People walk at the scene of a shooting incident at Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia, December 14, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kirsty Needham

On Sunday, a Chabad Hanukkah candle-lighting at Bondi Beach was turned into a massacre. At least 16 people are dead. Witnesses report that the terrorists shouted “Allahu Akbar” between bursts of gunfire. What should have been a moment of communal joy became a scene of mass murder, carried out in full view of a society that has spent years purposefully ignoring antisemitic incitement and terror attacks that led to this moment.

Around the same time, elsewhere in Australia, the same moral failure surfaced again. On a Melbourne tram, an Australian woman verbally accosted a rabbi and his two children, aged eight and 14, telling them to “go to the gas chambers.” She was carrying a bag bearing the PLO flag. A Jewish father and his children were told, in public, to imagine their extermination.

And that was after “protesters” in Sydney chanted “gas the Jews” — with absolutely no consequences.

“Go to the gas chambers.” There is no metaphor here. No policy critique. No political argument hiding behind rhetoric. There is only genocidal hatred, delivered calmly and directly.

And yet anyone familiar with the pattern already knows what comes next. Not moral clarity, but “context.” Not unambiguous condemnation, but explanation.

We will be told about anger, about trauma, about spillover from Israel’s war with Hamas. We are reminded that emotions are high, tensions are inflamed, and nothing can be viewed in isolation.

This is not analysis. It is evasion.

This is the anti-Zionism exception.

In any other context, this kind of mass murder would end the conversation. No editor would ask what provoked it. No official would suggest it must be understood through global politics. No journalist would hesitate to call the racism exactly what it is. And don’t forget that before the State of Israel was created, one third of the entire global Jewish population was murdered for their religion. But now we’re going to be told that this is only happening because of Israel.

When the targets are Jews, and when the hatred can be draped in the language or symbols of the Palestinian cause, the rules change. Antisemitism becomes negotiable. Murderous language becomes expressive speech. The victims become abstractions.

This is why anti-Zionism has become the dominant framework through which antisemitism is excused in the modern West. Zionism is the belief that Jews, like any other people, have the right to collective self-determination and national survival through sovereignty in part of their indigenous and historical homeland. To deny that right uniquely to Jews — while granting it to every other people — is not a policy disagreement. It is a moral inversion that recasts Jewish survival itself as illegitimate.

For years, Australia, like much of the democratic West, has tolerated rhetoric that would be unthinkable if directed at any other group.

Crowds have chanted “gas the Jews” and many other murderous slogans with no consequence. Universities have hosted speakers who portray Jewish sovereignty as a unique moral crime. Media outlets have repeatedly softened or obscured antisemitic incidents — like burning synagogues — treating them as political reactions rather than as hatred with a long and documented history.

Law enforcement responses have been hesitant and inconsistent, often focused on crowd control instead of stopping incitement.

In England, Jews wearing yarmulkes and Stars of David have been arrested for “provocation,” while standing before crowds chanting “Globalize the Intifada,” “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the Gas,” and “Khaybar, Khaybar ya Yahud” — an explicit invocation of the massacre of Jews in seventh-century Arabia.

This matters because antisemitism does not operate like other hatreds. It has always depended on permission structures. It advances not only through violence, but through ideas that render violence against Jews intelligible, justifiable, and even necessary to those inclined to act.

When genocidal slogans are tolerated in public space, when Jewish identity is reframed as provocation, when Jewish self-determination is condemned as uniquely evil, and when hatred is endlessly contextualized rather than condemned, the distance between speech and action collapses.

What happened at Bondi Beach was 100% predictable. A slogan shouted yesterday becomes gunfire today. The targets were not symbols or states or abstractions. They were Jews lighting candles.

The media plays a central role in this process, whether it admits it or not. Language is softened. Headlines are hedged. Victims are pushed to the margins of their own stories. A massacre becomes an “incident.” A threat of extermination becomes “heated rhetoric.” Jewish presence itself is recast as a political act that invites response.

