Blowback at Bondi

Fifteen people were killed, with more critically injured, at the massacre at Sydney’s iconic, decidedly secular, Bondi beach on 14 December. Members of the local Jewish community were gathered to celebrate Hanukkah. The killers were father and son Indian-born Sajid Akram (killed) and Australian-born Naveed Akram. The inferred motivation, until the injured Naveed can be interrogated, is that of Islamic extremism. The Australian Federal Police, to date, believe that the couple acted alone.

Rabbi Eli Schlanger, of the Chabad Lubavitch congregation, who had previously initiated the annual public celebration at the beach, was among the dead.

The city, the country mourns. But the dominant reaction is narrowly oriented, misplaced. It is claimed that this is purely a manifestation of unprecedented antisemitism. It needs to be stamped out by all means, which will inevitably entail the curtailing of previously enjoyed civil liberties. Israel is to be made immune from criticism. Don’t look for the logic in the implied causation.

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The conservative US political scientist and historian Chalmers Johnson became somewhat pinko in his later years. As the first of numerous books on the American Empire he published Blowback in 2000.

Johnson claimed that ‘blowback’ was a term coined by the CIA itself in a report following the 1953 UK-US overthrow of the Mossadegh government in Iran. And what a mega blowback ultimately followed that ‘successful’ operation.

Successive US administrations have consistently failed to document, evaluate and learn from their arrogant and impetuous foreign interventions and the aftermath. Since their cause is righteous, the concept of blowback is inconceivable. Evil is always external.

So also with Israel.

Early Zionist leaders were explicit that the indigenous (non-Jewish) population of Palestine had to be removed to make possible a Jewish state. Yosef Weitz’s 1940s Transfer Committee embodied the imperative. The 1947-49 expulsion (the Nakba) was wildly successful but incomplete.

Since then, Israel’s racist intransigence has faced blowback from expelled Palestinians (the fedayeen) and from those remaining in Israel and the Occupied Territories (witness the first and second Intifadas). Israeli leaders, with very rare exceptions (Moshe Dayan, 1956), consistently fail to join the dots. Rather, resistance to repression and ethnic cleansing is conveniently labelled ‘terrorism’. Benjamin Netanyahu is past master at the ruse.

Ditto with spokespeople for ‘diaspora’ Zionist organizations, not least in Australia.

In the tidal wave of commentary on the Bondi killings there is a clanging dissonance. Israel is both omnipresent and omni-absent. Israel per se, its character and modus operandi, is nowhere to be found in the post-massacre commentary.

American Patrick Lawrence captures my sentiments:

“But I cannot enter into the responses officials and the media serving them have urged incessantly since last weekend. Out of the question for any number of reasons, chief among them the dishonesty at the core of what I may as well call ‘official grief’.

“Read in the larger context of these awful events, the obsessive humanization of the Bondi Beach victims is an upside-down exercise in dehumanization. This is first, straight off the top. Jewish lives count, white lives count, names, faces, generous smiles – all this counts.

“But the names, faces and lives of those the Zionist regime has terrorized and brutalized for the past two years or eight decades, depending on how you reckon history: No, no need for any of this because they do not count.

Quite. Neither the Zionist community nor anybody in authority cares about dead Palestinians. Rather, it’s all about Palestinian terrorists against Israel and historic antisemitism globally and myriad national states’ failure to stamp it out.

Long-time Member of Parliament (2010-22), and sometime federal Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg claimed that Australian Jews face security concerns in their daily lives. He was vituperative about the Labor government’s seeming indifference. Frydenberg was glowingly reported thus:

“We, as a Jewish community, have been abandoned, and left alone by our government. Our governments have failed every Australian when it comes to fighting hate and antisemitism … Our prime minister, our government, has allowed Australia to be radicalised on his watch.

“[Frydenberg] did not speak delicately. He accused governments of moral failure – of hiding behind euphemisms, of refusing to name Islamist extremism, of indulging antisemitism under the cover of balance and process.”

In July 2024, the Labor government appointed prominent businesswoman Jillian Segal as ‘Special envoy to combat Antisemitism’. Segal, known as an ultra-Zionist, delivered a report on July 2025. The report, as I have written elsewhere (here and here), is an embarrassment because of its vacuity, and dangerous because of its demands for repression. Peculiarly, Israel gains only an oblique reference. Similarly, in December 2025, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) issued an annual report titled ‘Anti-Jewish Incidents’. Again, Israel is mentioned only obliquely.

