Be’eri to Manchester to Bondi: Antisemitism is the canary in the coalmine for extremism

The murder of Jews has never required novelty, only permission.

When Jews are slaughtered, the instinct is usually to ask why this place, why now, why these victims. The more devastating and urgent question that the murder of Jews demands we ask is what has been normalised to make murder unsurprising, predictable, and thus preventable.

The Bondi Beach massacre in Australia again demands to zoom out. Chabad Rabbis, Holocaust survivors, and several Jewish refugees from Ukraine and Russia, including 10-year-old Matilda, are bound together. They all fled one theatre of violence in search of safety to live as who they are, only to be murdered in a democratic society that they believed, as it did, was immune to such hatred. This pattern is cyclical, repeating like the seasons.

Commemoration is not enough. If we are to prevent the recurrence of cold-blooded murder, we have to recognise what fuelled it.

Antisemitism, an ever-mutating hate, does not erupt spontaneously. It mutates by latching onto the prevailing social construct of the time, finding ‘new’ hosts to spread to. The oldest conspiracy myth is the most reliable early-warning sign for extremism, far larger and far more dangerous than the legitimised targeting of Jews alone.

Antisemitism is the siren to a raging fire, binding together an axis of evil that openly declares war on democratic civilisation.

Fifty years after its opening shot in the form of the 1975 UN Resolution “Zionism is Racism”, we are witnesses to the fully formed brown-red-green alliance that enabled it to pass. A convergence of forces that in theory are ideologically incompatible far right (brown), radical left (red), and Islamist extremism (green)- is enabled by the systematic demonisation, delegitimisation, and double standards towards ‘the Jew’ – a mechanism proven effective over thousands of years of trial, with little error.

Antizionism, the modern strain of antisemitism, preceded the return of Jews to our ancestral home of Zion and Jerusalem in 1948. Soviet propaganda weaponised antisemitism through canonical blood-libellous texts like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated document exported globally to ears willing to believe. Nazism, latching onto science as a guiding social construct of the time, labelled a prototypical indigenous people ‘an inferior race’, ‘justifying’ the ‘final solution’ required for its annihilation for a world ‘cleansed’ of Jews.

Tens of Arab countries that refused to accept sovereign Jewish presence in any borders and failed at the openly declared intent to destroy it in a series of conventional wars, recognised the efficacy of an unconventional war for hearts and minds that would enable them to further that intent. That was the opening shot inherent to the 1975 “Zionism is racism" resolution that echoes and reverberates 50 years later, with anti-Zionism rebranded and repackaged for Western consumption.

But what begins with Jews never ends with Jews. This marriage of convenience of extremes manifests in antisemitism, fuels it, and uses it as low-hanging fruit to advance openly declared intent of an axis of evil to destroy the foundations of democracies, exploiting their strengths that cherish freedom as weaknesses to collapse them from within.

Just like the Jews murdered in Be’eri, the Jews murdered in Manchester and Bondi did not die because of Middle Eastern geopolitics. They died because the modern strain of an ever-mutating, lethal hate has been normalised as legitimate, in the name of progress, justice, and liberation. Because the hatred of Jews has once again been reframed as a moral critique. Because calls for the elimination of Israel, the Jew among nations, from 'from river to sea' are uniquely tolerated as speech, not genocidal intent.

The victims’ biographies matter. Jews fleeing antisemitism. Jews fleeing war. Jews who believed liberal democracies and universal values would protect them. History tells us otherwise.

But the same ideologies that support ‘globalising the intifada’ are not hostile singularly to Israel or Jews. They are openly hostile to the foundations of democracies: rule of law, pluralism, individual rights, and the very idea of national self-determination. Israel is not the cause of this hostility. It is the testing ground. Antisemitism is not just a weapon in this war. It is the proof of concept.

For the past two years, Israel has been on the front lines of this global threat. The war has not been confined to conventional battlefields. The existential threat is raging as a cultural, legal, informational, and moral war. As Jew among nations, Israel is where an axis of evil tests how far it can go, how much terror can be normalised, how much violence can be justified, how many individual and collective ‘Jews’ can be dehumanised, delegitimised, and applied double standards to - before the world objects.

When antisemitism spreads unchecked, it emboldens those who seek to dismantle democratic norms everywhere. When Jews are murdered, it signals that the guardrails are down. This is why antisemitism is the most reliable predictor of democratic collapse. It is the siren that sounds before the raging fire engulfs everyone else.

The lesson of Bondi Beach, like Manchester, Pittsburgh, Paris, Brussels, Mumbai, Washington, Boulder and elsewhere, is not merely that Jews remain vulnerable as canaries in the coalmine. It is those societies that fail to confront antisemitism at its ideological roots that will inevitably embolden the extremism it predicts, fueling broader violence. This is not about Jewish exceptionalism. It is about memory as historical literacy.

The axis of evil no longer hides its intent. It slaughters and tortures the people of Iran, emboldened by impunity. It openly declares its desire to collapse the West and to build a Caliphate on its rubble. It does so by using shape-shifting antisemitism as defined by the IHRA in a long democratic process as both weapon and symptom. The recent UK court decision that chants of ‘death to the IDF’ to which all Israelis must conscript at a music festival aired to millions - “does not meet criminal threshold” should trouble all who cherish life and liberty.

Those who continue to treat antisemitism as a marginal issue, or a subset of prejudice, are willfully ignoring history’s clearest warning sign. The siren is sounding again. The question remains whether we will finally recognise the fire before it consumes us all.

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Michal Cotler-Wunsh, formerly Israel’s special envoy for combating antisemitism, is chief executive of the International Legal Forum, where Nadav Steinman is board chair.

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