When Atrocity Becomes Opportunity
Bondi Beach: surf, sun, the myth of easygoing tolerance. When a gunman killed fifteen people at a Jewish religious gathering there in December 2025, that myth shattered. Within days, Canberra responded with the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026 – over four hundred pages redefining the boundaries of speech and association.
The official story is simple: hate speech breeds hatred; hatred breeds violence; therefore, extirpate the speech. If only human affairs obeyed such linear scripts.
My concern isn’t whether hate is harmful – of course it’s – but how this new legal architecture codifies a worldview already in trouble, and what it reveals about the way industrial economism now governs the emotional weather of entire societies. The most dangerous feature of this moment may not be the hate we can see, but the habits of sanitised feeling that insist all complex conflict be reduced to pathology and handed to the security state for treatment.
Fear Has Muscle Memory
Jewish fear after Bondi isn’t abstract. It has muscle memory. Every Jewish community carries the echo of centuries in which vilification could turn, without warning, into pogrom. The Shoah isn’t distant history; it lives in bodies and dreams of people still among us. When Jews in Sydney see classic antisemitic tropes re-emerging online, when synagogues strengthen security, when reports of harassment increase, vigilance isn’t paranoia. It’s realism born from experience.
At the same time, Gaza has introduced another kind of unbearable knowledge into Australian living rooms. Hour after hour: pulverised neighbourhoods, children pulled from rubble, hospitals lit only by mobile phones. Jews who criticise Israeli policy, Palestinians who have lost relatives, gentile Australians with no former stake – all find themselves drawn into tragedy that refuses to stay on the other side of the world.
Two forms of anguish share the same civic space. Jewish anxiety about rising antisemitism. Palestinian grief and rage at the destruction of their homeland. Both real. Both claiming the moral vocabulary of survival. Both now intersecting in Australia, mediated by an information economy that thrives on short emotional cycles and algorithmic outrage.
When governments promise “protection” in such contexts, the kind of protection matters. When the primary response is criminal law and expanded executive power, we must ask: who will be protected from which harms, and at what cost to the ecosystem of public imagination upon which democracy depends?
The Legal Architecture of Control
The Bill’s supporters argue current laws are too weak. They emphasise provisions criminalising conduct that “promotes or incites hatred” based on race, colour, or national origin, and the new capacity to ban organisations deemed to encourage hate crimes. Business elites invoke “social cohesion”. Security agencies nod. Mainstream media frames it as necessary tightening.
The legal texture – not the headlines – reveals deeper currents.
For most of the modern period, liberal legal traditions distinguished between private conscience, however unpalatable, and overt acts of harm. Speech became actionable when it crossed into clear threats, targeted harassment, or direct incitement to violence. The broad terrain was mapped around a presumption: the best defence against offensive speech was usually more speech, not criminal courts.
The new Bill adopts different cartography. It stretches prohibited terrain from incitement into the amorphous realm of “promotion of hatred”. It shifts the test from a notional “reasonable person” towards reactions of members of protected groups. It contemplates retrospective application to expressions made months earlier. It welds these provisions to ministerial powers allowing organisations to be banned almost administratively, with criminal penalties for symbols and associations several steps removed from any actual violent act.
Nobody doubts that speech can nurture contempt and intimidation. The question is whether a state apparatus already fattened by two decades of “counter terrorism” can be trusted to distinguish between a direct call to attack Jews in Bondi and an argument, however fiery, that a particular state or military is engaged in criminal acts in Gaza, or that a particular form of nationalism is structurally racist.
Where similar laws exist, they rarely remain confined to the threats first invoked to sell them. Powers created to fight a specific menace find new objects. What begins as a shield for vulnerable communities becomes a multipurpose instrument deployed against whistleblowers, journalists, and protest movements whose main offence is unsettling official narratives.
The Bondi Bill isn’t just about antisemitism. It’s about centralising the right to decide which stories may be told, and how sharply, whenever those stories touch the vital organs of the prevailing order.
Gaza as Pressure Point
Gaza is the obvious faultline. Since October 2023 the conflict has moved from diplomatic margins to the heart of everyday conversations. Images so harrowing that language frays. Terms once confined to technical legal debate – genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid – spill into vernacular use.