After Bondi, a representative letter in the Sydney Morning Herald (16 December) claims:

“I went to a Jewish school and, as the child of Holocaust survivors, believed antisemitism was something Australia had left behind – lessons learnt, never to be repeated. That illusion was shattered by the October 7, 2023 massacre in Israel, and profoundly changed how many Jewish Australians view their safety. But it was the pro-Palestine rallies afterwards that revealed where the danger truly lay. It exposed how public discourse in Australia has shifted, and whose voices now dominate. Last night’s horrific attack in Bondi has forced Australians to confront an uncomfortable truth: antisemitic violence is not theoretical or distant. It is here, and it is carried out with a confidence that grows when hostility towards Israel and Jewish people is tolerated.”

The danger of pro-Palestine rallies (at which Jews spoke on the rostrum and were present in the marches)? An abstract Israel is mentioned but actually-existing Israel is absent. I see no genocide.

Yet actually-existing Israel intrudes. Here is the Israeli flag draped over memorial flowers and mourners at Bondi. Nobody highlights the glaring anomaly.

The good Rabbi Schlanger was so affronted by Australian Prime Minister Albanese’s recognition of a Palestinian state in September 2025 that he publicly responded (reports John Helmer) thus:

“In the month before the Bondi incident, Schlanger released to the press a letter he had sent to Prime Minister Albanese attacking the government’s decision to recognise the state of Palestine as a crime against God, an apostasy, an act of heresy, and a betrayal of the Jews. “As a rabbi in Sydney,” Schlanger wrote, “I beg you not to betray the Jewish people and not God Himself. This land was given by God to Abraham, then to his son Isaac, and then to Jacob, to be the eternal homeland of the Jewish people. Throughout history, Jews have been torn from their land again and again by leaders who are now remembered with contempt in the pages of history… Today, you have an opportunity to stand on the side of truth and justice. By reversing this act of betrayal, you will not only honor the Jewish people and our heritage, but also stand with the word of God. If you choose this path, you will be welcomed home with open arms and even a warm Shabbat meal. I bless you in advance for having the courage to do what is right and to stand firm against this act of apostasy.””

Presumably, God also gave Bondi Beach to the Jews, courtesy of Schlanger’s intercession (Rabbi Ulman: ‘the sacred space’).

Self-described ‘Sydney-based Jewish Australian writer’ Michael Cohen offers a personal perspective on the local Chabad sect. He writes:

“Over the past 40 to 50 years, Chabad-Lubavitch has steadily expanded its influence within Sydney’s Jewish institutions. This did not happen suddenly. It happened gradually – synagogue by synagogue, committee by committee – until much of communal life became centralised around a single ideological framework. This expansion was not merely organic. It was strategic. …

“Community spaces were monopolised. Alternative voices were marginalised. Funding, legitimacy and access increasingly flowed through a single gate. Those who dissented were quietly frozen out. What emerged resembled, metaphorically, mafia-like politics — not criminal in the literal sense, but in its methods: pressure, intimidation, monopolisation and the systematic elimination of rivals.

Creativity and free thought were not debated; they were suffocated. Independent Jewish expression was treated as disorder.”

The mainstream media has provided no background to this Bondi Hannukah gathering, turned deadly.

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The lobby and the hasbara. All self-appointed ‘official’ representatives of Australian Jews (particularly the nation-wide ECAJ and the Zionist Federation of Australia) support Israel unconditionally.

The Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC, Australia’s equivalent to AIPAC) is a pro-Israel propaganda front pure and simple. AIJAC has perennially been given privileged access to defend Israel against any criticism. AIJAC representative Joel Burnie was invited on to the public broadcaster Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) on 15 December where he bitterly criticised Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for doing insufficient to support the Jewish community, citing protestors’ ‘hate speech’ as fueling antisemitism. Burnie unapologetically defended his (and his young children as ‘Zionist-identifying Jews’) and the community’s Zionism: “Zionism is simply the recognition of Jewish self-determination in its ancestral and biblical homeland. Not at the expense of anyone else …”. Whence the Nakba, ongoing, and the current genocide?

The bulk of Australian Jewish ‘faith’ schools have ‘a love of Israel’ in their ‘mission statements’, eager to ferry their brainwashed charges to visits to Israel. I call it child abuse.

