When my friend, Dina, gave evidence to the royal commission into antisemitism and social cohesion on Tuesday, she made a striking observation. A few weeks earlier, her youngest daughter burst into tears when the family were heading to Bondi Beach for dinner. When Dina asked her what was wrong, her daughter replied, “now when I go to Bondi I think about dying”. Dina realised, in that moment, that her daughter had every reason to think that. “They came to kill all of us, we just weren’t there,” Dina told commissioner Virginia Bell.

The only reason it wasn’t her daughter, or mine, on that day in December, is because Dina and her family were with me at the Bat Mitzvah of a mutual family friend. When my friend and colleague rang me from the Bondi Beach Channukah event to tell me he’d been shot in the back and thigh, Dina was standing with me. We had just spoken about how sad we........

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