JEREMY LEIBLER: Australian Jews no longer feel safe to live freely and openly

The Australian Jewish experience rests on two simple truths.

The first was that Australia had given our families the gift of refuge after the Holocaust. It allowed those who arrived with nothing but trauma to live freely as Jews, to raise children openly, to build schools and synagogues, to live Jewish life in public.

Our gratitude shaped our identity, our loyalty, our sense of belonging and our desire to give back.

In much of the world, Jewish life is largely multi-generational and deeply woven into national stories. In Australia, modern Jewish life was rebuilt after 1945, disproportionately by survivors and refugees who arrived with the trauma still close to the surface.

That proximity to catastrophe shaped how Australian Jews understand refuge, and why Israel is not a partisan attachment but a psychological anchor.

The second truth was Israel. Not as a political idea, but as that psychological anchor.

Israel exists, in part, because the world once abandoned the Jewish people. It represented the promise that the Jewish people would never again face annihilation without an army, a government and a homeland prepared to act.

These two truths — the gift of Australia and the guarantee of Israel — formed the foundation of our psychological safety for generations. They were our covenants.

Israel’s covenant was clear: never again would Jews be left unprotected. Australia’s covenant was its quiet promise that this country would never allow the forces of hatred that once ravaged Jewish life elsewhere to take root here.

Successive Australian governments from both sides of politics have consistently supported Israel based on our shared values and interests.

This was part of that covenant too, a recognition of how deeply Israel is woven into Jewish identity and Jewish security.

On October 7, both covenants were shaken at once.

When Israel failed to protect its citizens that morning, Jews everywhere felt — if only for a moment — what it might be like if Israel faltered, if the Jewish world no longer had its ultimate safeguard.

But what followed in Australia unsettled us even more.

For the first time, we saw an erosion of the protections we had long believed were immutable.

We saw synagogues firebombed. Schools defaced. Chants calling for the death of Jews echoing through our streets and universities.

A rising hostility to Israel morphed into hostility toward anyone who identified with it.

Criticism of Israel is legitimate. What spread was something else: a social license to treat Zionists and by extension most Australian Jews as morally untouchable.

Beneath the surface, we felt another shift: the weakening of the Australia–Israel relationship. When Australia distanced itself from that alignment, it shook the foundation on which our community had relied.

For two years, the psychological safety of Australian Jews — the post-Holocaust belief that distance protected us from the ancient forces of Jew hatred — eroded before our eyes. And then Bondi happened.

The terror attack at Bondi Beach, which claimed 15 lives, is a nightmare. But the fear running through our community today is not about that single act of violence. It is about the months and years that paved the way toward it: the warnings ignored, the rhetoric excused, the failure of leadership to act with clarity when the danger first emerged.

It is about watching the debate narrow to mechanics, including gun laws and policing, while refusing to name the worldview that targets Jews and sanctifies violence.

Mechanics matter. They are not sufficient And it is about the growing sense that the covenant Australia once held with its Jewish citizens has been deeply shaken.

For the first time, many Australian Jews are asking whether they can live as freely and openly as they once did.

Some are contemplating a move to Israel, not because it is safer in a physical sense, but because it is the one place where Jews expect the state to treat Jewish security as a first-order obligation.

That certainty is the essence of psychological safety, and it is what our community feels slipping away.

The Australian Government has announced steps to strengthen hate and incitement laws. These are welcome.

The international lesson is that leadership is not only what you say, it’s what you enforce.

When a state treats anti-Semitism as a civil rights and security problem, it uses every lever available: consequences for institutions that tolerate harassment, protection for vulnerable communities, and moral clarity from the top even when it costs politically.

But laws alone cannot repair the damage.

Psychological safety is built on something deeper: the confidence that the values anchoring a society — safety, freedom, dignity, equality — are upheld not only in legislation, but in culture and leadership.

This is as true in Australia as it is any Western democracy confronting the same ideological threats.

Jewish life in Australia will not return to the innocence it once had. But it can return to stability if the community can once again believe that the covenant of protection still holds, and that our leaders have both the capacity and the will to uphold it.

This moment is about far more than anti-Semitism. The treatment of Jews is rarely only about Jews. It is a stress test for whether liberal societies can defend minorities when it is unpopular.

Australia, like all free societies, must now decide whether it will defend those values with clarity and resolve, or allow the forces seeking to erode them to advance unchecked.

Jeremy Leibler is the president of the Zionist Federation of Australia