Here’s hoping that the royal commission into the Bondi massacre of last December does not turn into partisan point-scoring, least of all over whether the Albanese government effectively ‘caused’ the tragic massacre by reducing its activity against antisemitism in the aftermath of the October 2024 Hamas attack on Israelis.

It’s an argument no one can really win, but which most of those with legitimate things to say before the commission can lose.

Discussion about the Bondi massacre is difficult, partly because some of the players are talking right past each other. Many Jewish Australians have spoken of a sense of siege and of having come to feel unwelcome in Australia over the past few years. There’s no mistake about it, from their point of view.

There has been no substantial change in the number of Australian bigots who want to destroy the Jewish religion, or to kill or disadvantage people because they are Jews. That there are too many such bigots is disgraceful, an anomaly of the much-vaunted western civilisation – and primarily an artefact of Europe and America, rather than Africa, Asia or the Middle East. Frank hostility to Jews and the Jewish religion has existed among a declining number of Europeans over the past 2,000 years. Economic decline in the west, including Australia, gives rise to talk of Jewish conspiracy theories, plus a small segment of alienated youth who chant the words of Nazis, and associated campaigns against immigration and for ‘white rights’.

Horrible as this has been, it has been largely the work of a tiny minority, a rabble much despised by most of the population. Some may have acquired a temporary status by adopting anti-immigration causes as attempted entry points into mainstream politics. But, even where their presence has not been legislated against, they are a long way away from levers of power, or any serious threat to the citizenry. They are their own worst enemies.

But what the Jewish community has complained of as an avalanche of antisemitism has mostly developed in popular hostility to the actions of the state of Israel: not in any outbreak of hostile feeling against the Jewish religion or against individual Jews, particularly in the diaspora. Many, if not all Jews, have a strong emotional attachment to the idea of a homeland for Jews, without having a moment for the ideas or the actions of most Jewish politicians. They do not see Israeli actions as the united action of religious or ethnic Jews so much as the actions of a Jewish state.

But these can seem to be fine points – almost theological distinctions between an Israel-is- never-wrong faction and groups insistent on criticising Israel. They criticise it for its selfish and brutal actions against Palestinians, its bullying of its neighbours, or its use of a seemingly unlimited credit to buy guns and missiles to make war on Iran, on Syria, on Lebanon, Jordan, Qatar and other nations it has attacked in recent times. To the diehard or the naïve, this may be sold as pre-emptive self-defence.

The struggle has been most unequal. Battle casualty rates are almost always entirely in Israel’s favour, with a western media that has, at least until........

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