DVIR ABRAMOVICH: Only a royal commission can replace denial with truth and confusion with clarity after Bondi

How did we get here?

That is the question echoing through this country now, louder than sirens, heavier than grief.

How did Australia, a nation that prides itself on calm, fairness, and an almost stubborn belief in social cohesion reach a moment where the protection of Jewish children may require soldiers in uniform standing outside schools and synagogues?

How did we slide from trust to troops without stopping ourselves?

In recent days, Australians have heard Premier Chris Minns speak about the possibility of deploying the Australian Army to protect Jewish schools and synagogues in NSW.

Not overseas. Not in a failed state. Here. Not in a war zone. In Sydney. In a country that has long told itself a comforting story about fairness, multiculturalism and restraint.

Read that again. Let it scar you. Soldiers. Guarding Jews. In Australia.

This is us. This is now. This is the price of everything we refused to confront.

Armies are not deployed because things are going well. They appear when ordinary civic machinery has broken down, when police, laws, institutions, and norms can no longer hold the line.

Soldiers on our streets are not a show of strength. They are an admission of failure.

Soldiers do not arrive suddenly. They arrive after years of denial. After incitement is tolerated. After intimidation is excused. After Jewish fear is waved away as inconvenient.

And make no mistake: if the army is deployed, it will mean something monstrous has already happened beneath the surface. It will mean we let a sickness spread while we argued about tone.

It will mean we watched the warning lights flash red and chose to dim them until 15 people were slaughtered at Bondi Beach while celebrating Chanukah.

This is what societal failure looks like at the end of the road.

When a nation can no longer guarantee the safety of a minority through law, leadership, and moral clarity, it reaches for force. And that moment should terrify every Australian because once soldiers are needed to protect Jews, the rot has already gone far deeper than Jews alone.

I respect leaders who refuse to rule anything out when lives are at stake. But we should not confuse emergency measures with solutions. Soldiers can stand guard, but they cannot answer the deeper questions now pressing on this country.

A Federal royal commission is not a gesture. It is not theatre. At its best, it is a moral instrument.

It exists for moments when the ordinary channels of accountability have failed — when warnings were raised and not acted upon, when responsibilities blurred across jurisdictions, when institutions protected themselves instead of the vulnerable.

We have used such commissions before, not because they were easy, but because they were necessary. They forced uncomfortable truths into the open.

They allowed victims to speak not as complainants, but as witnesses to national catastrophes.

And they produced reforms with weight, reforms that could not be quietly ignored once daylight had done its work.

That is what this moment calls for.

Not a narrow review. Not a departmental audit. Not another promise that “lessons will be learned.”

But a process that asks, publicly and under oath, how anti-Semitism was allowed to harden into threat, and threat into bloodshed.

The Prime Minister says a royal commission would take too long. Too long?

Too long for what?

Too long for the families burying their dead? Too long for the children who may need soldiers to walk them to school?

The families of those killed at Bondi understand this.

So do many across the Jewish community, who now live with a question they never imagined they would have to ask in Australia: is it still safe to be visible?

A royal commission will not heal all wounds. Nothing can. But it can do something essential: it can replace denial with truth, confusion with clarity, and fear with the beginning of trust.

If we want an Australia where soldiers are not needed to escort children to school, then we must be willing to examine, honestly and without defensiveness, how we lost our way.

The presence of the army would be a moment of reckoning.

The willingness to seek the full truth would be a moment of renewal.

The choice between them is now before us.

Dr Dvir Abramovich is chair of the Anti-Defamation Commission