This is how a Hanukkah celebration becomes a “flashpoint.” This is how a rabbi and his children become “part of a broader conflict.” This is how Jews going about their lives in Sydney, London, or New York are quietly reassigned responsibility for the hatred directed at them.

Some will insist that Bondi Beach and the Melbourne tram were isolated events. They never are. Antisemitism has never announced itself first with bullets. It begins with the libels societies allow to circulate. It begins when calls for violence against Jews — “Globalize the Intifada,” “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the Gas” — are treated as political opinions rather than warnings.

A culture that cannot draw a red line at “go to the gas chambers” has already erased the line entirely.

Bondi Beach was not unforeseeable. It was foretold — in slogans excused, in threats contextualized, in hatred endlessly rebranded as politics. The massacre did not appear without warning. It appeared after years of permission.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, antisemitism, and Jewish history and serves on the board of Herut North America.

A man lights a candle as police officers stand guard following the attack on a Jewish holiday celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia, December 15, 2025. REUTERS/Flavio Brancaleone

Jews arrived in Australia with the First Fleet in 1788. That is the Australian equivalent of the Mayflower, albeit with convicts.

From their earliest days, Australian Jews integrated into national life visibly, with patriotism and confidence. They built their shuls without apology, established businesses without resentment, and raised families with great pride.

They were disproportionately represented in the military, academia, medicine, and commerce. They embraced their Australian identity fully, while remaining true to their Jewish faith and seeing no contradiction between the two.

Australia was once a country that understood how integration worked. Newcomers were welcome, but they were expected to participate in a shared civic culture. Loyalty, contribution, and respect for Australian society were not considered controversial demands — they were the price of admission. For more than two centuries, Australian Jews lived by that bargain.

This is why the massacre at Bondi Beach during a public Hanukkah celebration seems like more than an act of terror. It feels like a betrayal. Holocaust survivor Alex Kleytman, 92, shielded his wife of 57 years in the crowd before dying. That is the Jewish-Aussie spirit that symbolized this community.

Hanukkah is, by design, a public holiday. It commemorates a minority preserving its identity while remaining part of a broader civilization. Light is placed deliberately in the public square. Faith without withdrawal. Cultural continuity without separatism. That is the message of Hanukkah.

That such a celebration was targeted in one of Australia’s most iconic public spaces is not incidental. It was an attack on a place and a community that exemplified successful integration during a festival that celebrates cohesion and tolerance.

Speaking to Australian Jews over the past two years, a new theme has emerged — not only of fear, but abandonment. The country they love increasingly hesitates to defend them, is embarrassed by its own culture, and is unwilling to confront hateful belief systems it has imported.

This is not an immigration crisis. It is a governance crisis.

Great countries are built by immigrants. The Greeks, Romans, and Americans all understood that growth comes from outsiders who want to become insiders. But instead of importing entrepreneurs, innovators, and builders, we have incubated an endless supply of cultural resentment. A nation cannot transmit to its citizens what it no longer values. Assimilation requires national pride and confidence in one’s own civilizational values.

Deterrence is dismissed for fear of “sending the wrong signal.” Enforcement is denounced as cruelty. Borders are discussed endlessly but defended reluctantly. Politicians still perform the language of control, but with the conviction of actors reciting lines they no longer believe.

Western governments have not failed to implement their will. They have abandoned the idea that they are entitled to have a will in the first place. The result is a system engineered for failure while absolving those responsible for it. Illegal entry is rewarded. Removal is treated as a scandal. Integration becomes optional.

What emerges is grievance without gratitude, and hate without consequence. Flags become suspect. History is reduced to a catalogue of sins. Elites perform ritualized shame as a marker of sophistication. A country that cannot defend its own identity cannot plausibly ask newcomers to adopt it.

