By Ron Hoenig
They were Jews.
Whatever else they were in the minds of the shooters at Bondi, they were Jews.
You don’t choose a Chanukah celebration on a beach to make your stand against your enemy without naming that enemy “Jews”.
Fifteen people are dead and dozens wounded, some very seriously. On December 14, a sunny Sydney day, late in the afternoon, before the Chanukah candles could be lit.
Celebrating the persistence of light in the darkness. Not Christmas for Jews, but a holiday that has been magnified in the Jewish diaspora because Jewish parents want to give their kids presents around Christmas time.
On the beach.
It was hot there. Many would have been wearing shorts and a tee shirt. Perhaps suncream. And a big hat, and sandals or thongs on their feet. Nothing to deflect or
absorb bullets. Vulnerable.
My people. Australians. Jews.
I am thousands of kilometers away from Australia, in Hannover in Germany, closer to the centre of Europe – Dead Europe, as Greek-Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas named his novel – where almost every geographic point carries a reminder of the destruction and hatred of Jews. We are not that far from Bergen Belsen.
I sit here, stewing in confusion and feel a strange guilt about not being in Australia at the time, and try to make sense of my feelings and thoughts about it.
I mourn the loss of those 15 people and the horrific pain of their families and the families of all those people who were injured and traumatized by that awful event.
And, as Ursula says, I carry the traumata of my parents in my very being. The hatred and fear of antisemitism is in my Jewish bones. The fear that it will happen again – as it has so many times before, although the shape of it will change. The shape of the hatred or fear, or envy, of Jews.
And the shape it took on the first night of Chanukah on Bondi Beach is terrifying.
Words matter. Was it a murder? Terrorist attack? Pogrom? Massacre?
Yes, it was murder, but on a larger scale. But it wasn’t just a “terrorist” act. Not, as my dictionary says: “calculated use of violence … to coerce or intimidate
governments/societies for political, religious, or ideological goals” because any crowded place would do as a target for that – a football game, a concert, a shopping
centre, a Christmas market.
This was a different target. Chabad’s annual Chanukah on the Beach.
Pogroms are organized massacres mainly of Jews in the Russian Empire, often with official “connivance”. Thank God, there was no connivance by the State.
Many journalists have called it a “massacre”, the brutal killing of a large number of people, often indiscriminately.
It was distant. Impersonal, like shooting fish in a barrel. A piece of cake. They were trained shooters. There was no organised defense. But someone stopped them and he is important.
Yes it was “indiscriminate”, but although the shooters didn’t care which individuals in the group they hit, and they did hit others on the beach, it is very clear that the target was Jews.
It was a vicious, targeted antisemitic attack on Jews on a beach. In broad daylight. By experienced marksmen.
And that summons a deep fear in me. Not mainly for myself, but for my daughter and grandchildren. It’s a deep, inherited fear that goes back to my parents. Yet, in a way the Holocaust (Shoah) that my parents suffered through obscures and magnifies this event and the pattern of antisemitic acts that preceded and followed it.
This is something different. Unlike Europe in the 1930s, when a hurricane of anti-Jewish laws attacked, eroded and erased the commercial and economic life, the civic
personality of the Jews in many countries before the actual liquidation and incineration of their bodies. Unlike Europe in the 1930s, it’s not state sponsored or even acquiesced to, or church-endorsed.
Somehow the symbolism of doing this act on the sands of Bondi Beach has stirred an amazing response from all kinds of Australians.
The beach is so Australian. Literally littoral. The edge of Australia, where most Australians cling to land on the fringes of the country, close to the sea.
Bondi is iconic. It features in films and tourism advertising. It stands for the beach: sunlit laid-back Aussie hedonism only half an hour away from the city.
In the past, it was also a refuge for immigrants, including Jews. Many of the European Jews who survived the Holocaust were finally permitted to settle in Sydney after the war gathered here, near the beach, in cheap apartments they may have rented with other refugee families. Many Sydney Jews still live in and around Bondi.
Somehow, the beach offered migrant families freedom to play in or near water, as if the force of rolling waves and the tang of saltwater and Australia’s enormous blue skies in the fierce heat of mid-summer could cauterize the fear and wash away the calamity they had escaped.
After all, they were young and strong and could carry on and build a new life for themselves and their children.
They would survive and many would build small businesses, and some became huge organisations, their children would become professionals or politicians or artists and scientists. And all this would be possible without antisemitism raising its horrid, ugly and vicious face.
Maybe, then, they could relax.
Australia was supposed to be safe, far away from the antisemitism of dead Europe. Sunburnt, sleepy, playful, peaceful.
In Australia, they comforted themselves, you never heard antisemitism and nobody really knew what a Jew was. How could they be antisemitic when there were hardly any Jews.
On the beach. All those shapely and shapeless bodies lying in the sun and absorbing the gift of the sun equally. We have no private beaches in Australia – yet. Families of all classes could come to the water together. Children can play freely and old bodies can freely lie on the hot sand near fitter younger bodies. The beach is imagined to be democratic.
Yet beaches in Australia can also mark deep ruptures within the community. There’s another place in Sydney, Cronulla, not so far away from Bondi, where, almost exactly 20 years ago, on December 11, 2005, the beach was fiercely contested. Some people who thought the accident of their white Aussie cultural background and birth entitled them to claim “ownership” of the beach from darker skinned “Muslim” “others”.
Spurred on by racist broadcasters and neo-Nazis, over 5,000 mostly Anglo-Australians assembled at Cronulla in Sydney’s south to ‘reclaim the beach from outsiders’. People with browner skin. They attacked mainly Lebanese background people who had to travel long hours in trains from Sydney’s western industrial suburbs to enjoy the water, sparking two further days of rioting.
Among the slogans: “We grew here; you flew here”.
Not antisemitism then, but vicious racism against Muslim migrants, or people who look like Muslim migrants.
Racists are not fussy.
The beach acts as a marker of the border that must not be penetrated by others.
Again.
Because of course, it’s appropriate to remember that this beach and the rest of this huge continent are only “ours”, because British soldiers and settlers stole it only two
hundred and fifty years ago and during long and only recently-acknowledged frontier wars with its traditional owners.
Bondi is in the traditional lands of the Gadigaal, Bidjigal and Birrabirrigal peoples of the Eora nation who have lived there for many thousands of years. Long before there was an Australia.
Generations of other migrants from all over the world have benefited from that original theft of the land. There is and has been racism in Australia since the beginning.
Especially to Aboriginal people. And Asian people and Muslims.
But I am Jewish and Bondi raises deep fears in me.
Any innocence of the beach was an illusion.
People have reacted to the shooting with incredible generosity and warmth to the Jewish community and their Jewish friends after this terrible antisemitic event.
But the cold-blooded murder of those Jews has changed me.
I have acknowledged that there is antisemitism in Australia. And that it can be catastrophically destructive. I am afraid of it and I don’t know what we can do about it.
Many Jewish friends and I have shared our relief that, even though these two shooters were Muslim, it was a Muslim man who attacked them at enormous risk to his own life, and stopped even more slaughter.
This man and others who bravely intervened are being rightly celebrated in front of huge crowds at football matches.
It has thus far held two parts of the community whose sympathies are on either side of the conflict in the Middle East together in uneasy peace. Celebrating the best in
humanity.
Perhaps that can be a beginning.
But we all know that this is not a permanent solution to the problem of antisemitism.