For Palestinians and many supporters, such words are not hyperbole but the only lexicon honouring the scale of devastation. For large sections of the Jewish community and their allies, the same phrases land as erasure of Jewish self-determination or as coded invitations to violence.
Into this charged semantic field comes a law that does not clearly protect robust political communication about foreign policy, does not embed a strong defence of truth in matters of public interest, and does not separate the human figure of “the Jew” from the juridical abstraction of “the State of Israel”.
Under such a regime, a speech describing documented atrocities by the Israeli Defence Forces could be construed as whipping up hatred of “Israelis as a national group”. Likewise, a sermon railing against “Islamic barbarism” might be defended as legitimate religious commentary rather than as an attack on Muslims as Muslims. History suggests the gradient of enforcement will not be even.
This isn’t because Jews as a people demand immunity from criticism of Israel – many do not. It’s because states that have bound their strategic fortunes to a particular ally, as Australia has to the United States and by extension to Israel, have strong incentives to police narratives that might delegitimise that ally’s conduct. Hate speech law, in that setting, becomes another instrument by which uncomfortable evidence is domesticated or pushed to the periphery.
Palestinians and their allies are not simply “opinionated” about Gaza. They are, in many cases, survivors or direct witnesses attempting to testify to what they see as slow violence decades in the making. To treat that testimony as “hate” because it inflames moral anger is to invert the relationship between cruelty and language. It makes the emotion generated by atrocity a more urgent object of regulation than the atrocity itself.
The Machinery That Manufactures Fear
A trap in current debates is the expectation that we treat antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other racisms as rival claimants in a competition for attention. “What about…” has become the most tedious refrain of our age.
More fruitful to ask: what kind of social machinery keeps manufacturing these forms of contempt, often in cyclical patterns, even when legal prohibitions are strong? Why do different groups become primary targets of vilification in different decades? What is the relationship between those cycles and the economic and geopolitical arrangements upon which contemporary societies are built?
If the same underlying system that produces Gaza’s ruins also produces resentments that attach themselves to Jews in Paris, Muslims in Delhi, migrants in Johannesburg and Aboriginal communities in Melbourne, then focusing exclusively on the speech that expresses such resentments risks treating symptoms while feeding the fever.
Industrial economism – that extractive, growth-addicted paradigm we still dignify as “the economy” – relies on constant mobilisation of fear: of unemployment, crime, cultural loss, external enemies. Entire media ecologies specialise in converting fear into attention, attention into profit. Politicians ride the currents they helped stir, promising order if only we accept stronger borders, tougher policing, narrower lexicons of permissible outrage.
In such a climate, antisemitism and Islamophobia are not aberrations. They are familiar weeds in already poisoned soil. Jews and Muslims experience them differently – they must not be conflated. But both are fed by a worldview that construes difference as threat, and by a political economy more comfortable punishing the expression of grievance than questioning the structures that produce grievance.
When governments respond by tightening hate speech laws while leaving the soil untouched, they tacitly accept that the churn of hostility will continue. Their primary concern is preventing that hostility from escaping the channels they control.
Jewish Diversity and the Risk of Co‑optation
Any conversation about antisemitism in Australia defaults to pronouncements of a handful of communal organisations and high-profile spokespeople. Their views matter. They carry real responsibilities to constituencies that understandably want to feel heard and protected.
But communities are never reducible to official representatives. Within Jewish spaces there are sharp disagreements about Israel, about the uses of antisemitism as political accusation, and about the proper relationship between Jews and state security agencies.
Some Jewish thinkers warn that fusing Jewish safety with expanded powers of surveillance and proscription may be short-sighted. States generous with such powers on behalf of one group today can easily wield the same instruments against that group tomorrow under a slightly altered story. Others ask whether a definition of antisemitism that enfolds serious critique of Zionism might eventually stifle venerable Jewish ethical traditions that place universal justice above ethnic loyalty.