Bondi was not a random eruption of violence. It was the predictable outcome of a system that encouraged hate, refused to do anything about years of incitement and terror attacks on Jews, and will likely change nothing after this attack.

The bitter irony is that the community that proved integration was possible is now among the first to feel the consequences of a society that has stopped insisting on it.

Nations do not decline in a single dramatic moment. They erode through a thousand small capitulations; each defended as compassion.

Bondi was not an aberration. It was a warning. The only question is whether the warning arrived too late. The story of Hanukkah ends with our salvation and spiritual redemption; how will this story end?

Philip Gross is a Manhattan-born, London-based business executive and writer. He explores issues of Jewish identity, faith, and contemporary society through the lens of both the American and British experience.

Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who was part of the Global Sumud Flotilla seeking to deliver aid to Gaza and was detained by Israel, gestures as she is greeted by supporters upon her arrival to the Athens Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport, in Athens, Greece, October 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Louisa Gouliamaki

Father Germanos, born Georgios Tsibouktzakis in Greece, was a Greek Orthodox monk-priest who moved to Israel in the early 1990s to serve at the St. George Monastery in the Judean Desert. He was widely respected and known for maintaining warm relations with the local community.

On June 12, 2001, while returning to the monastery from Jerusalem, Father Germanos was ambushed and murdered by Palestinian terrorists. The attack was carried out by Fatah-affiliated gunmen, making him one of more than 1,000 Israelis and foreign nationals killed in Palestinian terror attacks during the Second Intifada.

In 2004, arch-terrorist Marwan Barghouti was convicted in a Tel Aviv court and sentenced to five life sentences for orchestrating a series of attacks that killed five civilians, including Father Germanos.

200+ celebrities want Marwan Barghouti freed. But the man they’re calling a “Palestinian Mandela” is a convicted murderer. pic.twitter.com/b9Ak4vJUAy

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) December 10, 2025

Since 2004, calls for Marwan Barghouti’s release have become a cause célèbre among those willing to overlook terrorism and murder, clinging to the idea that he could somehow emerge as a unifying figure in Palestinian politics or even a partner for peace with Israel.

Support for Barghouti has ebbed and flowed over the past two decades, but the past few months have seen a marked resurgence in articles, commentary, and sympathetic profiles of the Palestinian terror leader. His release was floated in the lead-up to the most recent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and more recently, 200 artists and celebrities publicly endorsed freeing him.

This renewed wave of attention has not been limited to English-language media. Coverage of Barghouti has been widespread, appearing in news outlets across the world.

The Greek media has been no exception to the renewed global interest in Marwan Barghouti. Over the past few months, several Greek outlets have published pieces spotlighting the imprisoned Palestinian leader.

Yet one striking omission appears across these articles: none of them mention Father Germanos. The last time a mainstream Greek news outlet referenced his murder in connection with Barghouti was in November 2023.

A review of recent Greek-language coverage shows that these articles devote minimal attention to the actual reasons for Barghouti’s imprisonment. Instead, they focus largely on the arguments being advanced for his release, while entirely overlooking Father Germanos and the other victims whose deaths led to Barghouti’s conviction.

These Barghouti-centered pieces have appeared in numerous major publications, including Business Daily, Kathimerini, ERT News, ProtoThema, Naftemporiki, Skai, and Ethnos.

Instead of highlighting Barghouti’s responsibility for the murder of one of their own countrymen, these Greek news outlets dedicated only a few brief paragraphs to Barghouti’s record of terrorism and violence. Their coverage focused largely on the campaign to free him.

By omitting Father Germanos from recent reporting on Marwan Barghouti, Greek-language media organizations are doing a disservice to their audiences. They present Barghouti’s potential release as an issue confined to the Middle East, rather than one that also carries profound resonance for Greece. What is lost in this coverage is the simple truth that this story is not distant at all, and it is tied directly to the murder of a Greek citizen whose name deserves not to be forgotten.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.