When fifteen people were murdered at a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach last December, the country was rightly horrified. The flowers piled up, and for a moment it felt as though Australia finally understood. But condemning a massacre was always going to be the easy part.
Mass murder clarifies. Almost nobody has to ask whether they would have pulled the trigger, so almost everybody gets to stand on the right side of the line without examining anything else. Atrocities have a weird way of flattering us like that, because next to a massacre, everything we’ve excused looks harmless.
But the harder question is what gets waved through when it doesn’t feel like an emergency.
Jewish Australians have been trying to warn us for three years. Long before Bondi they were telling us what was happening at their schools, outside their synagogues, on the way to work. Jewish author Dara Horn titled a 2021 book “People Love Dead Jews”, and she wasn’t joking. We can manage a minute’s silence when Jews are killed, but listening to them while they’re alive is apparently more difficult.
