ANTI-SEMITISM IN AUSTRALIA – AFTER THE BONDI MASSACRE – ARSEN OSTROVSKY

Sydney’s Bondi Beach massacre during Hannukah celebrations on Sunday 14 December 2025 shocked Australians. That years of anti-Semitism, especially following the atrocities of 7 October 2023, waged against Israeli citizens in southern Israel by Hamas terrorists, had led to such a bloody outrage changed Australia. But how? On Tuesday 10 February 2026, Arsen Ostrovsky, human rights lawyer & head of AIJAC’s Sydney office, and Gemma Tognini, social and political commentator, columnist with The Australian and founder of GT Communications addressed The Sydney Institute to evaluate what happened and what next.

ANTI-SEMITISM IN AUSTRALIA – AFTER THE BONDI MASSACRE

ARSEN OSTROVSKY

It is an incredible honour to be here at The Sydney Institute. I’ve been here many, many times. I’ve walked past and you see the list of prime ministers, diplomats, security officials, world leaders, and now I get to speak here as well, and all it took was a bullet to the head. I’m also incredibly happy to be here with Gemma. If you put a Jew and an Italian in a room, we can talk for a long time, not least over our bonding of food and our Jewish mothers.

But as is clear now, I wear multiple hats. One is with Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), which I’m very proud to have commenced as head of the Sydney office. The other is as a survivor of the Bondi attacks. These are four words, “I am a survivor”, that I never thought I would have to utter in my life, but here I am.

I grew up in Bondi. For the last 13 or so years of my life, I had lived in Israel, and that includes through the period of October 7 and the war with Iran. So, I have seen what I thought was the worst of humanity until having to repeat it again only in Sydney’s Bondi.

I was born in Odessa, which was still then part of the former Soviet Union, and moved here with my family as refuseniks. We escaped in 1987 when Bob Hawke was still Prime Minister. The Australia that I grew up in, the Australia that welcomed our family as refugees, was a very different Australia than what we have today. It was an oasis. It was a beacon of peace and tolerance, of humanity and compassion, that welcomed us with open arms. I cannot recall in all my years of living here ever once facing an instance of antisemitism. And I went to the most public of high schools and went on to the University in Wollongong.

That was seemingly an eternity away. Today, when I dropped my kids off at a Jewish Day School, they went through not one, not two, but three layers of security.

Including armed police, including Jewish communal security guards and private security guards. I don’t know of any other group in this country that has to go through this. It’s not just our schools, it’s our communal institutions, it’s our aged care homes, it’s our synagogues. No one in Australia lives like that, except us.

I was originally planning on going straight into my experience at Bondi, but it would be somewhat remiss not to talk about the elephant in the room. And that is what happened last night, and certainly the discussion we’ve been having endlessly in the last few days and weeks with the news of Israeli President Herzog’s arrival to Australia. I would like to express deep gratitude to the New South Wales Police, for two reasons. One for allowing me to get here safely and freely, but also for their actions in the last 24 hours.

The protest against the visit of Israel’s President Herzog in Sydney last was led by a group of Jihadist wannabes who, quite frankly, hate Israel as much as they hate Jews and, if not more so, as much as they hate Australia. We are their common enemy. You can ask if they’ve learned anything from Bondi, when you see a former Australian of the Year standing up and calling to globalise the Intifada. What does she think globalise the Intifada is? To hold our hands, sing Kumbaya and have peace?

Globalise the Intifada is what happened in Bondi. It’s a 10-year-old girl murdered in cold blood. It is an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, who saw the worst of humanity in surviving the Holocaust, being murdered

and 13 other precious souls being taken away from us. What we saw yesterday was a split screen.

On the one hand, you have President Herzog, who came to Australia for one reason and one reason only, to show solidarity and compassion for the Jewish community here, after the most heinous act of terror on Australian soil. To go to Bondi, I was there yesterday morning as well, to lay rocks, which is what we do in the Jewish faith. Because rocks last, flowers don’t. To lay two rocks he brought from Jerusalem as a sign of respect.

