I don’t know why, in the immediate aftermath of the Bondi Beach massacre, the shooter’s name, Naveed Akram, was published so quickly - prior to police verification - by Australia’s national broadcaster, when restraint is usually the norm in cases like this.
I don’t know why that same name appears, according to publicly available Google search data, to have been searched multiple times by multiple users in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv on December 10th, and again on December 13th, the day before the attack.
I don’t know why Israel’s Prime Minister felt compelled to first publicly misidentify the man who stopped the attacker as Jewish, when he was in fact Muslim.
I don’t know why Netanyahu rushed to blame Iran while the attack was practically still unfolding, before facts were established, before victims were even named.
I don’t know why, before acknowledging the dead and wounded in Sydney, Netanyahu instead chose to frame the massacre as retaliation for Australia’s recognition of a Palestinian state.
I don’t know why reports are now circulating that Israeli intelligence (Mossad) is involved in an investigation on Australian soil; or why that involvement would be necessary in a domestic Australian case.
I don’t know why, within hours of the shooting, pro-Israel organisations across the globe appeared to converge almost uniformly around the phrase “globalize the intifada.”
I don’t know why those same organisations, across countries and continents, began using nearly identical language calling for governments to “crack down on hate speech” more aggressively than ever before.
I don’t know why Western media appeared to fall into a kind of lockstep: major outlets like The New York Times and The Atlantic contextualising “globalize the intifada” as an urgent cultural threat, while other Western mainstream platforms rolled out one pro-Israel spokesperson after another to condemn the phrase and demand immediate state intervention.
And I don’t know why Israel intensified its shelling of Gaza while the blood in Sydney had barely dried.
But here is what I do know…
Fifteen people were tragically killed in a massacre targeting Sydney’s Jewish community.
I also know that a day in which Israel kills fifteen Palestinian civilians in Gaza would be considered below the daily average during more than two years of ongoing genocide.
I know that Israel’s atrocities, and the total impunity they enjoy, are the single greatest driver of rising antisemitism around the world.
And I know that the speed with which Israel and its apologists have weaponized the Bondi Beach massacre: to reject Palestinian statehood, to baselessly blame Iran, and to demand broader censorship of anti-genocide protest — exposes just how little they truly care about Jewish safety.
Antisemitism is real.
But so is its exploitation.
And the refusal to confront Israel’s crimes, while using Jewish suffering as political cover, ensures that both Palestinians and Jews will continue to pay the price.
