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, chipped in with her........

© Dawn