You've been told Bondi came out of nowhere. It came after two years of warnings: a rally on the Opera House steps two days after October 7, a synagogue set on fire on orders traced to Tehran, and more attacks on Jews than Australia had ever recorded.
Australia's Muslims are 3.2% of the population, 813,392 people at the 2021 census. The story here is not a percentage. It is what a small, organized Islamist current, a foreign regime and a political class slow to call antisemitism by its name produced together, and who paid for it.
Every one of these was public, reported and on the record before Bondi.
9 October 2023 · The Opera House
Two days after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, while the Sydney Opera House was lit in Israel's colours, hundreds rallied on its forecourt, burned flags and chanted. You'll hear "gas the Jews" was among the chants. A police acoustic expert concluded it was where's the Jews
. The Zionist Federation of Australia documented f*** the Jews
at the same rally. What they were chanting was never the question. Where the Jews were, two days after October 7, was.
15 April 2024 · Wakeley
A 16-year-old stabbed Assyrian bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel at the altar during a livestreamed service in western Sydney, blinding him in one eye. Police declared it a terrorist act, religiously motivated. Hundreds rioted outside the church. The ideology does not stop at Jews.
October 2024 · Lewis' Continental Kitchen
A kosher restaurant near Bondi was set alight. ASIO later traced the order to Iran's Revolutionary Guard, working through criminal intermediaries who hit the wrong venue twice before they found it.
6 December 2024 · Adass Israel Synagogue
Masked men poured accelerant inside Melbourne's Adass Israel synagogue before dawn and set it on fire, injuring a congregant and gutting the building. ASIO's finding: directed by the IRGC through a series of overseas cut-out facilitators to coordinators that found their way to tasking Australians.
January 2025 · Sydney
A childcare centre near a synagogue in Maroubra was set on fire and sprayed with f*** the Jews
. Two Sydney synagogues were daubed with swastikas. A car was torched and cars in a Jewish neighbourhood were covered in slogans. (A caravan of explosives found at Dural the same month was later shown by police to be a criminal con job. It is not on this list. It did not need to be.)
26 August 2025 · Iran expelled
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced ASIO's finding that Iran was behind both arson attacks and gave ambassador Ahmad Sadeghi seven days to leave, Australia's first expulsion of an ambassador since the Second World War. On 27 November 2025 Australia listed the IRGC as a state sponsor of terrorism. Iran's ring of fire →
September 2025 · The record
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry counted 2,062 anti-Jewish incidents in the year after October 7, the highest ever, and 1,654 in the year after that: still roughly triple pre-October 7 levels. The overall number fell. The most serious categories, arson against synagogues, preschools and Jewish institutions, rose to the highest on record.
The attack the warnings described.
14 December 2025 · Chanukah by the Sea
About 1,000 people gathered at Archer Park on Bondi Beach for the first night of Hanukkah, a Chabad celebration. Sajid Akram, 50, an Indian national and permanent resident, and his Australian-born son Naveed, 24, both having pledged allegiance to Islamic State, opened fire with a rifle and two shotguns and carried four homemade bombs. They murdered 15 people: 11 men, 3 women and Matilda, aged ten. Among the dead were Holocaust survivor Alex Kleytman, 87, and Boris and Sofia Gurman. More than 40 were wounded. Police shot the father dead. Islamic State claimed the attack.
The man who ran at the gun · Ahmed al-Ahmed
A Syrian-Australian Muslim bystander, Ahmed al-Ahmed, tackled and disarmed one of the gunmen. The ideology that sent the Akrams to a Hanukkah party is not the faith of the man who stopped them, and he proved it with his hands.
The worst in Australia's history
The deadliest terrorist attack ever on Australian soil, the worst mass shooting since Port Arthur in 1996, and the deadliest antisemitic attack in the country's history. The roll of the murdered →
Everything below was possible before 14 December 2025.
18–19 December 2025 · Hate laws and guns
Hate speech laws strengthened within four days. A national gun buyback announced the next day.
9 January 2026 · A Royal Commission
The Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, led by former High Court justice Virginia Bell, was set up to examine the drivers of antisemitism, including ideologically and religiously motivated extremism and radicalisation
, and the circumstances of the Bondi attack. Its hearings closed in August 2026 after some 300 witnesses and 20,000 submissions.
20 January 2026 · New powers
The Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Act passed, creating a power to ban groups that fall short of the legal definition of terrorism while providing, in ASIO's words, a pathway to violence.
5 March 2026 · Hizb ut-Tahrir banned
The first group listed under the new law: Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist movement that works openly to restore a caliphate and rejects democracy, and one of the two groups the government named as its main targets after Bondi. Membership, recruiting or funding now carries up to 15 years in prison. For years it could not be touched because it stopped one step short of calling for violence.