Let me get this right – we’re expected to believe it is entirely coincidental that there has been a spike in anti-Jewish violence at the exact same time as hatred for the Jewish State has soared? We’re meant to think there is no connection whatsoever between today’s frothing bourgeois animus for the Jewish nation and the rise in disdain for the Jewish people? You’re telling us the targeting of Jews in the West is wholly unrelated to the Western elites’ ceaseless damning of the Jewish homeland as a uniquely barbarous entity?
Is anyone still buying this? I’m not. And after the massacre of the Jews at Bondi, that mini 7 October that has shaken Australia to its core, it’s time more people refused to buy it. The only individuals responsible for that pogrom on the beach are the father-and-son fascists who carried it out. But their apocalyptic loathing for Jews did not emerge in a vacuum. It festered and curdled in an era in which we are told, day in, day out, that the Jewish nation is a pox on Earth. That it is singularly murderous. That all who support it are scum. That it is so depraved it might have to be violently excised from the Holy Land, all the way from the river to the sea. It does not detract from the culpability of the two Jew killers to analyse this foul soil in which their medieval bigotry was able to take such firm root.
After Bondi, the activist class is fuming at the suggestion that their rage against the Jewish State might be aiding and abetting a new rage against the Jewish people. When the UK’s chief rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, said chants like ‘Globalise the intifada’ have stirred up suspicion and rancour against Jews, they flipped. How outrageous to suggest that ‘people opposing genocide’ are the problem, wailed the digital left. Blinded by the glare of their own self-righteousness, they refuse to countenance any connection between their zealous enmity for the Jewish State and the new imperilling of the Jewish people.
Former Aussie PM Tony Abbott and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu added their voices to the mix. On those ‘hate marches’ against Israel, there have been open cries for ‘the Jewish people of Israel to effectively suffer a new Holocaust’, said Abbott. And it is unquestionable, he said, that this is nourishing a culture of ‘anti-Jewish hate’ in the West. The ‘pro-Palestine’ set is irate. Owen Jones says ‘pro-Israel cheerleaders’ are ‘opportunistically us[ing] this atrocity as an excuse to silence opponents of Israel’s genocide’.
Perhaps I’m being overly optimistic, but I sense defensiveness in the left’s fury with those who say the barbarism in Bondi was at the very least aided by the voguish scorn for the Jewish nation. That this is the ‘intifada’ being ‘globalised’, exactly as Israel’s witless haters have been crying out for. Following the Bondi massacre, there’s been a furious effort to erect a moral firewall between the activism of those who loathe the Jewish State and the actions of those who loathe the Jewish people. But it’s not working. The firewall isn’t holding. More people are now saying it: if you create a culture that is neurotically hostile to the world’s only Jewish country, there is a very good chance you will inflame hatred for Jewish people.
The establishment Israelophobes always say the same thing – it is not anti-Semitic to criticise Israel. That’s right, it isn’t. But we are not talking about ‘criticism of Israel’. We are talking about a fanatical obsession with Israel. We are talking about the singling out of Israel as the most inhuman nation in existence. We are talking about brazen agitation for Israel’s destruction. In Australia and across the West, armies of bigots have clamoured for the erasure of this ‘bloodletting’ state. That unholy and unhappiest marriage of Islamists and leftists has openly insisted that world peace is contingent on the scrubbing from Earth of the demonic Jewish nation.
We’re talking about the reanimation of medieval tropes in the drag of ‘anti-Zionism’. We’re talking about the Jewish State being accused of lusting after the blood of innocents, just as the Jews once were. We’re talking about the Jewish nation being branded the puppet-master of world affairs, just as the Jews once were. We’re talking about the Jewish homeland being reimagined as the poison in the well of humanity, just as the Jews once were. Criticising Israel? Go for it. Spending your every waking hour telling the world Israel is a diabolical entity that relishes in the destruction of the sinless? Not on my watch.
