The Bondi Beach shootings mark a grim new chapter in the history of Jew-hatred

The terror attack on Sydney’s Jewish festival bore all the defining hallmarks of Nazism – and is the latest proof that antisemitism is evolving, with much of the ancient prejudice displaced onto Israel, says historian Laurence Rees

The images of two gunmen on a bridge at Bondi Beach, shooting into a crowd of innocent men, women and children who had gathered to celebrate Hannukah, are among the most horrific and haunting of modern times. They force an unavoidable question: how could this happen in a civilised society?

The answer lies in understanding the nature of antisemitism – and the way it has mutated since the ultimate crime of the Holocaust.

Historically, most antisemitism rested on religious hatred, with Jews being blamed for the death of Christ. But Hitler and the Nazis transformed Jewishness into a matter of “blood”, not belief. It no longer mattered whether someone was a Christian or a Hindu; if the Nazis believed Jewish blood ran in their veins, they were a target.

A bystander tackles gunman after mass shooting at Bondi Beach (Social Media)

I shall never forget hearing Oskar Groning, an SS man I met who worked at Auschwitz, describe the murder of Jewish children. His words still chill: “The enemy is the blood in them – the [capacity] to grow up to be a Jew who could become dangerous. And because of that, the children were also affected.” For the Nazis, there was no such thing as an “innocent” Jew.

This warped thinking was allied to another lie: that the Jews in one country were linked with Jews in other countries in a vast secret conspiracy. In the fantasies of the Nazis, the Jews worked in the shadows – portrayed as cowardly and parasitic as individuals, yet powerful as a hidden force. Moreover, claimed the Nazis, because the Jews were prepared to act corruptly in some imagined conspiracy, they could undermine nations from within and pull the strings in both capitalist and communist countries.

Former SS sergeant Oskar Groning (Axel Heimken/Pool Photo via AP)

This fantasy allowed the Nazis to believe in the infamous “stab-in-the-back” myth, which held that the Jews had lost Germany the First World War by plotting behind the lines to undermine the soldiers at the front. The fact that there was no evidence for this ludicrous proposition served only – in the eyes of the Nazis – to prove their point. As one former Nazi once put it to me, the absence of evidence was itself “proof”, since the Jews were “far too clever” to leave any evidence.

After 1945, there was a widespread belief that antisemitism had been discredited. The scale of Auschwitz seemed to place such hatred beyond the bounds of civilisation. This confidence proved premature.

Antisemitism did not vanish; it adapted, with much of the hatred displaced onto Israel. While, of course, criticism of Israeli policy is legitimate, it often acts as a smoke screen to conceal the familiar hatred towards the Jews. How often do we hear people hint – or even say explicitly – that foreign Jews are bound to support Israel because the Jews are effectively one entity across the globe? That’s another lie, of course, but antisemitism was never based on truth.

Once Jews are seen as one group, wherever they live in the world, individual guilt and innocence cease to matter. The Nazis demonstrated the lethal consequences of that kind of thinking. Violence is not directed at people for what they have done, but for what they are imagined to represent.

Recent terrible events in Gaza have led to a perversion of history, with the Jews sometimes recast as Nazis. For anyone who has studied the history of the Nazi extermination process, the idea that events today, however horrific, are the “same” as what happened during the Holocaust is an obscenity.

Ten-year-old Matilda Poltavchenko was killed in the Bondi Beach shooting (GoFundMe)

What seems certain is that the actions of the killers at Bondi demonstrate that they subscribed to the lie that the Jews are one group, linked across the world. But one still revolts against the inherent absurdity of this thinking. Did they really think that, by murdering an Australian Jewish child in Sydney, they were killing an Israeli soldier in the Middle East? A Nazi would likely have thought so, that’s for sure.

I wrote in my recent book, The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History, that “the essential values of Nazism – hatred, scapegoating, antisemitism, racism, and violent nationalism – are still very much with us”. I wish it were not so. But the blood on the sand in Bondi sadly demonstrates that it is all too true.

Laurence Rees is author of ‘The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History’ (Penguin, £12.99) and ‘The Holocaust’ (Penguin, £14.99)