When I published an article on this phenomenon, a senior member of Melbourne’s Monash University’s Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation complained to the outlet’s editor (23 September 2024):

“I’m writing to request that you remove two online articles that appeared in June this year from your website. I write as … a leading Australian expert in Jewish history … Both articles attacked Australia’s Jewish day schools for their Zionist ethos. Quite apart from Jones’s oversimplification of Jewish political thought and the Australian Jewish community, the article’s vitriolic targeting of Jewish schools endangers Jewish children, including my own. …

“I appreciate the moment we live in and the strong feelings around the crisis in Gaza, but I’d hope we’re sensible enough to not hold Jewish children responsible for the actions of another state.”

‘The actions of another state’? Ergo, nothing to do with the Australian Jewish community, in spite of that ‘another state’ appearing prominently in the schools’ ‘Who we are’ screeds. On the contrary. As for ‘hold[ing] Jewish children responsible …’ – ludicrous and outrageous. It is transparent that I hold the children’s parents and the schools’ administrators responsible, with them being more concerned about Israel than their own children’s physical security and mental well-being.

This orientation was glaringly evident with the life and death of a young Australian Jew, Ben Zygier, early socialized into ‘a love of Israel’. Zygier became an Israeli spy and died in a high security Israeli prison at 34. Years later, the details of Zygier’s experience, treatment and death remain murky. Zygier, martyr for Zionism’s cause, has been consigned to history and no lesson have been learnt by the Australian Jewish community regarding its steadfast commitment to a foreign state.

The Australian pro-Israel fraternity (as elsewhere) has thrown huge resources into buying friends and keeping accurate descriptions of Israel out of the media. The lobby is unrepentant in its unflagging support of Israel. It opposes a substantive Palestinian state. Not a single Zionist organization representative (or Australian Jewish media) has expressed any mea culpa over Israel’s ongoing barbarism. Hamas and a weak Palestinian Authority, both products of Israel’s dominance over Palestinian lives, are supposedly to blame.

The media. The Australian mainstream media are complicit in their coverage of Israel. The Murdoch media (the national ‘flagship’, The Australian, crass tabloids in almost every Australian capital city, and Sky News) is ‘more Catholic than the Pope’, essentially hysterical, with respect to Israel.

The Nine stable (previously Fairfax Media) publishes the ‘quality’ papers (Sydney Morning Herald, the Melbourne Age, the Australian Financial Review and the depleted Canberra Times). It has been more pluralist in reproducing News Agencies’ accounts of the carnage in Gaza, but its opinion pages are tightly controlled. Murdoch-lite?

We are no longer regularly harassed with bilious op-eds from Zionist organization heavies, although their message is now conveyed more covertly via Nine’s regular journalists. The letters pages regularly reward the pro-Israel foot soldiers who display a staggering ignorance of the object of their devotion, which only encourages the hold of their ignorance.

What is seemingly not possible is getting an article, a letter, even a comment, in a Nine paper that outlines the essential character of Israel. Israel was created by terrorism, built on apartheid and ethnic cleansing, now turned to genocide. Gaza being destroyed, East Jerusalem swallowed, the West Bank is the front line for the mopping up operation. At best, one gets a letter blaming Netanyahu and his fellow nasties, presumably as aberrations to ‘a light among the nations’. Pointing out Israel’s strategically structured inhumanity is verboten.

The lobby constantly harasses the Australian mainstream media regarding any critical comment on Israel. A friend, ex-Fairfax journalist of many years, recounts how the Israel lobby floods the media’s management/editorial and feedback mechanisms to cancel or redress any criticism, no matter how mild. Management and editorial teams get worn down.

Australian media correspondents based in Israel have been constantly attacked as biased, mis-informed. One such correspondent, John Lyons (and his wife Sylvie Le Clezio) wrote an important book about this experience, the 2017 Balcony Over Jerusalem.

The lobby pushes to have potentially influential figures (journalists, academics) marginalized or sacked. It successfully pursued ABC presenter Antoinette Lattouf (even though a fill-in) in 2023, except to have the court condemn her treatment while also forcefully condemning the ‘pro-Israel lobbyists’ behind the sacking. A rare lecturing on propriety from the Australian bench! Undeterred, The Zionist Federation of Australia is suing long-time SBS broadcaster and activist Mary Kostakidis for breaching Australia’s 1975 Racial Discrimination Act.

The University. Sydney University is perennially in the news. The ‘lawfare’ firm Shurat Hadin sued Sydney University’s Jake Lynch in 2013. Lynch, then Director of the University’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (CPACS), was pressing the University to break its links with Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Thankfully, Shurat Hadin later abandoned its case (because fanciful). Yet the University has since dismantled CPACS (its support for worthy causes like Palestine too embarrassing) while its links with Technion and Hebrew University remain.