As Dave Rich has argued, it shouldn’t surprise us one bit that ‘a protest movement that treats the world’s only Jewish State as a transgressor of all moral and human norms’ is helping to embolden lowlifes who just ‘do not like Jews’. How telling that the faux-progressive elites see ‘incitement’ everywhere except in their own daily hate missives against the Jewish State that have so many echoes of the ancient dread of the Jewish people. Call a ‘transwoman’ a man and they’ll have you up for hate speech. Call for the annihilation of the Jewish State and they’ll hug you.
If this high-status invective for the Jewish State and its allegedly immoral populace had exploded a few years back, it might have been manageable. It would still have required the firmest of pushbacks, but it might not have proven so existentially menacing. Today is different, though. Now the chattering classes’ mandatory abhorrence for the Jewish nation mingles with other catastrophic trends to create a moment of very clear danger for both the Jews and civilisation itself.
There are our porous borders, the flat-out refusal of those who rule over us to police our frontiers against people from profoundly anti-Semitic cultures. There is the emboldening of Islamists. We’ve seen them on those hate marches, walking alongside middle-aged Guardianistas in Vinted pashmimas, hollering for the return of the Army of Muhammad to kill all the Jews. And there is the authoritarian clampdown on open discussion of the Islamist threat. Raise concerns about the violent-minded Jew-haters in Islamist circles and you’ll be branded an ‘Islamophobe’. Our thoughts are policed better than our borders.
It is the crashing together of these two things – the modish loathing for Israel and the swelling of the Islamist menace – that has birthed this lethal moment. To defame Israel as uniquely barbarous would be bad at the best of times. To do it when we know very well there are bellicose Islamists in our midst is reckless in the extreme. Elite Israelophobia is like a red rag to murderous anti-Semitism. The Bondi pogrom is devastating proof of this – two ISIS worshippers carrying out a murderous assault on Jews following 26 months of non-stop Jewish State demonisation in Oz and across the West.
After Bondi, we have to ask – has anti-Semitism now been superseded by anti-Israel sentiment? Is the hatred for Israel not simply the witless inflamer of anti-Semitic thinking but the very form that anti-Semitism now takes? As the Australian’s Yoni Bashan reminded us this week, anti-Semitism ‘never goose-steps into the ball dressed as anti-Semitism. It doesn’t wear a sign. It arrives in the costume of the moment. As nationalism. As anti-capitalism. As social justice.’ And today as ‘criticism of Israel’. As 2025 comes to a close, one question matters above all others: are you on the side of the Jews or are you not? Their safety and our civilisation depend on how we answer.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
After Bondi, the activist class is fuming at the suggestion that their rage against the Jewish State might be aiding and abetting a new rage against the Jewish people. When the UK’s chief rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, said chants like ‘Globalise the intifada’ have stirred up suspicion and rancour against Jews, they flipped. How outrageous to suggest that ‘people opposing genocide’ are the problem, wailed the digital left. Blinded by the glare of their own self-righteousness, they refuse to countenance any connection between their zealous enmity for the Jewish State and the new imperilling of the Jewish people.
Former Aussie PM Tony Abbott and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu added their voices to the mix. On those ‘hate marches’ against Israel, there have been open cries for ‘the Jewish people of Israel to effectively suffer a new Holocaust’, said Abbott. And it is unquestionable, he said, that this is nourishing a culture of ‘anti-Jewish hate’ in the West. The ‘pro-Palestine’ set is irate. Owen Jones says ‘pro-Israel cheerleaders’ are ‘opportunistically us[ing] this atrocity as an excuse to silence opponents of Israel’s genocide’.
Perhaps I’m being overly optimistic, but I sense defensiveness in the left’s fury with those who say the barbarism in Bondi was at the very least aided by the voguish scorn for the Jewish nation. That this is the ‘intifada’ being ‘globalised’, exactly as Israel’s witless haters have been crying out for. Following the Bondi massacre, there’s been a furious effort to erect a moral firewall between the activism of those who loathe the Jewish State and the actions of those who loathe the Jewish people. But it’s not working. The firewall isn’t holding. More people are now saying it: if you create a culture that is neurotically hostile to the world’s only Jewish country, there is a very good chance you will inflame hatred for Jewish people.