These internal debates reveal a general problem: when a state claims to protect a minority by criminalising certain speech, it also invites that minority to legitimate the new powers, intentionally or not. Communities who have suffered neglect or indifference from authorities are understandably tempted to welcome a show of seriousness, even if that seriousness comes packaged with broader constraints on civil liberties.
The question is how Jews – and indeed any minority – can press for real protection against hate without being co‑opted into a project whose ultimate beneficiary is a security bureaucracy whose priorities extend well beyond the welfare of any one community.
Muslims and Palestinians in the Shadow of Suspicion
For Muslim and Palestinian Australians the pattern looks painfully familiar. Each spectacular act of violence associated with someone claiming Islamic inspiration triggers a wave of public suspicion that rarely discriminates between individuals and the billion-plus people who happen to share a religious label.
Bondi was immediately read through the lens of earlier “terror” events. That reading has consequences. It shapes policing priorities, informs media coverage, seeps into hiring decisions and casual street interactions. Entire communities walk a tightrope between condemning crimes done “in their name” and trying to retain the right to express anger about policies that affect them profoundly.
The Bill, with its associative offences and latitude for visa cancellation on suspected links to proscribed organisations, fits neatly into that existing pattern. For many Muslims and Palestinians it feels less like a neutral response to hate than like an intensification of scrutiny directed chiefly at them – at their charities, student groups, online networks.
If Jews fear physical attack and cultural erasure, Muslims and Palestinians fear being permanently penned into the role of the suspect. Both fears are grounded in experience. Yet when one group’s fear is used rhetorically to justify laws that deepen the other group’s precariousness, something corrosive happens to the possibility of shared civic life.
We enter a zero-sum moral economy where protection of one identity appears to require constraint of another’s voice. That is a failure of political imagination, not an inevitability of pluralism.
Emergency Theatre and Democratic Decay
The Bondi Bill was rushed through consultation in days, with a parliamentary recall staged almost theatrically to emphasise urgency. Over four hundred pages of significant amendments – touching speech, association, immigration and security – were treated as emergency measures.
Emergency is the preferred tempo of industrial power. It compresses time, reduces complexity, discourages the public from asking awkward systemic questions. In the emotional aftershock of massacre, legislators appear virtuous acting swiftly. But law made in that register often ossifies panic into permanence.
Had Australia wished to respond differently, it could have embarked on a slower path: detailed public hearings allowing Jewish and Muslim leaders, civil liberties advocates, legal scholars, police, historians of fascism and colonialism, and ordinary citizens to explore what kinds of speech genuinely presage violence; what differentiates ideological fervour from dehumanising propaganda; how existing laws are working; what non‑penal strategies might do more to heal fractured communities.
Instead, we have emergency theatre: the performance of decisiveness masking an underlying reluctance to look too closely at root causes.
Many people – Jewish, Muslim, secular, devout, activist and apathetic – feel they are not authors of this new regime but objects within it.
The Geopolitical Subtext
Australia does not exist in a vacuum. Its foreign policy is tightly bound to the United States through AUKUS, intelligence sharing arrangements, and a bipartisan consensus that treats alignment with Washington as a law of nature. That alignment has consequences. It shapes which wars Australia supports, which human rights abuses it overlooks, and which forms of dissent it finds threatening.
The Gaza war has exposed fissures in that consensus. For the first time in decades, large numbers of Australians – including many who would never describe themselves as radicals – have begun questioning whether uncritical support for Israeli military operations serves Australia’s interests or values. University students, trade unionists, doctors, lawyers, and ordinary suburbanites have found themselves marching alongside Palestinians and asking uncomfortable questions about complicity.
This presents a problem for a political class that has long relied on foreign policy being a domain of elite consensus, insulated from popular pressure. The pro‑Palestine movement isn’t merely large; it’s diverse, persistent, and increasingly sophisticated in its use of international law, human rights discourse, and moral argument. It can’t easily be dismissed as fringe or extremist, though many have tried.
Viewed through this lens, the Bondi Bill isn’t simply about preventing another massacre. It’s also about reasserting control over a conversation that has slipped its leash. By creating legal jeopardy around speech that “promotes hatred” of national groups, the legislation plants a warning flag in the middle of the most contested terrain in Australian public life: the right to describe what is happening in Gaza, to name it as genocide or ethnic cleansing, and to demand that Australia change course.