A cabal of the Zionist lobby, university management and the media led to my sometime Sydney University colleague, Tim Anderson, being sacked in 2019 (ultimately confirmed in a Federal Court Appeal in May 2024 on a technicality). The University closed down the pro-Palestine encampment in late June 2024 under Jewish community pressure, with the Vice-Chancellor offering a grovelling apology for not closing it down sooner.

Several Sydney University research staff and an ex-student (the latter now a National Campaigns Coordinator of the Australasian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS)) are currently suing academics and Israel critics Nick Riemer and John Keane for supposedly also violating the Racial Discrimination Act in criticising a certain foreign racist state and its cheer squad. The ex-longtime head of the University’s Discipline of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies, Suzanne Rutland, has joined the suit. One would think that the ultra-Zionist Rutland would keep her head down, to ensure that her ‘academic discipline’ is not being politicized for Israel’s cause. But no. Remarkably and uncharacteristically, Sydney University management has joined the suit in support of Riemer and Keane. One can only assume that management’s action is driven by self-interest rather than principle.

In October 2025 a telling incident occurred on Sydney University’s campus. A University staffer of self-described Palestinian origin walked past a stall manned by Jewish students who were publicizing the celebration of Sukkoth. The woman (unnamed in any report) reputedly asked “Are you a Zionist?”, before adding “In your name, they’re shredding children bit to bit … you should be making it stop.” The woman further added “You’re disgusting … you are depraved baby-killers.” The university condemned the statements, labelling them antisemitic and hate speech and suspended the woman. The woman was subsequently sacked (strangely, on 15 December, one day after the Bondi massacre).

Interviewed at the stall was Dror Liraz, then President of AUJS, which had set up the stall. Turning to AUJS’ website we read, under Who we are: ‘AUJS’ constitution lists its four pillars as Judaism, Activism, Zionism, and Pluralism’. Under ‘Zionism’ we read: “We seek to promote a positive image of Israel on campus; to encourage truth in student political dialogue, and to educate the wider student population about Judaism and Israel.” Good luck with that. Under ‘Pluralism’ we read: “AUJS is committed to providing a voice and platform for every Jewish and Zionist student … regardless of political affiliation or religious identity. We reflect the complete spectrum of Jewish student opinion …”. This is a peculiar concept of pluralism.

It turns that (disclosures courtesy of Sydney University’s student newspaper Honi Soit, March 2024) that Zionism and Israel is of more than of marginal interest to AUJS. We read:

“Leaked documents, screenshots and email communication chains reveal that the Australasian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS) lobbies on behalf of the Israeli government and its Zionist policies across Australian university campuses. … These leaked documents show AUJS’ significant preoccupation with Israeli advocacy. Their refusal to engage with anti-Zionist Jewish voices makes their claim to be a representative body for Jewish students tenuous.”

A very peculiar concept of pluralism. So here we have Sydney University Jewish students, under the AUJS mantle, in September 2024 demanding the resignation of the University’s Vice-Chancellor Mark Scott. At that event we discover:

“Jewish student Dror Liraz, who was born in Israel, said the last 11 months had seen “dangerous, hateful individuals crossing the limits of free speech on this campus with their calls for intifada, their continued use of offensive and sometimes illegal graffiti, and their labelling of my country of birth as a terrorist state”.”

Yet if the shoe fits … Said spokesperson Liraz made a submission to a proposed Commission of Inquiry into Antisemitism at Australian Universities Bill 2024 (the Commission was not established). There we read: “My name is Dror Liraz and I am an Israeli-born Australian Jew with great pride for both of my nations …”.

Israel’s genocide apparently passed under AUJS’ student members’ radar while other students’ protests against that genocide causes them great distress. Meanwhile, the Palestinian woman staffer, beside herself with genuine distress, is sacked for ‘serious misconduct’. The University claimed that ‘free and confidential wellbeing support is available to those who need it’ – evidently to self-designated Zionist students and not to the sacked staffer.

The Academy’s formal commitment to truth, based on reason and evidence (hopefully complemented by an ethics-based humanity) is apparently yesterday’s model, not fit for current purposes.

The junkets. There are perennial sponsored trips (by AIJAC and others) of opinion-makers and policy-makers to Israel. The Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce (not least with the aforementioned Jillian Segal’s involvement) has also played an active role in pushing Israel’s commercial ‘virtues’ via conferences and Israel visits – an arm of soft power.

