The Bondi Beach lesson: all must confront extremist ideologues

There is a good reason why anti-Zionism feels so righteous to those who preach it, and feels so viscerally familiar to Jews forced to face it. 

Anti-Zionism (which can be defined as denial of Israel’s right to exist) is the spawn of a lethal truth exposed by the Bondi Beach terror attack against Jews in Australia on 14 December. 

The terrorists, reportedly inspired by ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), killed 15 Jews, including a 10-year-old girl, two rabbis (one born in South Africa), and a Holocaust survivor, celebrating Chanukah, the Festival of Lights. They wounded more than 40, including two policemen, not all of them Jews. 

The same lethal truth lies behind the unprecedented, gratuitous savagery of the 7 October 2023 terror attack against mostly civilian targets in southern Israel, that left more 1 200 people dead, more than 5 000 injured, and more than 250 kidnapped and sent to Gaza as hostages. Not all victims were Jews. 

That truth, say legal and historical scholars, is that anti-Zionism really is a modern mutation of the ancient virus of hatred known as antisemitism. 

It has evolved, they say, by latching itself onto modern social constructs. In this case, the construct is the language around international law and human rights that has been “weaponised” in an “unconventional war” to delegitimise, demonise, and destroy the state of Israel. 

An allied strand to this truth is that anti-Zionism threatens not just Jews, who may or may not be Zionists, but anyone in the way of genocidal fanatics hellbent on wiping Israel from the face of the earth, and all Jews with it. 

Hamas proved that fact on 7 October, by torturing, murdering, burning alive, and beheading not just Jews, not just adults, but also babies, Muslims, Christians, Druze, Bedouins, Buddhists, dogs, and any living beings unlucky enough to stumble across its murderous path. 

Hamas proved that ‘Zionist’ really is the anti-Israel lobby’s code word for Jews, despite protestations from lobbyists that they are only showing “Palestinian solidarity”. 

October 7 led American-Jewish atheist, neuroscientist philosopher Sam Harris, an avowed non-Zionist, to declare presciently: “We all live in Israel now. Some of us just haven’t realised it yet.” 

Australians are now realising that, after the Bondi attack by a father-and-son terrorist duo. 

Police shot dead Sajid Akram (50), an immigrant from India, at the scene. His Australian-born son, Naveed Akram (24), was critically injured but recovered in hospital. He has been charged with more than 50 terror counts. 

If that was a father-son bonding session, it was the most perversely depraved one imaginable. 

Akram set off on the day heavily armed, on a family outing with all the hallmarks of a suicide pact. With ISIS flags in his car, he inducted his son into mass murder as if into a shared rite. 

Both showed commitment to Islamist radicalisation not in isolation, but in intimacy with terror against Jews as a shared project and strangers as collateral. 

Against that obscene collapse of good parenting stood its brave, moral opposite in extraordinarily courageous, unarmed civilians. 

A dash-cam video shows Boris and Sofia Gurman, a Russian-Jewish couple in their 60s, confronting the terrorists as they emerged from their car. Boris managed to grab a gun from one of the terrorists, but both he and Sofia were fatally shot. 

They were found dying in the street in each other’s arms. 

As courageous, and much luckier, was Muslim bystander Ahmed Al Ahmed. A video shows him moving towards the gunfire, risking his life to save others, and wresting a large rifle from Akram. Al Ahmed was shot in the interchange but is recovering in hospital. 

On 15 December, Sarah Ettedgui, a “proud Sephardi Jew” from Canada, and a corporate lawyer with a psychology background, took to X (formerly Twitter) to call out the Bondi attack as “ideologically motivated violence rooted in contemporary anti-Zionism”. 

“Mass hate movement” 

Ettedgui called anti-Zionism “antisemitism expressed in a political vocabulary” and a “transnational mass hate movement that has reshaped university culture, activist networks, and even mainstream political spaces”. 

She pointed out that the Bondi Beach attack did not emerge in a vacuum. It was birthed in an environment that “defends calls to globalise the intifada as protected speech, dismisses Jewish fear as exaggeration, and treats enforcement of existing laws as optional”. 