This does not require architects secretly plotting to silence Palestine solidarity. Conspiracies are rarely necessary when incentives align. The Bill emerges from, and will be administered within, a geopolitical and institutional context in which certain narratives are already marked as dangerous, not because they are false but because they threaten settled arrangements.
In mature liberal democracies censorship is rarely crude. It operates through risk, through the chilling knowledge that certain kinds of speech may attract investigation, prosecution, or social ostracism. Formal law is only the most visible layer.
The Silence Around Empire
One of the more striking absences in the post‑Bondi debate is any sustained discussion of how empire and class shape the distribution of violence and the patterns of speech we are now being asked to regulate.
Antisemitism and Islamophobia do not float free of material conditions. They flourish where people are economically precarious, socially isolated, and politically disenfranchised. They flourish where entire communities have been abandoned by the state, left to compete for scraps while elites accumulate obscene wealth. They flourish where foreign policy decisions – to support this dictatorship, to bomb that country, to sell weapons to this regime – are made without democratic input and then imposed as fait accompli.
Australia’s role in these dynamics isn’t incidental. As a junior partner in the Anglo‑American imperium, Australia has participated in nearly every major Western military intervention of the past century. It hosts U.S. military installations integral to surveillance, drone warfare, and nuclear strategy. Its mining and energy corporations operate across the Global South, often in partnership with regimes that commit grave abuses. Its arms manufacturers sell weapons that end up in Yemen, in West Papua, in occupied Palestine.
None of this is mentioned when politicians speak solemnly about “social cohesion” or the need to combat hate. Yet it’s precisely this entanglement in imperial violence that generates the conditions – the refugees, the grievances, the counter‑violence, the ideological fervour – that periodically erupt within Australia’s borders.
If we were serious about preventing the next Bondi, we would be asking whether a country that profits from and participates in distant wars can expect to remain insulated from their consequences. We would be asking whether the billions spent on security theatre might be better invested in ending Australia’s complicity in the structures that produce radicalisation in the first place.
Such questions threaten too much: the alliance with Washington, the mining lobby, the comfortable fiction that Australia is a peaceful, tolerant nation that just happens to keep getting caught up in other people’s wars. So instead we get a Bill that promises to protect Australians from each other, while leaving untouched the arrangements that bind Australia to the machinery of global violence.
The Global South Watches
Much of the world views the Australian debate over hate speech with weary recognition. In Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where I have spent much of the past two decades, the spectacle of Western nations agonising over speech laws while simultaneously arming dictatorships, bombing cities, and imposing economic policies that immiserate millions, is understood as moral theatre. The concern isn’t insincere, but it’s radically incomplete.
Many in the Global South have lived experience of what happens when powerful states decide that certain forms of speech constitute threats to security or social cohesion. They have seen journalists jailed, activists disappeared, entire movements criminalised under laws that bear striking resemblance to the one now being debated in Canberra. They have learned that once a state acquires the power to define and punish “extremism” or “hate”, that power will be used to protect the interests of elites, not the safety of ordinary people.
China has extensive hate speech provisions and uses them to suppress Uyghur, Tibetan, and Hong Kong dissent under the guise of combating separatism. India’s laws against hate speech have been selectively enforced to protect Hindu nationalist narratives while criminalising Muslim and Dalit voices.
Australia isn’t China or India. But the mechanisms are structurally similar: vague offences, broad ministerial discretion, and a presumption that the state is the appropriate arbiter of which speech harms and which does not. The fact that Australia has, until now, used such powers more sparingly isn’t a function of superior legal architecture but of a political culture that has not yet faced the kind of internal pressures that reveal what those powers can do in less scrupulous hands.
Laws do not enforce themselves. They are wielded by people with interests, ideologies, and career ambitions. What looks like restraint in one decade can look like repression in the next, without a single word of the statute being changed.
