MENACHEM VORCHHEIMER: The Bondi massacre royal commission must free Jews like me from the threat of violence

I am a Bondi boy. I am an eighth-generation Australian and a Jew. My maternal grandfather was a Rat of Tobruk; he died too young for me to ever meet him.

My paternal grandfather survived the Holocaust and also died young. Between them sits my inheritance: a belief in Australia as a fair, democratic country that does not judge its citizens by who they are.

That belief was first shaken on 23 December 1982. I was nine years old when the Israeli consulate in Sydney and the Hakoah Jewish social club in Bondi were bombed.

I remember walking with my father to the synagogue on the next street. A security guard stood outside, the boot of his car open, a shotgun resting inside. It was the first gun I had ever seen — and the first time I understood that Jews in Australia were considered targets.

More than 40 years later, the Bondi Chanukah massacre dragged that memory back into the centre of my life. Fifteen people were murdered and 41 seriously injured.

Once again, we are told the attackers “acted alone.” That phrase may describe how the crime was carried out. It does not explain why it happened.

Terrorism scholars have long warned against the comfort of the “lone wolf” narrative. Violent actors rarely arise in isolation. They are shaped by environments that legitimise hatred and dull moral restraint.

What matters is not formal membership in an organisation, but whether a surrounding culture teaches who deserves empathy — and who does not.

For years in Australia, the word “Zionist” has been used as a proxy for “Jew,” portraying Jews as collective perpetrators of global evil. Chants such as “globalise the intifada” have circulated freely.

Violence against Jews has been reframed as political expression rather than racism. Debate fixates on intent. Consequences are dismissed.

Social psychology explains why this is dangerous. Dehumanisation removes groups from the circle of moral concern. When people are conditioned to believe a group is uniquely malevolent, uniquely powerful, or uniquely undeserving of compassion, the threshold for violence drops.

If we insist on treating the Bondi attackers as aberrant lone actors, we refuse to confront the social and rhetorical ecosystem that made Jews a plausible target.

I welcome the Royal Commission announced after Bondi. But it should never have taken a massacre to get here. For 26 months before the attack, myself and others repeatedly warned State and Federal governments about the normalisation of antisemitism.

Those warnings were largely ignored. In the absence of political leadership, I turned to existing law — the Commonwealth Race Discrimination Act and Victoria’s Racial and Religious Tolerance Act — to bring private actions addressing incitement against Jews.

Those cases centred on conduct at pro-Palestine rallies, including hateful chants like “All Zionists are Terrorists”. On any ordinary reading, such language assigns collective responsibility to Australian Jews for the actions of a foreign state. Under the definition of anti-Semitism adopted by Australia in 2021, that is anti-Semitism — plain and simple.

Yet the slogans were defended. More troubling still, Adam Bandt and the Australian Greens rejected a proposed settlement that would have affirmed two basic principles: that targeting Jews or Jewish institutions over a foreign conflict is wrong, and that freedom of speech in Australia is not absolute when it crosses into racial or religious vilification.

When the third-largest political party in the country cannot bring itself to endorse those propositions, something is deeply broken. If relentless dehumanisation of a minority group is treated as legitimate political discourse, violence becomes not just foreseeable, but inevitable.

The contradiction deepens further. In May 2024, the Australian Senate passed a motion describing the slogan “From the river to the sea” as “extremely violent”, noting that it opposes Israel’s right to exist and is frequently used to intimidate Jewish Australians.

Yet despite that acknowledgement, government departments, including Home Affairs, continued to engage with — and fund — organisations that used or promoted such rhetoric. When I challenged Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, silence followed.

Meanwhile, the streets told the unvarnished truth. Crowds chanted: “There is only one solution, intifada revolution”, a reference to waves of suicide bombings and mass-casualty attacks that killed more than 1,300 Jews.

Posters glorified armed struggle “by any means necessary.” This was not abstract speech. It was conditioning — a steady normalisation of the idea that violence against Jews is justified.

Ten months before Bondi, ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess told Senate estimates that anti-Semitism was his agency’s number one priority in terms of threats to life.

One of the Royal Commission’s central questions must be why, despite that assessment, the threat was not meaningfully confronted.

The attackers at Bondi pulled the triggers. But they did not invent the moral climate that animated them. That climate was cultivated here, in Australia, through rhetoric that portrayed Jews as terrorists, Nazis, baby killers, and genocidal. Warnings were issued.

They were ignored. Engagement and funding continued. Accountability did not.

The purpose of the Royal Commission must therefore be larger than assigning blame. Its true objective must be to restore Australia to a place where no citizen — Jewish or otherwise — needs armed guards or fortified walls to live openly as who they are.

That is the Australia my grandfather fought for at Tobruk. It is the Australia Holocaust survivors believed in when they rebuilt their lives here. And it is the Australia we all deserve to reclaim.

Menachem Vorchheimer is a Melbourne-based businessman.