The establishment Israelophobes always say the same thing – it is not anti-Semitic to criticise Israel. That’s right, it isn’t. But we are not talking about ‘criticism of Israel’. We are talking about a fanatical obsession with Israel. We are talking about the singling out of Israel as the most inhuman nation in existence. We are talking about brazen agitation for Israel’s destruction. In Australia and across the West, armies of bigots have clamoured for the erasure of this ‘bloodletting’ state. That unholy and unhappiest marriage of Islamists and leftists has openly insisted that world peace is contingent on the scrubbing from Earth of the demonic Jewish nation.
We’re talking about the reanimation of medieval tropes in the drag of ‘anti-Zionism’. We’re talking about the Jewish State being accused of lusting after the blood of innocents, just as the Jews once were. We’re talking about the Jewish nation being branded the puppet-master of world affairs, just as the Jews once were. We’re talking about the Jewish homeland being reimagined as the poison in the well of humanity, just as the Jews once were. Criticising Israel? Go for it. Spending your every waking hour telling the world Israel is a diabolical entity that relishes in the destruction of the sinless? Not on my watch.
As Dave Rich has argued, it shouldn’t surprise us one bit that ‘a protest movement that treats the world’s only Jewish State as a transgressor of all moral and human norms’ is helping to embolden lowlifes who just ‘do not like Jews’. How telling that the faux-progressive elites see ‘incitement’ everywhere except in their own daily hate missives against the Jewish State that have so many echoes of the ancient dread of the Jewish people. Call a ‘transwoman’ a man and they’ll have you up for hate speech. Call for the annihilation of the Jewish State and they’ll hug you.
If this high-status invective for the Jewish State and its allegedly immoral populace had exploded a few years back, it might have been manageable. It would still have required the firmest of pushbacks, but it might not have proven so existentially menacing. Today is different, though. Now the chattering classes’ mandatory abhorrence for the Jewish nation mingles with other catastrophic trends to create a moment of very clear danger for both the Jews and civilisation itself.
There are our porous borders, the flat-out refusal of those who rule over us to police our frontiers against people from profoundly anti-Semitic cultures. There is the emboldening of Islamists. We’ve seen them on those hate marches, walking alongside middle-aged Guardianistas in Vinted pashmimas, hollering for the return of the Army of Muhammad to kill all the Jews. And there is the authoritarian clampdown on open discussion of the Islamist threat. Raise concerns about the violent-minded Jew-haters in Islamist circles and you’ll be branded an ‘Islamophobe’. Our thoughts are policed better than our borders.
It is the crashing together of these two things – the modish loathing for Israel and the swelling of the Islamist menace – that has birthed this lethal moment. To defame Israel as uniquely barbarous would be bad at the best of times. To do it when we know very well there are bellicose Islamists in our midst is reckless in the extreme. Elite Israelophobia is like a red rag to murderous anti-Semitism. The Bondi pogrom is devastating proof of this – two ISIS worshippers carrying out a murderous assault on Jews following 26 months of non-stop Jewish State demonisation in Oz and across the West.
After Bondi, we have to ask – has anti-Semitism now been superseded by anti-Israel sentiment? Is the hatred for Israel not simply the witless inflamer of anti-Semitic thinking but the very form that anti-Semitism now takes? As the Australian’s Yoni Bashan reminded us this week, anti-Semitism ‘never goose-steps into the ball dressed as anti-Semitism. It doesn’t wear a sign. It arrives in the costume of the moment. As nationalism. As anti-capitalism. As social justice.’ And today as ‘criticism of Israel’. As 2025 comes to a close, one question matters above all others: are you on the side of the Jews or are you not? Their safety and our civilisation depend on how we answer.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
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