The other dimension that registers clearly outside the West is the hypocrisy. Australia, like most of its allies, is happy to condemn hate speech and antisemitism at home while remaining conspicuously silent about – or actively complicit in – far graver forms of dehumanisation abroad. Palestinian children can be killed by the thousands, their schools and hospitals reduced to rubble, and Australian ministers will speak carefully about Israel’s “right to defend itself”. But let someone in Melbourne describe those actions as genocide and suddenly the full weight of moral outrage and legal scrutiny descends.
This confirms a suspicion that the rules‑based international order, and the liberal values it claims to uphold, apply selectively – rigorously to the weak, leniently to the powerful. That suspicion corrodes the legitimacy of Western institutions far more effectively than any amount of hostile propaganda.
What Bondi Reveals
Every society has a story it tells about itself. Australia’s official version is one of tolerance, mateship, and a fair go. We are, we like to believe, a pragmatic people, less ideological than the Americans, less class‑bound than the British, more open than the Europeans.
Bondi shatters that story, or at least exposes its fragility. It reveals that beneath the surface of multicultural civility, old furies and new resentments simmer. It reveals that Australia isn’t insulated from the hatreds tearing at other societies but is fully enmeshed in them, through immigration, through media, through foreign policy, and through the globalised circuitry of rage that now connects a teenager in Sydney to a manifesto written in Christchurch or a sermon uploaded in Raqqa.
The question is what we do with that revelation. Do we retreat into a harder, more militarised version of the national story, one in which security replaces solidarity and the state becomes the primary guarantor of safety? Or do we use this moment to ask deeper questions about the kind of society we are building and whether its foundations can bear the weight of the conflicts now pressing upon it?
The Bondi Bill represents the first path. It doubles down on the belief that if we can just identify and silence the dangerous voices, if we can proscribe the right organisations and monitor the right networks, then we can return to a stable equilibrium. That equilibrium, to the extent it ever existed, was partial and purchased at the cost of someone else’s silence or exclusion.
The harder path requires abandoning the comforting myth that Australia is essentially a peaceful, tolerant nation occasionally disturbed by external threats or deviant individuals. It requires acknowledging that the violence we see – in Bondi, in Alice Springs, in immigration detention centres, in the rising seas that will soon swallow Pacific nations – isn’t aberrational but structural, woven into the way we organise land, labour, and belonging.
It requires accepting that we are not innocent bystanders to the world’s cruelties but active participants in systems of extraction and domination that stretch back centuries and forward into a future we are still choosing, and recognising that much of the hatred we are now trying to regulate through law is blowback – the return, in distorted and toxic forms, of violences we have exported or endorsed elsewhere.
To trace such connections isn’t to excuse antisemitism or any other form of bigotry. Hatred is never justified, and the murder of innocents is always a moral catastrophe regardless of context. But if we refuse to see the links between what we do in the world and what eventually happens within our borders, we condemn ourselves to an endless cycle of reaction and repression, never addressing the conditions that keep regenerating the problem.
Industrial Economism and the Exhaustion of Paradigms
Throughout this essay I have used the term “industrial economism” to describe the worldview shaping contemporary political life. It’s worth clarifying what I mean, because the paradigm itself works best when it remains invisible, taken for granted as simply “the way things are”.
Industrial economism is the civilisational logic that emerged from the convergence of Enlightenment rationalism, fossil fuel energy, colonial expansion, and capitalist accumulation. It rests on interlocking premises: that nature is inert matter to be exploited; that human beings are primarily economic agents whose worth is measured by productivity; that growth is both possible and desirable without limit; that technology can solve any problem generated by previous technology; and that the purpose of politics is to facilitate market exchange and protect property.
This paradigm has produced extraordinary material wealth, at least for some. It has also produced ecological devastation, grotesque inequality, the erosion of community, and a culture of perpetual anxiety in which human beings are always either consuming or being consumed.
Hate speech, and the legislative response to it, can only be fully understood within this frame. Industrial economism treats human beings as isolated individuals competing in a marketplace of identities, each seeking recognition and protection from the state. It has no vocabulary for collective belonging that isn’t mediated by nation, race, or consumer preference. It can’t imagine forms of solidarity that cross borders or transcend market logic. And so when conflicts arise – between Jews and Palestinians, between Muslims and secularists, between Indigenous peoples and settlers – the only solutions it can offer are legal: more rights, more protections, more prohibitions.