Then what we saw what happened outside the town hall yesterday, even after the Supreme Court handed down a verdict and said, no, you cannot do this. Even after New South Wales Premier Chris Minns, whom I believe deserves a great deal of respect and acknowledgement for his leadership, said, yes, you can protest, but don’t do it here. Protest in Hyde Park, away from our community, away from pedestrians. You can protest, but you cannot antagonise. You cannot break the law. Yes, freedom of speech is sacrosanct, but it is not an open licence to defy the law, to abuse us, to harass us, to intimidate us, and to call for globalisation of the Intifada.

The President came here as a guest. He’s not a politician. He’s a head of state, no different to the Governor-General. And he came as a guest of the Governor-General and the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese. So, the reality is those that have been calling his visit divisive, which I believe is a very fringe minority of very loud extremists, are actually the ones that are being divisive. They are the ones that are pouring fuel on this toxic atmosphere that we find ourselves in. They are the ones, through their relentless vilification and harassment and abuse of anyone who supports even Israel’s very right to exist, they are the ones that are being divisive.

If these protesters really cared about human rights and peace and justice, maybe they’d be protesting Ayatollah Khamenei. Fifty, sixty thousand people in Iran have been massacred. They couldn’t care less.

They care about two things. One, they care about indulging in this ravenous Jew hatred, unadulterated, unhinged. And two, they care about confrontation and clicks. They care about hashtags. They care about Instagram. They care about getting front page stories and provocation. If they wanted to protest they could have gone to Hyde Park, but they don’t care.

I was at Bondi. Yes, I got hit with a bullet to the head. It is not the easiest thing to talk about. We had moved back to Australia two and a half weeks before the attack. I grew up in Bondi. Bondi was my beach. Bondi was my home. Bondi is my community.

We told our daughters, four and eight years old, that we were moving to Australia. These are girls who have seen many bomb shelters in their lives. More than any child ever should. When we told them we’re moving to Australia, my oldest said, “Daddy, does that mean no more boomies?”. No more rockets, no more sirens, no more missiles, no more running to the bomb shelter. This is the same girl who would put her flip-flops at a certain angle by the door, because if a bomb was to come at 3:30am, she could get in her flip-flops as fast as possible to make it down to our bomb shelter. No more boomies, she asked. I said, no sweetie, no more boomies. We’re going to Australia. This is a long way away.

What do you say to an eight-year-old girl? As a father, as a parent? You feel like you’ve failed your number one duty. Number one, protect your children. When we got to the festival, I was there with my wife and both our daughters. It was the the first night of the Hanukkah festival. The festival of light. It teaches us that light will always prevail, not that there is no darkness, there is darkness, but the light will prevail. But in order for the light to prevail, we must fight for it.

So, when we got there, my wife and daughters went to sit down, to begin watching the ceremony, which was about to start, and I went to get some food. Then bang! My first thought was, it must be some balloons. This was a festival, children, families, face painting, pet animals, rides. It must have been a clown or something or a balloon, and then bang! bang! bang!, non-stop. So, I knew straight away, we’re under attack.

People were running in every direction, people taking their children, chairs falling, smoke billowing from the grass, and I ducked. There was a picnic area right next to us, I ducked. But my first thought is my wife and kids, about 20 or 30 metres away from me, which meant they would have been even more exposed, in line with the shooter. So, I stood up to run towards them, and I got hit. It’s hard to describe that feeling, but it’s like someone opens a faucet and blood just gushes out. I fell to the ground, and I began screaming, I’m hit, I’m hit. No one could help. Everyone was lying down. Bullets were going in every direction. I put my hand on my head. I could feel the flap of my skin.

You can still see the scars there today, which is thankfully, bless our angels at Royal North Shore Hospital, fixed up. I called my wife. Couldn’t reach her. I didn’t know where she was. I didn’t know where the kids were. Next to me, lying, a man gave me his shirt to put a tourniquet on my head. On my right, an old man was lying over his wife, shielding her. Not moving. He was shot – blood was dripping out, drip, drip, drip.

 On the left of me, two people were shot in front of my very eyes. By then. The shooting had been going for about four minutes. Still I hadn’t heard from my wife.

So, I took a photo of myself. One, to see how bad I was hit, and two, to send to her with the words “love you”. Not knowing if those were going to be my last two words. Maybe ten minutes after the shooting started, I finally got word that she was okay. That she was safe. And that she took the children in her arms, and they ran towards the beach. They hid on the sand in a spot where they keep surfboards. The scars, physical scars,will heal. Emotional scars will take much longer.

