I have been arguing with an Australian friend about the Bondi Beach attack. He is an immigrant himself. He is not Jewish. He is not frightened. He is furious.
His anger is directed not primarily at the attackers, but at pro-Palestinian marchers. He describes the marches as “anti-Jewish” by definition. All of them. That claim is striking not least because Jews themselves have been marching in significant numbers. When Jewish protesters calling for a ceasefire are treated as part of an “anti-Jewish movement”, it tells you something important about the frame of mind at work. This is no longer about protecting Jews. It is about enforcing a single political interpretation.
In his telling, the marches were anti-Jewish, the government was weak for allowing them, and the atrocity was the foreseeable consequence of not cracking down sooner. That narrative is also being actively reinforced by sections of the media that flatten everything into outrage-friendly headlines. Nuance disappears, anger is rewarded, and complexity is treated as weakness. It is not surprising that this framing feels emotionally airtight once absorbed.
I understand why Jewish Australians are afraid. Synagogues attacked. Children harassed. Restaurants vandalised. People escorted to school. If the state has failed to stop that decisively, it has failed in its duty. That is not in dispute.
What is in dispute is the leap from those crimes to collective blame.
Chanting “gas the Jews” is not protest, it is incitement. Arrests should have followed. If police failed to act, that is a policing failure. It does not convert every march into a hate rally, nor does it make everyone present complicit. Precision matters. Once you abandon it, you stop targeting criminals and start punishing by identity.
The attacks on synagogues and homes were not caused by marches being allowed to happen. They were caused by individuals choosing violence. Blurring that distinction has a long and ugly history, and it never leads where people think it will.
There is a historical parallel that keeps being ignored. During the Troubles, the IRA carried out lethal attacks on the British mainland. Yet no serious voice called for banning Northern Irish people, criminalising Irish identity, or treating Irish marches as proof of collective guilt. The state held the line, imperfectly but deliberately, on individual responsibility. That was not weakness. It was how Britain avoided turning terrorism into communal war.
What has changed is not the logic of extremism, but the willingness to abandon principle when anger takes over.
The symmetry here is uncomfortable but unavoidable. The shooters justified killing civilians by blaming a whole group for the actions of a state. When we respond by blaming whole communities, or entire protest movements, for the actions of individuals, we are using the same logic in reverse. Different conclusions, identical reasoning. Once that logic is accepted, civilians everywhere become expendable.
Then reality intrudes.
One of the people who physically stopped a shooter, at great personal risk, was a Middle Eastern migrant. He ran towards a gunman while others ran away. In that moment, he demonstrated what collective blame always obscures: individual moral agency.
There is another imbalance in my friend’s position. He expresses fierce outrage at attacks on Jewish civilians in Australia, rightly so, but none at the killing of civilians in Gaza or the ongoing land grabs and settler violence in the West Bank. That selectivity matters. It does not excuse antisemitism. Nothing does. But it explains why people protest. When one set of civilian deaths counts as tragedy and another as background noise, outrage stops being principled and becomes tribal.
At that point, even Jewish protesters are no longer acceptable, because the issue is no longer safety. It is alignment. Who is allowed to speak, and on whose behalf. Once dissent itself becomes the enemy, the argument has fully detached from protecting Jews and drifted into enforcing a single political narrative.
This is also where the danger of precedent creeps in. If protests can be shut down, charged for policing, or delegitimised because someone else commits violence, that power will not remain confined to this issue. Powers created in anger never stay pointed at the original target.
Israel’s own trajectory should give pause here. It still has democratic structures, and those structures matter precisely because they restrain the state. Courts, press, protest and internal dissent are brakes. Remove them, and the range of state action widens dramatically. Democracies do not collapse overnight. They hollow out by treating dissent as disloyalty.
What all of this points to is something deeply unfashionable and stubbornly dull. Law. Individual responsibility. Evidence. Limits. No collective guilt. No panic dressed up as strength.
If civilian lives matter, they matter universally.
If guilt is individual, it stays individual.
Abandon those principles, and you do not defeat extremism. You imitate it.
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