Shortly after the mass shooting targeting Australia’s Jewish community on Sunday, Rabbi Levi Wolff of Central Sydney Synagogue told reporters that “the inevitable has happened now”.
Wolff was speaking in Bondi, close to where two men armed with powerful rifles or shotguns had just attacked an event celebrating Hanukah, the Jewish religious festival. At least 12 people were killed, including one alleged gunman, and dozens were injured in Australia’s deadliest mass shooting in almost three decades.
His words will resonate with representatives of the Jewish community in Australia and across the world who have been warning policymakers about the clear and present danger of such an attack.
Experts point out that antisemitism was already widely prevalent before the bloody conflict in Gaza, provoked by the Hamas attack into Israel of October 2023, polarised opinions across the world.
The most lethal attack against the Jewish community in the US, for example, came in 2018, while in 2023, Michael O’Flaherty, the director of the EU’s agency for fundamental rights, described such hate as a “deeply ingrained racism in European society” that posed an existential threat to the continent’s Jewish community.
But there is no doubt that such trends were intensified dramatically by the conflict in the Middle East.
In the US, the Anti-Defamation League reported 9,354 antisemitic incidents in 2024, the highest since its records began in 1979. For the first time, a majority “contained elements related to Israel or Zionism”.
The Community Safety Trust recorded 4,296 instances of anti-Jewish hate across the UK in 2023 – double the previous year – and the most ever documented. There were 3,528 in 2024, the second-highest annual total.
In Australia, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) logged 1,654 anti-Jewish incidents in the 12 months to 30 September, about three times higher than any annual total before the war in Gaza. In a report earlier this month, the ECAJ said anti-Jewish racism had left the fringes of society and become part of the mainstream, with “an increasing ideological alignment … between neo-Nazis, the anti-Israel left or Islamists”.
Terrorism experts know that radicalisation does not occur in a vacuum. Such violence remains a social activity, reflecting broader trends. This means even incidents of race hate seen as relatively minor – hateful graffiti, racist insults in the street, and similar – suggest something deeper and more dangerous.
The telescopic sights used by the Bondi attackers would have made every one of their victims plainly visible – talking, laughing, looking after children, greeting friends, hugging relatives at one of the most joyous events in the Jewish religious calendar.
Pulling the trigger would have come at the end of a process of dehumanisation that begins well before even swastikas are painted on the walls of synagogues, or schoolchildren are insulted at a bus stop.
Security officials have been warning for some time that the Gaza conflict has prompted a wave of extremist radicalisation across the Islamic world and well beyond. Last year, then US director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, said the war “will have a generational impact on terrorism”.
The most recent report of the UN committee overseeing sanctions on members of al-Qaida and Islamic State noted that “the Gaza and Israel conflict” still featured prominently in terrorist propaganda, and that “in the US, there were several alleged terrorist attack plots, largely motivated by the Gaza and Israel conflict or individuals inspired and radicalised by [IS]”.
This will be a key focus of investigators.
There have been some suggestions that Iran, which appears to have been responsible for instigating some earlier antisemitic attacks in Australia, could be to blame. But this would be a dramatic escalation and departure from recent tactics used by Iranian agents, so is improbable.
British officials share information with their Australian counterparts through the Five Eyes security alliance and are likely to have passed on their own concerns about violence targeting Jewish communities following recent incidents in the UK. Jihad al-Shamie, 35, reportedly pledged allegiance to IS before he attacked a synagogue in Manchester on the Jewish festival of Yom Kippur in October, leading to the deaths of two worshippers.
In the aftermath, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), issued a new call to arms in an online magazine distributed via social media, urging Muslims in the west to follow al-Shamie’s example.
AQAP, which has significant propaganda reach and international ambitions, called for further violence against Jewish communities and offered detailed advice from its “lone jihad guide team” to aspirant attackers.
An unconfirmed report from one witness that the killers in Sydney displayed a “black flag with an insignia on it” will interest investigators, as this could indicate an IS allegiance. But there is no evidence so far that the organisation has any link to Sunday’s horrifying events.
For the moment, there is merely the sense of a tragedy foretold. “This is the worst fears of the Jewish community,” Alex Ryvchin, co-CEO of the ECAJ, told Sky News. “It’s been bubbling under the surface for a long time, and now it’s actually happened.”
