A woman keeps a candle next to flowers laid as a tribute at Bondi Beach to honor the victims of a mass shooting that targeted a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach on Sunday, in Sydney, Australia, Dec. 16, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Flavio Brancaleone

December 14, 2025, will go down as one of the darkest moments in modern Australian history.

The massacre that took place that day at Bondi Beach in Sydney, during a Hanukkah event, left scars on Australian society that will not easily be healed.

And while Jews were the primary target, the attack didn’t just break the hearts of Australian Jews, but the hearts of many Australians, who wondered what had become of their country.

Australia is famously known for being tolerant, laid-back, and relaxed. The very idea of such extremism coming to our shores seemed such a foreign concept that it could scarcely be believed. If it could happen here, then surely it could happen anywhere.

Yet many of the truths we cling to from the past no longer exist in the world post October 7.

In the more than 1,000 days since the October 7 attacks, the security and confidence of the Australian Jewish community have been stripped away, replaced by a deep concern that life has forever changed here.

Of course, this is not unique to Australia. Instead, it is a microcosm of what’s happened to Jewish communities all around the world.

From Canada to Britain to France to Germany to the United States and elsewhere, record-breaking numbers of antisemitic incidents have occurred, a wave of hatred not seen in the West since the darkest days of the Holocaust.

That’s why Australia has become a case-study of a society that has shifted profoundly — from welcoming to indifference, from indifference to intimidation, from intimidation to violence, and from violence to terrorism.

After the Bondi massacre, the Australian government, under pressure from many prominent members of Australian society, established a Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.

It was arguably the first serious attempt to find out just what went wrong in Australian society.  Over 20,000 submissions were made to the Commission, each telling the story of how a world that people thought they knew had changed.

On May 4, 2026, the first witnesses spoke about their “lived experiences” — led by Sheina Gutnick, whose father, Reuven Morrison, was one of the 15 victims of the massacre at Bondi. She spoke of how proud her father was to become an Australian citizen, how grateful he was to the nation that had welcomed him (and other Jews) after he fled Ukraine at the age of 14. And she also spoke of her own experience of Jew-hatred — just a year before the Bondi massacre, a man pointed at her Star of David necklace, while she was with her baby, and called her a “f-ing terrorist.”

More testimonies followed. Some expressed a fear of public spaces, including feeling unsafe when they encountered the many anti-Israel rallies in Australia’s cities — rallies often characterized by violent or intimidatory rhetoric. Others spoke of questioning whether Australia still had a future for them.

Sadly, the current Australian Jewish story echoes the experience of countless Jewish communities throughout history — communities that fled one country believing another would be different.

But as important as it is to give voice to the many Australians who have been affected by this surge of antisemitism, this Commission, at its core, is about asking how Australia, a country with a rich tradition of tolerance and acceptance, reached a point where antisemitism escalated into mass terrorism, and what must change to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

That includes understanding the drivers of that antisemitism, from Islamic extremism, the far-right, the far-left, online radicalism, foreign influence, social media and institutional failures. The Commission has been given less than a year to investigate this with a final report due on December 14, 2026 — the one-year anniversary of the Bondi Beach massacre.

If successful, the Commission will explain why antisemitism increased, why it was not confronted and halted, recommend reforms, and provide Australia with a roadmap to prevent such a tragedy from happening again.

However, despite hopes that such a report will be an antidote to the mental disease of antisemitism, there is reason to be concerned that trends feeding the explosion in antisemitism are not truly turning around.

Even as the Commission does its work, anti-Israel politics continues to make inroads in the background. A proposed new policy platform of the ruling Australian Labor Party (ALP) calls for increased pressure on Israel while dropping past demands that Hamas disarm and give up its rule over Gaza, and that the Palestinian Authority be reformed.

These demands formed a central part of the Australian Government’s justification of Australia’s recognition of “Palestine” last September — a move that made little sense except as a response to activist pressure, both inside and outside the ALP.

But apparently, the pro-Palestinian lobby within the ALP is now demanding even more — they just want Israel punished, and reject any obligations, no matter how obviously justifiable, directed at the Palestinian side.

Australia is not an exception, but instead a warning. And if the lessons emerging from the Royal Commission are ignored, other democracies may one day find themselves confronting the same question Australia faces now: how did we let this happen?

Justin Amler is a policy analyst at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC).