How the Bondi Beach attack is being weaponized to suppress the Palestine movement in Australia

When news broke of the Bondi Beach shooting, those of us in the global Palestine solidarity movement knew immediately what was coming. We’ve seen this pattern: when liberation movements challenge state power and when genocide is named and resisted, states seize on any incident, any tragedy, to justify criminalizing that resistance. Since October 2023, as Israel has carried out genocide in Gaza, Australia has built an apparatus to suppress Palestine solidarity: envoys, task forces, and “safety” initiatives that treat anti-genocide organizing as a threat.

We knew the Bondi shooting would be weaponized against us because Zionism – through Israeli state institutions, lobby groups, and complicit governments – has made Jewish safety inseparable from Israeli state interests. It is not because of any connection to Palestine, but because the victims were Jewish. Zionism has constructed a system where any harm to Jews, regardless of context or motive, becomes justification to criminalize Palestine solidarity and crush demands for liberation.

Within hours, despite minimal details and no established motive, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu blamed Australia’s recognition of Palestinian statehood, claiming it “pours fuel on the antisemitic fire.” After the shooting, he declared Australia had “let the disease spread and the result is the horrific attacks on Jews we saw today.” Israeli officials claimed “the blood of the victims is on the hands of the Australian government” for not standing “unequivocally” with Israel. The New York Times published Bret Stephens’ op-ed: “Bondi Beach Is What ‘Globalize the Intifada’ Looks Like.” The Atlantic ran “The Intifada Comes to Bondi Beach.” 

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese spoke of those who seek to “extinguish light and promote darkness” – echoing Netanyahu’s framing of a “war between children of light and the children of darkness” to justify extermination in Gaza. By deploying the rhetoric of light versus darkness, it lays the foundations for a moral and legal framework where anything deemed threatening to the existing order – which, as we’ve established, includes Palestine solidarity – becomes a legitimate target for state repression.

Jillian Segal – Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism and an executive member of Australia’s peak Zionist lobby group, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry – drew an explicit line between a march across Sydney Harbour Bridge in support of Palestine to mass murder. 

“We saw the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge and now Bondi Beach, each a progression,” she said, linking the October 2023 Opera House protest and the August 2025 March for Humanity – where 300,000 people peacefully marched over Sydney Harbour Bridge – directly to the Bondi shooting. 

Politicians and media amplified the connection without challenge. No evidence connected the attack to Palestinian movement work, but that didn’t matter. Suddenly, a shooting with no connection to Palestine had become proof that Palestine solidarity leads to mass murder, justifying repression that was already planned.

Within days, the government moved. Prime Minister Albanese adopted Segal’s entire proposed antisemitism plan – recommendations she had released in July 2025.

Her plan proposes defunding schools, universities, media outlets, and cultural institutions that “fail to act against antisemitism,” while monitoring the ABC and SBS, Australia’s public broadcasters, for “fair” reporting. The IHRA definition – which treats criticism of Israel’s policies, comparisons between Israel and apartheid South Africa, or claims that Israel is a racist endeavor as “antisemitic” – is now set to become the framework for cutting funding and terminating employment in Australia’s media.

Albanese announced sweeping new powers targeting “preachers and leaders who promote violence”, as well as organizations engaging in “hate speech promoting violence or racial hatred”. The Home Affairs Minister gained power to cancel visas for those who “spread hate and division,” allowing the government to deny entry to solidarity activists and deport organizers. Federal parliament may yet be recalled to rush through legislation. Under the guise of combating hate speech and violence, these are the tools to defund, deplatform and fire anyone organizing against genocide.

The government announced financial assistance payments for Bondi victims, mirroring the scheme established after October 7 for Australians impacted by Hamas attacks under the Australian Victim of Terrorism Overseas Payment – a scheme never extended to Australian-Palestinians killed in Gaza by Israeli forces.

The Education Minister announced a 12-month antisemitism education taskforce led by the former Chancellor of the University of New South Wales David Gonski, working with the Special Envoy, to reshape curriculums “from early education right through to universities” to address students making Jewish peers “feel unwelcome” – campus organizing for Palestine will be embedded as antisemitism in educational policy from childhood.

NSW Premier Chris Minns recalled parliament to pass laws allowing police to reject protest applications under a “terrorism designation”. He claimed mass demonstrations could “light a flame impossible to extinguish,” effectively designating Palestine protests – which have sustained nearly weekly demonstrations for over two years, making them among the most enduring solidarity movements in Australian history –  as potential terrorism, giving police the power to ban them. 

Minns also indicated that he is open to arming the Community Security Group – a private organization with documented ties to Israeli intelligence – to operate at public events, with Victoria already allocating $900,000 to the group in the wake of the Bondi attack. (An Australian Defence Force officer recently lost his security clearance for “divided loyalty” after CSG training in Israel). Essentially, a foreign-aligned militia could be deputized to police Australian streets and surveil organizers.

At the memorial for Bondi victims, an Israeli flag flies alongside Australian flags. The conflation is complete: Jewish safety becomes inseparable from Israeli state interests, and therefore solidarity with Palestinians becomes a threat, and criminalizing that solidarity becomes justified as protection. When a Jewish woman wearing a keffiyeh attempted to attend the vigil – wearing it, she said, because of the Israeli flag on display – police escorted her out. She knew people who died. This was her community. But “Jewish safety”, it turns out, means safety only for those who align with Israel, not Jews who stand with Palestine.

Meanwhile, Australia continues manufacturing and shipping weapons components to enable mass death in Gaza – a reality the government continues to deny. A shooting at an iconic national beach becomes terrorism and justifies sweeping powers. But Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza – mass killing of civilians, deliberate starvation, and erasure of entire families – is deemed self-defense. Palestinian liberation is an existential threat, while Israel’s genocidal violence is a supported policy.

The response to Bondi lays bare what the state has been building since October 2023: infrastructure to protect Australia’s stake in Israeli genocide from challenge. This serves Zionist lobby groups like the Executive Council of Australian Jewry that weaponize Jewish safety to justify Israel’s exterminationist policies. It serves a settler-colonial state defending another settler-colonial project. What’s being defended here is Australia’s complicity. 

Ultimately, the response to this shooting accelerates what was already brewing: heightened powers, intensified surveillance, and violence against organizing, now legitimized. State repression doesn’t require a connection between incident and response. It requires opportunity.