The truth is, we cannot change what happened. But we can change the future. We must change the future. In order to do that, however, we need to also talk about how we got to where we are today. How did this happen in our Australia, a sunburnt country, a land of opportunity and freedom. We like to think of Australia, or perhaps, we did think of Australia, as a tolerant, multicultural, open success story. In many ways it is, but that image has also, over the years, bred complacency where we allowed hate to fester unchecked.

We told ourselves that antisemitism was marginal, it was fringe, it was imported from elsewhere. It was on the extreme far-right. It was in the minority, that belief is no longer tenable. Antisemitism is not confined to the Neo-Nazis or the graffiti in the dead of the night. It is now mainstream. And Bondi is the result of years of warnings going unheeded.

What do people think would happen when, two days after October 7, on October 9, at Sydney Opera House, we saw a mob, exactly the same mob, and exactly the same people that we saw in town hall yesterday, marching towards the Opera House, chanting “gas the Jews” only to be told, no, no, they only said “where are the Jews?” As if that’s somehow more tolerable or more acceptable – it is not.

What did we think would happen when synagogues were being firebombed, when Jews were being doxxed, when schools were being graffitied. When we had weekly, week after week after week, chants to globalise Intifada, marches across the Harbour Bridge, our landmarks being hijacked. And yes, the role of the government as well.

We have to ask hard questions about that. What did people think would happen when the government inflamed the conflict, reversing decades of bipartisan support for Israel. Singling Israel out for opprobrium, engaging in lawfare campaigns in international courts, or giving tacit approval to that. Or recognising a Palestinian state while hostages were still being held in the dungeons of Gaza. What did people think was going to happen? Peace would burst into being?

No, we warned. We warned repeatedly that when this hatred is left unchecked, when it is mainstream, when it’s legitimised or excused, it will lead to violence. Bondi on 14 December was the deadly manifestation of those warnings going unheeded. We also need to talk about the elephant in the room. It’s one word, Zionism. Zionism at its simplest, is belief in the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in our ancestral homeland, you don’t have to be a Jew.

Jonathan Sacks, former chief rabbi of the UK, in 2016 was speaking to the European Parliament. He spoke about antisemitism as a mutating virus. It was said in the Middle Ages, they came for us because of our religion. In the 1930s and 1940s, they came for us because of our race. Today, they come for us because of our nation state, Israel. But, throughout the generations, there has been one constant, the refusal and denial of Jews to live as free and equal human beings. Antisemitism is a virus that has mutated.

It is not only attacks on Jews as individuals, on synagogues and on Jews celebrating a religious holiday of Hanukkah, but it is also the hatred manifesting itself as antizionism. As if that can ever justify attacks on children, on elderly, synagogues, on our schools. It cannot, and we need to call that out, and we need to address this.

Bondi must be a turning point. We must learn not only what happened, but how it was allowed to happen, and appropriate lessons to ensure that it does not ever happen again. To that extent, the Royal Commission is absolutely critical, and it’s something we called for from the very beginning. We must understand that even though we were targeted as Jews, this was an assault on Australia, on Australian values. This is not a left-wing issue. This not a right-wing issue. This is an Australian issue, because when any one minority is singled out, is dehumanised, is attacked, is harassed and vilified, it is as if the entire nation is attacked. So, we all have to speak out.

The attack in Bondi was not merely a failure of intelligence, though it was a very big one. It was a wholesale failure of leadership. And we need to understand that leaders have obligations and power and responsibility to show leadership, to show courage, to show moral clarity. I believe we are seeing that now. We’ve been seeing that from Premier Chris Minns and increasingly so from Prime Minister Albanese, who, I would say, at least in this regard, should be acknowledged for inviting President Herzog.

But it is a long road to repairing the relationship with Israel that has been so harmed over the last number of years, as well as with the Jewish community, which has, in many ways, felt abandoned by this government.

Our warnings have been unheeded. And we must call a spade a spade. We cannot shy away from calling out antisemitism and Jew hatred wherever we see it. Whether it is from the far-right. Whether it is in radical Islamic circles. Whether it is, as it has been now, so deeply entrenched within progressive cultural arena, as we’ve seen at one Writers’ Festival after another.

We must learn from what happened, if we don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past. I think we can.