GENOCIDE eventually emerged as a broadly acceptable descriptor of Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip after more than a year of relentless violence entailing tens of thousands of fatalities. It’s harder to find a single word to describe what happened on Australia’s Bondi Beach last Sunday evening.

A crime against humanity? Antisemitic terrorism? A pogrom? Tick, tick, tick. It is not, however, “reasonable to surmise”, as New York Times columnist Bret Stephens claims, that the father-and-son team of killers thought they were “globalising the intifada” — unless they were as ignorant as Stephens about what the phrase implies. Conflating a call for uprisings against op­­pression with a heinous massacre is an absurd ideological ploy. Even more ridiculous, though, are the voices blaming the crime on Australia’s token recognition of a Palestinian state, or the protests in solidarity with the Gazan victims of genocide.

The bodies of those slain at Bondi were barely cold before Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, eager for a distraction from the horrors he continues to inflict on Gaza, began blaming his Australian counterpart, Anthony Albanese, for the Bondi bloodshed. The Albanese government’s “antisemitism envoy”, Jillian Segal,........

© Dawn