WhatsappThe Chanukah massacre on Bondi Beach was the result of sweeping antisemitic darkness. But it won’t douse the eternal Jewish flame.
As families around the world gathered on Sunday evening to light the first candle of Chanukah, a massacre was perpetrated against Jews celebrating the festival at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia.
A video released last week shows six young hostages—heroes—reduced to shadows of themselves in Hamas’s underground tunnels. There, in captivity, they lit a makeshift chanukiyah and recited the prayers. That was exactly a year ago. They were Jews bound to one another and to their people, even in imprisonment, until Hamas decided to massacre them in cold blood, simply because they were Jews.
Chanukah commemorates the Jewish victory over Seleucid power. More than two years ago, Hamas carried out its massacre on Oct. 7, 2023. The day was both Shabbat and the holiday of Simchat Torah—the festival of the joy of the Torah, the Bible given to all peoples so that they might find a path toward civilization.
Today, the State of Israel has become the target that has replaced the ancient “blood libel.” The mechanism is brutally simple: Transfer all guilt onto the Jewish state in order to justify hatred of all Jews. This is exactly what happened in Australia. And now the risk of a diffused Shoah exists across the world, disguised as political “criticism” of Israel.
The refusal on the part of Israelis to understand this reality was part of the conceptzia that Hamas was deterred—until the Oct. 7 terrorists cried out “Jew, Jew” as they went on a rape, arson and mutilating spree, slaughtering 1,200 and kidnapping 250.
The conceptzia prevented observers from recognizing Hamas’s glaringly obvious preparations. Now, following two years of lies and libels about Israeli actions, the conceptzia blinds us again—in Australia, in America, in Europe.
We hear endlessly about “aspirations for peace,” “Palestinian rights,” “legitimate criticism of the State of Israel” and “upholding human rights.” Terms like “genocide” and “war crimes” are shouted without restraint.
Two days after the Hamas invasion, masses filled Sydney streets waving Palestinian flags and chanting, “Gas the Jews.” For the next two years, politicians and much of the press either stood silent or actively backed such demonstrations of hatred.
Between Oct. 1, 2023, and Sept. 30, 2025, there were 4,716 antisemitic attacks in Australia—more than six per day. On Dec. 6 last year, a synagogue in Melbourne was set on fire. A synagogue in Sydney was saved only narrowly from an explosion. Behind these attacks stood Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
In other words, Australian Jews have been subjected to persecution in the form of marches, rallies, beatings and boycotts. And it culminated in a massacre.
This should have been foreseen. From Oct. 7, 2023 onward, Jew-hatred, which for centuries has nested in the most diverse of cultures, from Islamic to Christian and the Western left, was fed by politics. This ravenous beast is capable of assuming countless forms and has been nourished deliberately.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, like many European politicians, has been feeding it by cloaking it in outrage over ostensible crimes committed by Israel in Gaza. He has perpetuated false claims of “genocide” and “starvation” and supported international tribunals that hold Israel, rather than Hamas, as culpable.
Albanese has watched anti-Jewish hatred rise like whipped cream laced with curare. He has seen Iranian emissaries—and who knows whom else—wallow in it, even after warnings from the Mossad. And yet he’s continued, in the hope of garnering consensus, votes and advantages from the United Nations lobby.
The notion of destroying Israel has captivated crowds. It is what drove Lebanese and Pakistani Islamists to shoot at Australian women and children. It is what threatens the entire world—a world in cognitive and political decline following a “religion” that seeks the end of Judeo-Christian civilization, an aim nearly accomplished in the 1930s.
Still, tonight, Jews light the next candle.
It’s a literal and proverbial flame that belongs to all those intent on changing course—on stepping out the conceptzia—not with words, but with deeds.