The Bondi Bill is a perfect expression of this paradigm’s exhaustion. It takes a problem that is fundamentally about meaning, belonging, and the distribution of violence across the planet, and reduces it to a technical question of speech regulation. It assumes that if we can just get the definitions right, if we can just calibrate the penalties correctly, then we can manage hatred the way we manage inflation or traffic flow.
But hatred isn’t a commodity to be regulated. It’s a symptom of a civilisation that has lost the capacity to generate shared meaning, that has replaced the commons with the market, and that now finds itself unable to hold together the social fabric it has spent centuries unravelling.
Towards Different Responses
If the Bondi Bill represents the industrial paradigm’s answer to hatred – more law, more control, more executive discretion – what might alternatives look like?
I do not offer blueprints. Blueprints are part of the problem, the hubristic belief that complex living systems can be redesigned from above by experts with the right credentials. What I can offer are principles, drawn from decades of working with communities attempting to navigate conflict without resorting to coercion.
First, we must cultivate what I have elsewhere called “generative conversation” – forms of dialogue that do not aim for consensus or victory but for deeper understanding of the conditions that produce disagreement. In the case of Bondi and Gaza, this would mean creating spaces where Jews can speak about their fear without being accused of weaponising victimhood, where Palestinians can speak about their dispossession without being labelled antisemitic, and where both can begin to see how their fates are entangled in a larger story of empire, displacement, and the struggle for dignity.
Such conversations can’t be legislated. They require trust, time, and skilled facilitation. They require institutions willing to invest in processes that do not yield immediate results or neat conclusions. They require a public culture that values complexity over clarity.
Second, we must insist on the primacy of material conditions over symbolic gestures. Hate flourishes where people are economically precarious, socially isolated, and politically disenfranchised. Addressing hatred seriously therefore requires addressing inequality, rebuilding social infrastructure, democratising foreign policy, and creating genuine pathways for people to shape the decisions that govern their lives.
Third, we must resist the outsourcing of moral judgement to algorithms and security agencies. The question of what constitutes harmful speech, and how communities should respond to it, is an ethical question requiring ongoing collective deliberation, not a technical problem to be solved by lawyers and police. When we hand that question over to the state, we lose the capacity to make finer distinctions – between a slur and a critique, between dehumanisation and anger, between a call to violence and a cry of pain.
Different communities will draw those lines differently, and that is as it should be. The role of law should be to set outer boundaries – prohibiting direct incitement to violence, targeted harassment, and threats – while leaving the vast middle ground to be negotiated through education, social sanction, and the messy work of living together.
Fourth, we must name and confront the role of media – both legacy and digital – in manufacturing the emotional climate that makes hate profitable. This isn’t about “fake news” or individual bad actors. It’s about business models that reward polarisation, platforms designed to amplify outrage, and ownership structures that concentrate the power to shape public discourse in the hands of a tiny elite. Regulating hate speech while leaving these structures intact is like bailing water from a sinking ship without plugging the hole.
Fifth, and perhaps most radically, we must be willing to question the nation state itself as the primary container of political identity and loyalty. Much of the violence we are attempting to regulate through hate speech law arises from the collision of competing nationalisms. These are not eternal categories but historical constructs, many forged in the crucible of colonialism and empire.
The nation state, for all its claims to represent the people, has always been a mechanism for sorting populations into those who belong and those who do not, those who deserve protection and those who can be sacrificed. As long as we accept that sorting as natural and necessary, we will keep generating the conditions for hatred, expulsion, and massacre.
An alternative would begin from a different premise: that human beings have multiple, overlapping identities and loyalties; that borders are contingent and often unjust; and that the work of politics isn’t to defend the nation against outsiders but to create conditions in which all people, regardless of where they were born or what they believe, can live with dignity.
This isn’t utopianism. It’s realism. The nation state system is visibly failing to manage the great challenges of our time – climate breakdown, pandemic disease, mass displacement, ecological collapse. Clinging to it, and to the hatreds it generates, is the real fantasy.
