BY MOSHE HILL OPINION COLUMNS DECEMBER 17 2025
In the worst attack against Jews since October 7, a father-and-son duo opened fire on a Chanukah celebration in Bondi Beach, Australia, killing at least 15 people and injuring dozens more. This attack is what Jews all around the world fear when keffiyeh-clad college students march and politicians refuse to condemn chants of “Globalize the Intifada.” Australia has been the site of numerous antisemitic incidents since October 7, leading everyone from the Chabad rabbi who was killed this weekend to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu begging Australia to do something about its problem with Jew-haters. Now we see what happens when people do not take the warning signs seriously.
This bloodshed is the stark culmination of a pattern too blatant to ignore. Since October 7, when Hamas’s barbarity ignited global tensions, Australia has recorded over 2,000 antisemitic incidents, a 400% spike according to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. But numbers alone don’t capture the human toll. Consider the timeline of terror that preceded this massacre—a relentless barrage that Jewish leaders liken to a slow siege.
It started almost immediately. On October 8, 2023, hundreds converged on the Sydney Opera House to attack Israel and Jews before the bodies of the slain were even cold. “Gas the Jews,” they chanted, their voices echoing off the harbor as police stood by, powerless or unwilling to intervene. The rally, ostensibly protesting Israel’s response to Hamas, devolved into a spectacle of raw Jew-hatred, with signs reading “Zionists burn in hell” waved like trophies.
The threats escalated quickly. By December 2023, synagogues across the nation were deluged with bomb threats. Evacuations disrupted Shabbat services; children were shepherded out under armed guard. No bombs materialized, but the psychological warfare did its work, fraying the fabric of daily life.
Fast-forward to May 25, 2024. Australia’s largest Jewish school, Mount Scopus Memorial College in Melbourne, awoke to walls defaced with swastikas and slurs like “Zionist scum.”
On October 13, 2024, a kosher bakery in Sydney was vandalized—windows smashed, walls sprayed with “Death to Jews” and threats to “slaughter the owners.” The proprietors, an elderly couple who had fled pogroms in Eastern Europe, barricaded their doors.
On October 17, 2024, the front door of Curly Lewis Brewing Company in Bondi was torched because the arsonist was aiming for the adjacent Jewish-owned kosher deli, Lewis’ Continental Kitchen. Flames licked up the façade as firefighters battled the blaze, but the intent was clear: eradicate Jewish presence. Three days later, on October 20, the real target burned. Lewis’ Continental Kitchen, a beloved staple serving matzo ball soup to generations, was gutted by arsonists who doused it in accelerant and fled into the night. The owners escaped unharmed.
November 21, 2024, brought mob fury to Sydney’s predominantly Jewish Ripponlea neighborhood. Cars erupted in flames along quiet streets; buildings bore the scars of rocks and spray paint. Residents, peering from behind curtains, whispered of “pogrom vibes,” evoking the shtetl violence their grandparents fled.
Melbourne’s Adass Israel Synagogue, a Chassidic beacon, met a fiery end on December 6, 2024. What authorities called a “terrorist arson attack” saw petrol bombs hurled through stained-glass windows during evening prayers. Worshippers escaped, but the sanctuary—rebuilt after a prior vandalism—crumbled, its Torah scrolls saved only by miracle.
On January 7 of this year, a knife-wielding man menaced congregants at Chabad North Shore Synagogue in Sydney, ranting about “Zionist conspiracies” before being subdued. Days later, on January 10, Allawah Synagogue’s façade bloomed with fresh swastikas, a Nazi salute etched into history’s wounds. January 11 saw an attempted arson at Newtown Synagogue, flames extinguished just in time to prevent catastrophe.
On January 21, a Jewish childcare center in Sydney’s inner west was set ablaze and ransacked, toys melting in the heat as caregivers shielded toddlers from the chaos. The attackers left behind a note: “No more Zionist kids.”
On February 12, two nurses at a Sydney hospital were suspended after a TikTok video surfaced in which they boasted of “finishing off Jewish patients” with smug grins. The clip, viewed millions of times, drew international outrage, but for Jewish families navigating hospital corridors, it raised the terrifying question of whether they could trust their medical professionals to actually care for them.
On July 4, Shabbat dinner at East Melbourne Synagogue became a trap. Firebombs were thrown through a window while 20 people sat eating. Thankfully, everyone made it out alive.
This plague didn’t emerge in a vacuum. Australia’s antisemitism crisis is inextricably linked to seismic demographic changes, particularly the rapid influx of Muslim migrants into Sydney. According to the 2016 census, Sydney hosted 253,436 Muslims—45.1% of Australia’s total, comprising 5.3% of the city’s 4.8 million residents. By 2021, Australia’s Muslim population swelled to 813,392, a 70.8% surge since 2011, driven by immigration and high birth rates. In Sydney, the epicenter, growth has been explosive: a 21.8% increase from 2011 to 2016 alone, with neighborhoods like Auburn—now over 50% Muslim—emerging as enclaves where Arabic rivals English on shop signs.
This isn’t organic evolution; it’s policy-fueled migration. Pre-1981, only 41,000 Muslims called Australia home. But from 1996 to 2000, 47,000 arrived—9% of total immigrants—rising to 7,533 in 2001 alone. Post-2000, the floodgates widened: 56.7% of Muslim migrants settled after that watershed, hailing from hotspots like Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, where anti-Israel fervor runs deep. Sydney absorbed the lion’s share, with migrants fueling 63% of the city’s population growth from 1996 to 2016. Today, Arabic is Sydney’s second-most spoken language after English.
Post-October 7 rallies drew thousands from these communities, chanting slogans imported from Gaza’s streets. “From the river to the sea” morphed into “Gas the Jews” under the Opera House sails. Radical imams in Lakemba mosques sermonized against “Zionist occupiers,” their words echoing in the arsonists’ Molotov cocktails. Australia isn’t stopping, allowing hundreds of thousands of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa in every year.
Governments bear blame too. Successive leaders, from Scott Morrison to current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, prioritized “diversity” over vigilance, slashing funding for deradicalization while funding multicultural festivals that glossed over tensions. Police, outnumbered and outmaneuvered, treated synagogue attacks as “hate crimes” rather than terrorism. Jewish voices, dismissed as “alarmist,” issued many warnings to the government, all to be ignored.
This is the reality of “Globalize the Intifada,” the chant that reverberated from U.S. campuses to Sydney’s streets. The intifada was the targeted, repeated, and systemic attack on civilian Jews in Israel. To globalize that means only one thing: a targeted, repeated, and systemic attack on Jews around the world. Those who defend the phrase are either too ignorant to understand this or, more likely, lying because they want it to happen. The Jewish community in Australia has received the most brutal of its many wake-up calls. Now it must choose whether to fight, flee, or be wiped out. The Jewish community in America must heed this warning and make a similar decision.
