Evil on our shores
The cancer of antisemitism has turned a peaceful Jewish refuge into a killing ground. by nick cater.
The antisemitic hatred that drove Alexander Kleytman to seek sanctity in Australia finally caught up with him on Sunday.
Kleytman fled Ukraine as a child with his mother to escape the unspeakable terror of the Holocaust. They survived sub-zero temperatures and near starvation in Siberia, counting themselves lucky to be alive.
On Sunday, at the age of 87, Kleytman was killed by a Jihadist’s bullet on a warm summer evening at Bondi Beach in front of his grandchildren.
The Bondi Massacre, which claimed at least 15 lives, shattered the peace of a lazy summer Sydney afternoon together with the notion of Australian exceptionalism, the idea that we are the happiest, most integrated multicultural nation on earth.
We once hoped that the Jihadists might leave us out of their plans for a global caliphate, just as Hitler held back his troops on the borders of Switzerland.
Those hopes were destroyed two days after the October 7, 2023, atrocity in Israel when a large and threatening group of Palestinian protesters marched to the Sydney Opera House brandishing Jihadist flags and chanting “Gas the Jews” and “Where’s the Jews?”.
On Sunday, they found the Jews gathered by the sea to celebrate Hanukkah. The backyard Jihadists, father and son, fired at least 40 single-round shots, cold-bloodedly singling out their victims through the sights of their long-barrelled rifles.
Parents instinctively threw their bodies on their children. Kleytman shielded his wife, Laris, also a Holocaust survivor. The youngest victim was a 10-year-old child, pictured smiling on social media in a Country Road tee-shirt.
It was once tempting to imagine that antisemitism, like smallpox, might be eradicated in Australia. Such naivety was exposed in the aftermath of the October 7 atrocity, when an intense hatred of Jews erupted not just among a radical Islamist contingent, but in their fellow travellers on the progressive left.
Since then, almost 4000 antisemitic incidents have been recorded in Australia, an average of five a day.
The antisemitic attacks are too frequent and their targets too varied to be solely sheeted home to Jihadists or neo-Nazis, who, though active in Australia, are small in number. There is no common modus operandi. The best assessment is that this is the spontaneous expressions of everyday Jew hatred in an atmosphere in which antisemitism has become a normalised form of political expression.
Here are just a few:
February 1, 2025: A Melbourne doctor with an identifiably Jewish surname checking into a Sydney hotel is grabbed by the arm and scratched by a female staff member who mutters, “You’re a f****** Jew”.
March 20, 2025: A Jewish man is pushed off his bike near a Melbourne synagogue by a man yelling “F****** Jews”, “Free Palestine” and “You kikes”.
August 21, 2025: A pig leg is thrown inside a Kosher business in Waverley, Sydney.
October 9, 2024: About 20 protestors, most wearing masks, some wearing keffiyahs, break into and occupy a Jewish physics professor’s office at the University of Melbourne. They chant, “Stephen Prawer, you can’t hide. You’re guilty of genocide.” Prawer leads a joint Israeli/Australian PhD program exploring how birds navigate.
December, 19, 2024: Post by a Sydney man on X: “Let’s go to the (aged care) home in (suburb) and bash some Holocaust survivors!”
December 2, 2025: Sydney Police investigating a six-month antisemitic graffiti campaign in the up-market harbourside suburb of Rose Bay arrest a 71-year-old grandmother.
This is the moment to acknowledge that Australia has crossed a threshold into what Hannah Arendt described as the banality of evil. Arendt’s insight was not that evil was committed by monsters, but that many of the perpetrators of Nazi atrocities were disturbingly ordinary people who had surrendered their capacity for moral reflection.
Hatred of Jews became routine, enacted by individuals who were socially and institutionally affirmed rather than restrained, and who came to see their actions not as moral choices but as normal, even virtuous, conduct.
The cold-blooded, clinical assassination of men, women and children on Sunday was the worst terrorist incident on Australian soil and ranks among the most evil acts committed on this ancient continent.
Yet the perpetrators are distinguished by their banality: a father and son living in a relatively respectable neighbourhood in Western Sydney, where Australian-born residents are a minority.
Locals were shocked when their neighbour’s house was stormed by heavily armed police on Sunday night. It is an area populated largely by migrants who aspire for a better future for their children in a country that has granted them freedom and opportunities. Sunday’s attack was a brutal assault on that ideal.
Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese should seize the Bondi Massacre as the cue for a reset on his policy towards Israel and vacillating support for the Jewish population in Australia.
In July last year, Albanese responded to the wave of antisemitic attacks by appointing Jillian Segal a Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism. Yet he couldn’t leave it there. He announced he would also be appointing a Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia.
Five months ago, Segal issued a report on what she termed the crisis in antisemitism. None of its proposals has been acted upon.
Muslims represent just 3.2 per cent of Australians, yet they live predominantly in electorates in Melbourne and Sydney held by Labor. Muslims make up 10 per cent or more of the electorate in 11 Labor seats. In Immigration Minister Tony Burke’s seat, a quarter of the voters are Muslim.
That explains Albanese’s strenuous attempts to find two sides in the antisemitism debate and straddle somewhere in the imaginary middle. It also explains why he overturned 65 years of bipartisan foreign policy by supporting Palestinian independence at the UN.
Burke has gone further, approving visas for 2000 Gaza refugees, necessarily admitted to Australia with cursory checks as to their background, since Australia has no diplomatic presence in the territory.
In October, Burke took another gamble with national security by issuing passports to allow the Australian brides of ISIS fighters to return to Australia with their children. Burke first tried to claim that the government had nothing to do with the repatriation, which was facilitated by the charity Save the Children. Minutes of a meeting with the charity later emerged, proving conclusively that the government has effectively given the deal a wink and a nod.
The anger in Australia is raw, and it extends well beyond the Jewish community. I write this against the backdrop of live coverage on Sky News Australia, where the broadcast’s rhythm shifts between fury and grief. In a country that stands apart as one of only two continents never to have been a battleground for civil war—the other being Antarctica—the shock of this moment runs deep, and its emotional residue will not quickly dissipate.
The location of the attack, on an iconic beach where thousands of Australians were enjoying the beauty and warmth of the Australian summer, emphasised that this was an attack not just on one community but on the Australian way of life.
Albanese lost the trust of the Jewish population long before Sunday’s attack. In the hours after the shooting, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was scathing.
“Your government did nothing to stop the spread of antisemitism in Australia,” he said. “You did nothing to curb the cancer cells that were growing inside your country. You took no action. You let the disease spread, and the result is the horrific attacks on Jews we saw today.”
At moments like this, nations need leadership: prime ministers who can channel justified public anger into a unifying resolve, who recognise an attack on one community as an attack on the civic fabric itself. Australians need to be reminded that we are a civilised, peaceful society precisely because we draw clear moral boundaries—and defend them together when they are tested.
That requires a leader willing to articulate the often unstated national compact: that citizenship carries responsibilities as well as rights, and that the most basic of those responsibilities is respect for the equal dignity and safety of fellow citizens, regardless of race or faith.
Anthony Albanese has shown himself unable to meet that test. His response betrays moral hesitation and intellectual thinness, leaving him ill-equipped to rally the country at a moment that calls for clarity and courage. In particular, he appears blind to the distinctive danger posed by antisemitism, a hatred whose resilience has long been understood. As the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks warned, “Antisemitism mutates, and in doing so defeats the immune system set up by cultures to protect themselves against hatred.”
A nation that fails to confront that truth decisively is not merely neglecting one minority; it is weakening the defences of its own civilisation.