The political class. The political class itself is naturally under constant pressure and attempted ‘sweetening’. Then Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd (previously an undiluted supporter of Israel), belatedly expelled a token Israeli ‘diplomat’ in May 2010, after Israel had used four Australian passports as means to assassinate Hamas leader Mahmoud al Mabhou in Dubai in January 2010. The lobby was displeased. Then Labor Deputy Leader, Julia Gillard, overthrew Rudd, in a ‘bloodless coup’, a month later in June 2010. Coincidence? It is not groundless to infer that the lobby was behind the coup. Gillard was ardently pro-Israel, and had to be rolled in November 2012, by a bevy of senior Labor Ministers, led by then Foreign Minister Bob Carr (himself a previous ‘Friend of Israel’ politician), in pushing for Palestine to be granted a seat at the UN.

Current Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese started life as a radical student (I was there) – an activist against apartheid South Africa and subsequently against apartheid Israel. At some stage during his long Labor Party and Parliamentary career his activism was effectively subdued. None of his fellow Parliamentarians are spilling the beans as to when and how it happened.

Albanese is now caught in a bind. Crucified by the lobby (donning the obligatory kippah at gatherings), he is being blamed for the Bondi massacre (not least by mass murderer Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) and blamed for reluctance (entirely reasonable) to establish a Royal Commission into the affair. Preposterous. He is being pressured to adopt all the recommendations of the ridiculous Segal report which involves comprehensive repression of any critique of Israel and shutting down of errant educational institutions. Apparently contrite under the delirium (media constant pressure), Albanese agrees to host the Israel President Isaac Herzog in a visit to Australia, presumably to lecture Australians on their rampant antisemitism. Grotesque. Meanwhile, the Netanyahu government has recently authorized 19 new settlements in the West Bank. More of the same.

Anti-Zionist Jews. Most tellingly, the lobby savages anti-Zionist Australian Jews and their small-scale against-the-grain organizations. Thus did long-time heavyweight AIJAC Mark Leibler tweet on 8 February 2025:

“Nothing, but nothing, is worse than those Jews who level totally unfounded allegations of genocide and ethnic cleansing against the State of Israel. They are repulsive and revolting human beings. Their relatives who were murdered by the Nazis – the role models for Hamas – will undoubtedly be turning in their graves. Their avowed anti Zionism is clearly no more than a cover for the reality that they are vicious antisemites.”

This heinous tweet has since been taken down, but it has been reproduced here.

Similarly, the National Council of Jewish Women Australia’s Linda Ben-Menashe eviscerates, indeed excommunicates from the sisterhood, human rights lawyer and courageous anti-Zionist activist Sarah Schwartz.

In short, the centre of gravity of the Australian Jewish community is Israel-occupied territory.

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The situation is as follows and is set to continue, because embedded, for the indefinite future.

Apartheid Israel is suffering no reprisals for its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population. On the contrary, it is being funded and armed in the operation.

Israel, aided by the worshipful ‘diaspora’ (who decline to make Aliyah), has perhaps the densest lobbying and propaganda machine in history – a key factor in Israel’s impunity. Apartheid South Africa eat your heart out.

Resistance – blowback – will inevitably be ongoing – in forms yet unknown.

This resistance predictably will be labelled ‘hate’ and placed in the ever-expanding ‘antisemitism’ category. The absurd IHRA definition of antisemitism will be universally adopted and its proponents will neither know nor care to hone in on genuine antisemitism, which is the point.

Repression of any manifestation of opposition to Israel (‘globalise the intifada!’) will further escalate, with educational institutions rendered dysfunctional and the media self-subordinated to abject obeisance to the interests of Israel.

Apartheid Israel will continue to murder and expel Palestinians and to permanently colonize neighboring territories wherever possible. The motif is lebensraum – from the river to the sea, and beyond.

In October 1899 (soon after the establishment of the World Zionist Congress), Theodore Herzl’s advisor Davis Trietsch wrote to Herzl noting:

“I would suggest to you to come around in time to the ‘Greater Palestine’ programme before it is too late. The Basel programme must contain the words ‘Greater Palestine’ or ‘Palestine and its neighboring Lands’ – otherwise it’s nonsense. You do not get the ten million Jews into a land of 25,000 km.”

Don’t wait up for the resolution. It’s a psychopathology. The tragic deaths at Bondi are merely its latest victims.

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