The New Wave of Violent Antisemitism Was Never About Israel

By Noah Rothman

Monday, December 15, 2025

 

A 50-year-old man and his 24-year-old son slaughtered 15 Jews on an Australian beach this weekend. The list of their victims includes a rabbi, a Holocaust survivor, and even a ten-year-old girl, among many more innocents.

 

In the attack’s wake, Israeli officials could not contain their outrage at their Australian counterparts. There had been so many warning signs that violent antisemitism was on the rise — a prejudice countenanced and coddled, they say, by Canberra.

 

Israeli intelligence cannot yet rule out an operational link between this terrorist attack and Iran, as well as Islamist terror networks affiliated with the Islamic Republic and other Sunni-dominated outfits. But it’s reasonable to assume that, even in the absence of a state sponsor, something would have set this tinderbox alight.

 

Over the twelve months that ended on September 30, Australia recorded over 1,650 “anti-Jewish incidents.” The Guardian suggests in its coverage of the Bondi Beach massacre that the uptick in violence is attributable to Israel’s defensive war in Gaza. After all, that’s when antisemitic violence skyrocketed, in the immediate aftermath of the worst one-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. But the violence in Australia had nothing to do with the War in Gaza, the combat phase of which ended more than two months ago. Nor were the other episodes of violent antisemitism that convulsed the globe.

 

Protesters marched in Amsterdam this weekend bearing Palestinian flags, harassed police, and chanted “blood on their hands,” “child murderers,” and “kill the Jews,” as they paraded past a concert hall during a Jewish-themed family event:

 

 

The situation deteriorated from there. The mob reportedly tried to breach police barriers and gain access to the facility sheltering their targets. Someone set off red and green smoke bombs, and the crowd clashed with police — a clash that resulted in an undisclosed number of arrests.

 

And in California, a family home decked out in identifiably Jewish holiday regalia was bombarded with a hail of bullets. Twenty rounds were fired into the Redlands home as the suspect, who was captured on camera, shouted antisemitic slurs, including, “F*** the Jews!”

 

The precipitating incident for these calculated acts of savagery wasn’t anything that took place in Israel or the Palestinian territories. The event that moved bloodthirsty assassins and mobs alike to terroristic violence was the first few nights of Hanukkah and the ostentatious displays of Judaic pride that accompany its celebration.

 

The international Jewish diaspora has come to expect its torment. That’s why expensive private security forces guard every synagogue, every Jewish day school. It’s why Jewish community centers spend exorbitant sums constructing airlock vestibules to evaluate potential threats before they gain access to teachers and children. It’s why Jewish events don’t reveal their location, even to attendees, until 24 hours out — just to give their would-be murderers less time to prepare.

 

None of that is new, although it is getting appreciably worse. And none of it has anything to do with the Jewish state’s geostrategic initiatives. These are the toxic fruits of a vile Jew hatred that had become observably more pronounced long before Hamas terrorists cascaded over Israel’s borders on October 7.

 

These horrors and those that are all but certain to come are not happening in a vacuum. This is a harvest of bloodshed that was sown and carefully tended to by this hatred’s custodians. It was abetted by those who are forever just asking questions but are never satisfied by answers that don’t lead back to the Jews. It was rendered thinkable by the complacent institutional stewards who turned a blind eye to anti-Jewish bigotry or sought to leverage the crippling inferiority complex at its root for their own ends. It is promoted by the enemies of Western civilization who seek to uproot the liberal social covenant and replace it with something darker — a project advanced one short-form video at a time.

 

It’s been happening under our noses, and it is getting worse. But none of it has anything to do with the state of Israel. It never has.

 

Those who are pathologically committed to or financially dependent on the promotion of antisemitism will surely blame the victims of this weekend’s anti-Jewish violence for their own fates. That can no longer be regarded as a quirky eccentricity that must be accommodated. Bloody consequences accompany the impoverishment of the stigma around antisemitism.

 

A civilized people would not tolerate that as the price of doing business in the marketplace of ideas. A civilized people would stand up for civilization. Is that who we are anymore?