After the Bondi massacre, Australia faces hard questions about extremism

thomas more THAN a g people gathered at Bondi Beach in Sydney on dec 14th, the number one night of Hannukah, to watch the lighting of a menorah. Children wearing face paint crowded a petting zoo. Families held balloons and bubble wands. Yet as the sun began to dip, at least two men dressed in black and wielding long-barrelled firearms shot into the crowd from positions just outside the beach-side park where the event was taking place. They murdered at least 15 people and injured dozens more, including two police officers.

Anthony Albanese, Australia’s prime minister, confirmed the massacre was a “targeted attack on Jewish Australians”. He labelled the attack “a terrorist incident”; that designation gives authorities additional powers to question and detain suspects. The dead include Eli Schlanger, a prominent local rabbi and the organiser of the event.

The attack is one of the worst shootings in modern Australian history, even if the final toll will take some days to come clear. And but for the immense courage of bystanders, it might have been even more lethal. One video shows a man in a white T-shirt creeping up on one of the gunmen from behind a car, then wrestling the attacker’s rifle away from him. “That man is a genuine hero,” said Chris Minns, the premier of New South Wales. “I’ve got no doubt that there are many, many people alive tonight as a result of his bravery.”

The attack ended when police shot one of the alleged gunmen dead and took a second presumed attacker, said to be critically injured, into custody. Police later confirmed that a search of a vehicle left in the area and linked to the attackers uncovered several improvised explosive devices. So the idea was clearly to inflict even greater devastation than has been wrought.

Since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023 Australia has seen a spate of antisemitic incidents, including arson attacks on synagogues. In August Australia expelled the Iranian ambassador after credible intelligence suggested that Iran had financed and directed at least two arson attacks on Australian soil (on a Jewish business and a synagogue). It was the first such expulsion since the second world war.

In February Mike Burgess, the boss of Australia’s domestic intelligence service, said fighting antisemitism had become his agency’s top priority because of the “threats to life...we’re seeing play out in this country”. On December 14th he told reporters that one of the alleged attackers at Bondi was known to the service (though the identities of the gunmen had not yet been confirmed by police as this article was published). He added, “Obviously we need to look into what happened.” Muslim groups condemned the terrorist attack. “These acts of violence and crimes have no place in our society,” the Australian National Imams Council said in a statement. “Those responsible must be held fully accountable and face the full force of the law.”

The coming days will doubtless also bring renewed debate about firearms. Mass killings in Australia are very rare; the country’s strict gun laws (commonly praised internationally) are one reason for that. Automatic and semi-automatic weapons were largely banned in 1996 after a gunman killed 35 people during a rampage in the Tasmanian town of Port Arthur. Back then the government purchased hundreds of thousands of firearms from the Australian public. But for the past five years there have been more guns in total registered in Australia than there were before the massacre at Port Arthur, according to a report released in January by the Australia Institute, a think-tank. Expect much more talk about that.

Editor’s note (December 14th 2025): This article has been updated.

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