Jewish and Muslim Futures Beyond the State
One of the more hopeful currents in the post‑Bondi moment, largely invisible in mainstream debate, is the quiet work being done by Jews and Muslims alike who refuse the roles assigned to them by the security state.
There are Jewish activists who insist that their safety can’t be built on Palestinian suffering, who organise against the occupation, who use their own tradition’s emphasis on justice to critique Zionism. There are Muslim scholars and community leaders who reject both the caricature of Islam as inherently violent and the demand that they constantly perform moderation for a suspicious audience. There are Palestinians who reach out to Jewish neighbours, not to erase their own claims but to build alliances based on shared humanity rather than shared victimhood.
These are fragile, contested efforts. They receive little institutional support and are often attacked from multiple directions – by Zionist organisations that label them self‑hating or traitors, by elements within their own communities that see any gesture towards the other side as betrayal, and by a media ecosystem that finds reconciliation far less newsworthy than confrontation.
Yet they persist, because the people involved understand something that eludes most politicians and commentators: that security built on the suppression of another people’s voice or the denial of another people’s history isn’t security at all. It’s a temporary armistice that stores up future violence.
What these efforts point towards is a different conception of safety, one rooted not in state protection but in mutual recognition and the patient construction of relationships that can withstand disagreement. This isn’t naïve. It acknowledges that Jews and Muslims, Palestinians and Israelis, will continue to have profound differences, including over questions of statehood, sovereignty, and historical memory. But it refuses to let those differences be weaponised by elites who benefit from permanent enmity.
In practical terms, this might mean Jewish and Muslim communities jointly resisting hate speech laws that threaten both, rather than competing to be the primary beneficiary of state protection. It might mean Palestinian and Jewish students creating shared spaces on campuses to discuss the conflict without the presence of administrators or security personnel. It might mean imams and rabbis co‑authoring public statements that reject both antisemitism and Islamophobia while defending the right to fierce political disagreement.
Such initiatives will not prevent every act of violence. No law and no community dialogue can eliminate the risk that a disturbed or radicalised individual will commit atrocity. But they can create a social fabric resilient enough to absorb such shocks without fragmenting into mutual suspicion and calls for collective punishment.
The Bondi Bill, by contrast, assumes that resilience comes from the state’s capacity to identify and neutralise threats before they materialise. This is the logic of pre‑emption, borrowed directly from the war on terror, and it has failed everywhere it has been tried. What it produces isn’t safety but a society organised around fear, in which entire populations are treated as potential threats and in which the line between vigilance and paranoia dissolves.
On Being Called Antisemitic
Some readers, particularly those who have lived through or inherited the trauma of the Holocaust and its long aftermath, may read parts of this essay as minimising antisemitism or as providing cover for those who wish Jews harm. That isn’t my intention. Antisemitism is real, it’s ancient, it’s lethal, and it’s resurgent. The Bondi massacre is proof enough of that. Jews have every reason to be vigilant, and every right to demand that societies take their safety seriously. The question “could it happen again?” isn’t paranoia but realism born from experience.
What I am arguing isn’t that Jewish concerns are illegitimate, but that the response being offered – this particular Bill, with this particular architecture – will not make Jews safer in any enduring sense. It will make the state more powerful. It will make certain kinds of political speech more dangerous. And it will, in all likelihood, be used in ways that harm other vulnerable communities, including Muslims and Palestinians, whose own safety and dignity matter just as much.
I am also arguing that the conflation of antisemitism with criticism of Israel or Zionism – a conflation not universal among Jews but increasingly embedded in institutional and legal definitions – does a disservice to the fight against actual antisemitism. It dilutes the term, making it harder to distinguish between hatred of Jews as Jews and opposition to the policies of a particular state. And it places Jews who reject that conflation, who insist that their Jewishness isn’t synonymous with support for Israeli actions, in an impossible position.
This isn’t an abstract concern. I have worked with Jewish scholars, activists, and community members around the world who live this tension daily. They are accused of being self‑hating, of giving comfort to antisemites, of betraying their people. Yet they persist, because they believe – as I do – that justice is indivisible, and that a politics built on the denial of Palestinian humanity will ultimately corrode Jewish ethics and endanger Jewish safety.
