Lynda Ben-Menashe, the president of the National Council of Jewish Women Australia, expressed an apt sentiment after yesterday’s terror attack at Bondi Beach: She said that she was “horrified and devastated” but, she added, “not shocked.”
Indeed, how could anyone be shocked? The act of terrorism, in which a father-and-son duo targeted Jews celebrating Hanukkah and killed at least 15, was the deadliest in Australia’s history. But events have been working up to it since October 7, 2023. Powerful forces far from Australia have responded to the conflict in Gaza by promoting anti-Semitism globally, and acts of violence like the one in Sydney are the predictable result.
In the past two years, Australia’s Jewish minority—117,000 people in a nation of close to 28 million—has come under an unrelenting barrage. Jewish schools, synagogues, bakeries, and delis have been graffitied with Nazi symbols and Fuck Israel messages. Cars and one brewery have been set ablaze in attacks linked to anti-Jewish sentiment. A pair of nurses recorded a video in which they threatened to kill Israeli patients in their hospitals or refuse to treat them. An explosive-filled trailer was found with a list of synagogues inside. Australia’s Jewish institutions recorded almost 4,000 anti-Semitic incidents from October 2023 to October 2025. In March, Australia’s intelligence chief said that anti-Semitism was his organization’s top priority “in terms of threats to life.”
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Yesterday’s attackers appear to be linked to the Islamic State. They are thought to be of Pakistani origin. The younger man, Naveed Akram, 24, is an Australian-born citizen. His father and co-assailant, Sajid, came to Australia on a student visa in 1998. Australia’s intelligence agencies monitored Naveed for a while, starting in 2019, because of his ties to a local ISIS cell, but they apparently concluded that he was not a threat. The duo had reportedly pledged allegiance to the Sunni jihadist group and had an ISIS flag in their car. ISIS no longer controls the population or territory in the Middle East that it did at its height, in 2015, but on Saturday, its militants killed two U.S. soldiers and an American civilian in Syria.
If the Sydney attack is indeed ISIS-linked, that may put to rest the line of inquiry that Israel was pursuing: Iranian involvement. The hypothesis was hardly far-fetched. In August, Australia expelled the Iranian ambassador over “credible intelligence” linking Tehran to several attacks on Australian Jews. Among these were an assault on a kosher restaurant in Sydney and one on a synagogue in Melbourne. Australia then passed a law banning organizations designated as state sponsors of terror. The first entity designated under that law was the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a powerful militia that controls much of Iran’s military and economy.
Iran’s foreign ministry has been quick to distance Iran from the Bondi Beach attack. “As a matter of principle, Iran condemns the violent attack against civilians in Sydney, Australia,” a spokesperson posted on X. “Terror violence and mass killing shall be condemned, wherever they’re committed, as unlawful and criminal.” (Israel has called Iran’s response deceitful.)
But IRGC-associated outlets have struck a different note. Tasnim, the IRGC’s main mouthpiece, headlined the news, “At Least Ten Zionists Dead on Hanukkah in Australia.” It used a derogatory term, halakat, that usually designates the death of animals, or of humans whose death is not considered lamentable. And it described Hanukkah as a “Zionist celebration.” (The Student News Network, run by a student wing of the IRGC, used the exact same language.)
The conflation of Jewish religious observance with Zionism is not new. In 2019, Tasnim condemned Hanukkah as “not a Jewish religious feast but a colonial Zionist event.” Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates officially acknowledge Hanukkah (including with public displays in Dubai, in the latter’s case), and the Iranian regime and its allies continually rail against them for it. In 2022, Isa Qassim, Bahrain’s top Shia cleric and an ally of Tehran, tweeted: “Do they want to force us to become a Jewish society?” Hours before the Bondi Beach attack, an Iranian researcher whose father was Iran’s envoy to Canberra in the early 1990s posted on X that Hanukkah was “a satanic feast of Masonic circles.”
Iran’s hard-line outlets have veered between describing the attack as an act of righteous anger and presenting it as a false-flag operation perpetrated by Israel. In Hamshahri, a newspaper currently run by hard-liners, an analyst wrote that “general anger against Israel following the genocide in Gaza could provide the background” for the attack. Mehr News Agency, linked to a top regime body, ran with a similar line. But both outlets also aired the conspiracy theory. Mehr featured an analyst who explained that the event led to “emotional shock, reconstructing the sympathy of public opinion in the West and reducing the pressure on Israel.” He went on to reference the 9/11 attacks as another example of a potential false-flag operation. Ali Akbar Raefipour, an influential purveyor of anti-Semitic conspiracism in Iran, claimed that he had predicted in October 2023 that Israel would resort to such attacks; he reposted Candace Owens’s theory of the case.
Iran’s direct regional influence has contracted with the degradation of its network of anti-Israel militias over the past two years of conflict. But extremism has not been eradicated from the territories Iran once dominated. Hadi Hoteit, a correspondent for Iran’s state broadcaster Press TV in Beirut, asked whether Naveed Akram could really be considered a terrorist, given that he had killed only “people who continue to support a state that has carried out a continuous genocide against the indigenous peoples of Palestine and Lebanon for 77 years.” Hoteit is also a producer at Free Palestine TV, an extremist channel run by a Syrian Canadian activist whose father was a Syrian diplomat. That outlet celebrated the Sydney attack for killing “10 Jewish Supremacist dual Australian citizen Jewsaders” who were “having some R&R from the hard work of Genocide in the Levant.”
The stark reality is that anti-Semitic extremism is not just the province of ISIS, and not just that of Iran and its so-called Axis of Resistance. Its reach extends to anywhere Jewish people can be found: a synagogue in Manchester, England; a pedestrian mall in Boulder, Colorado. Many critics of Israel abhor such attacks. But the extreme wings of the anti-Israel movement have emboldened those who refuse to condemn even the most brazen killings.