She joins others who say that anti-Zionism is not just a critique of Israeli state policy. It is mostly a framework that assigns “collective guilt to Jews, treats Jewish presence as provocation, and allows Jew-hatred to adapt”. 

Crucially, when that hatred is “laundered through political language and left unchallenged, it does not remain symbolic for long,” Ettedgui said. 

That political language laundering showed up in stark relief in South Africa on 16 December, in the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation’s statement on the Bondi Beach attack. 

Kathrada was an anti-apartheid activist and senior leader in the liberation struggle, a member of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party. He spent 26 years in prison, mostly on Robben Island, with his close friend and comrade, Nelson Mandela. 

After apartheid collapsed, Kathrada remained a moral voice in public life, known for his principled commitment to non-racialism, constitutionalism and ethical leadership. 

Hope springs eternal, and I’m hoping his eponymous foundation’s statement on the Bondi Beach terror attack would have horrified him. 

The Foundation denounced the Bondi terror onslaught against Jews simply as an “attack on a Jewish religious festival” by “two gunmen”. It quoted Foundation executive director Neeshan Balton sending condolences to “the Australian people”. 

Somewhat disingenuously, however, it claimed that the motive for the attack was currently “unknown”. 

In fact, it was known to the world watching on 14 December as a targeted terrorist assault on Jews. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese used precisely such language that same evening, calling it “an act of evil, antisemitism terrorism”. 

New South Wales Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon declared it a terrorist incident on 14 December. 

The Foundation statement segued seamlessly into anti-Zionist rhetoric, including the libellous “genocide in Gaza” claim against Israel. 

It quoted Balton saying that anti-Zionism differed “fundamentally” from antisemitism; and “conflation of the two – often by proponents of Israel themselves – should be guarded against”. 

He said it “paves the way for the legitimate challenging of a political concept to be dangerously blurred with clearcut religious hate”. 

Balton ended by dismissing the Bondi attack as the “recent killing of 15 more people in a different part of the world altogether…” and “possibly indicative of the global repercussions of the genocide”. 

He would have done better to take a leaf from the book of the eponymous family foundation of the late Anglican Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu and wife Leah. 

On 15 December, the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation condemned the Bondi Beach attack “in the strongest possible terms” as “a violent antisemitic attack” and an “attack of hatred” against “the Jewish community and the dignity and safety of all people”. 

Imam Tawhidi, Australian representative of the Global Imams Council (GIC), was similarly forceful. 

On 15 December, Tawhidi issued a statement unapologetically punctuated with J-words (Jews, Jewish), where the Kathrada Foundation used one (Jewish), once only. 

“Calculated antisemitic act of terror”. 

In it, Tawhidi condemns the Bondi Beach attack as “barbaric”, a “calculated antisemitic act of terror”, driven by “hatred, cowardice, and moral depravity”, and a crime that “stains the conscience of humanity”. 

It is what “globalising of the intifada looks like”, he said. “Any individual or ideology that targets Jews or justifies violence against them … is not representing Islam but desecrating it”. 

The GIC “stands in unbreakable, unapologetic solidarity with the Jewish community of Australia” and Jewish communities worldwide, Tawhidi said. 

Ettedgui says that we are (or should be) all far past the point that can justify “soft language, indirect framing or strategic silence”. And it is not radical to call anti-Zionism what it clearly is to most proponents – a hate movement, 

It is “necessary and accurate,” she said. 

That accuracy is “the starting point for any strategy that intends to protect Jewish communities and their allies today”. 

Tawhidi would endorse that sentiment. 

He calls on Muslims everywhere to confront extremist ideologies in their own communities and actively build “bonds of respect and protection for their Jewish brothers and sisters”. 

He calls on authorities globally to crush terror against Jews decisively, and to expose, and hold accountable without exception, all those who incite, fund, promote, or excuse it. 

Tawhidi channels Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel in declaring that “silence is complicity” and “neutrality in the face of terror is a moral failing”. 

Until that silence and neutrality lift, the global hunting of Jews under the cloak of anti-Zionism will go on. 

• Marika Sboros is a freelance journalist who commutes between South Africa and the UK. 

• This story was first published in the Daily Friend.