (using the name Hamas gave to the October 7 attack) written by a senior figure in Hamas’s military wing, the process of delegitimizing Israel is described as one of the goals of October 7. Hamas’s war doctrine was updated accordingly, including the use of the Palestinian population as human shields, with the aim of amplifying public hostility toward Israel. The book explicitly identifies Islamist forces and the radical left in the West (the red–green alliance) as those intended to transform negative sentiments toward Israel into a challenge to its very legitimacy. The senior Hamas official was not sufficiently optimistic in his ambitions, since the October 7 attack did not only generate delegitimization of Israel in the West, but also undermined the very ability of Jewish existence in the West.

The attack at Bondi Beach on Jewish families who had gathered to celebrate Hanukkah was another manifestation of the systematic assault since October 7 aimed at the erasure of Jewish and Israeli presence from the public sphere. Attacks on Jewish spaces can take many forms, including campaigns to boycott Israel at the Eurovision Song Contest, or decisions by universities such as the one in Alberta, Canada, not to allow the placement of a menorah in the university’s public space. Jews around the world feel besieged and speak of a unique exhaustion, “Jewish fatigue”: not dramatic fear, but ongoing weariness; not an ideological abandonment of Judaism or Zionism, but a quiet retreat into concealment and blurring; not a severing from Jewish identity, but its reduction to the private, ostensibly safe space.

They are the new Anusim.