Coda: Contraction of Imagination
I write this from Thailand, where I have lived for two decades, long enough to have watched the slow strangulation of a fragile democracy under the weight of coups, lèse‑majesté prosecutions, and the kind of security legislation that Australians are now being asked to embrace. I have seen what happens when the state is granted sweeping powers to define and punish threats to social harmony. I have seen how such powers are used first against the obvious targets and then, gradually, against anyone who questions the distribution of wealth and power.
Thailand isn’t Australia. The histories are different, the institutions are different, the cultural logics are different. But the mechanisms of repression are remarkably similar, because they draw on a common reservoir of techniques developed and refined across the twentieth century by states facing popular unrest.
Distance offers a certain clarity. It makes visible things that are harder to see from within. One of those things is the degree to which the Anglosphere operates as a single cultural and strategic bloc, despite its internal differences. The same debates about hate speech, the same anxieties about social cohesion, the same legislative templates, circulate among these countries with remarkable speed. What is proposed in London one year appears in Canberra the next, often with nearly identical language.
This isn’t conspiracy but convergence, the natural result of shared legal traditions, intelligence partnerships, and a political class that moves fluidly between these countries, carrying ideas and assumptions with them.
When we assess the Bondi Bill, we are not looking at an isolated Australian response to an Australian problem. We are looking at the local instantiation of a broader project to redefine the boundaries of acceptable speech across the democratic West in response to challenges – migration, inequality, imperial decline, climate disruption – that threaten the legitimacy of existing arrangements.
Viewed from Asia, this project appears less as a defence of liberal values than as their managed contraction. The freedoms that Western societies claim as their distinctive achievement are being quietly pruned back, not through overt authoritarianism but through the steady accumulation of laws that make certain kinds of political expression risky, certain forms of association suspect, and certain questions about power effectively unaskable.
What makes this contraction particularly insidious is that it’s undertaken in the name of protection – of minorities, of social harmony, of democracy itself. It’s hard to argue against protection. But we must learn to distinguish between protection that expands the realm of human possibility and protection that merely insulates existing hierarchies from challenge.
The Bondi Bill, for all its invocations of Jewish safety and social cohesion, belongs to the second category. It protects not people but a particular configuration of power. It defends not democracy but the narrowing consensus of a political class that has run out of ideas and now seeks to criminalise the imagination of alternatives.
Bondi will be remembered for the lives lost. Legislation will be passed in their name. Speeches will be made about resilience and unity. And yet, unless we are willing to interrogate the deeper architecture of a worldview that treats hatred as an isolated pathology rather than as a predictable secretion of a system addicted to fear and extraction, we will keep generating the conditions for the next Bondi, and the next Gaza, and the next wave of “emergency” bills.
We inhabit a civilisation that has become extraordinarily adept at managing symptoms while deepening the pathologies that produce them. Industrial economism does not merely tolerate hatred; it requires periodic eruptions of it to maintain the emotional infrastructure of borders, hierarchies and markets. When those eruptions become too visible or too inconvenient, the state steps in not to heal the wound but to anaesthetise the surrounding tissue. The Bondi Bill is anaesthesia presented as surgery.
If there is a way through, it will not be found in the binary contest between “protecting Jews” and “defending free speech”, as though those were rival goods. It will be found in the much harder labour of building forms of public life capable of holding multiple truths simultaneously: that Jews are genuinely at risk; that Palestinians are being destroyed; that Muslims face systematic suspicion; that speech can wound and also liberate; that law has a role but can’t substitute for the patient, messy work of repairing civic imagination.
The choice facing Australia isn’t between protecting Jews and protecting Palestinians, nor between condemning antisemitism and defending free speech. It’s whether we can craft a response that does all of these things together, in a way that strengthens, rather than weakens, our democratic fabric.
That work begins not with legislation but with refusal: refusal to accept that the current order is inevitable, refusal to delegate our moral judgement to security agencies, refusal to let fear be converted into profit and control. And it continues with the slow, unglamorous labour of building alternatives – one conversation, one relationship, one experiment in solidarity at a time.