The Bondi Beach mass murder attack is yet another inevitable sequel to the Israel-Palestine conflict. The precise nature of the sequels are seldom known, much less prevented in advance of their occurrence, but the fact that they will occur should. be obvious to anyone who has studied or experienced the dialectic of sectarian violence whatever its specific origins. In this case we saw a small-cell (not lone wolf) attack where operational secrecy in preparing, planning and execution was apparently well maintained.
While digesting the stock pap that passes for NZ local “expert” commentary on the Hanukkah attacks I found myself thinking about the broader tone of Western media coverage and the implicit biases reflected in it. Let me start with a few small points of order and then speak to what is left largely unsaid in mass media coverage.
The father and son attacks on the celebrating Jewish crowd at Bondi may or may not be a terrorist attack or simply a hate crime. I have written about this many times before, here and professionally, but the core of the definition is worth repeating. Terrorism is a violent tactic that has been used by States (during and outside of war), non-state ideological actors, criminal organisations and psychopathic individuals. It has a subject (audiences), object (to influence the will or psychological health of subjects by installing fear and dread among them) and target (victims). Seemingly random and unwarranted violence is the instrument and being terrorised is the effect. For unconventional warfare analysts and practitioners, the motivation of the terrorists is less important than the epistemological sequencing or chain of causality involved. Terrorism must have all three components in order to be correctly labeled as such.
Terrorism can be (and often is) a product of hatred but is not synonymous with hate crimes. Hate crimes lack the subject-object-target sequencing that distinguishes terrorism from other forms of unconventional violence. Hate crimes are often born of passion and fury. They may be done for revenge, retribution or sadistic pleasure. In some cases these pathologies enter into the terrorist’s equation. But what distinguishes hate crimes from terrorism is in the latter’s choice of subjects and objects, which gives an element of cold dispassioned rationality to the calculation. The subjects are more than the victims and their immediate circles. They include governments, communities, specific entities or organisations,, supporters, opponents and peer competitors. The object is to do more than inflict pain, suffering and punishment on victims and subjects. It is to bend the will of subjects in a specific direction pursuant to the perpetrator’s interests.
More simply, terrorism is a reflective exercise of violence. Hate crimes are a visceral violent response.
It remains to be seen whether the Bondi attacks were reflective or visceral in nature. Reporting has suggested a variety of motives but nothing concrete has been produced other than reports that one of the gunmen traveled to the Philippines in recent months, which may or may not be linked to the presence of ISIS cells in that country. What is clear is that the Australian government and global media have jumped to describe the event as an antisemitic terrorist attack. The antisemitic part of that label is undoubtably true (more on this below) but the terrorism label appears to be more one of unreflective convenience, political opportunism and/or agenda-serving rather than serious analysis (as is the case with what passes for local “expertise” in NZ).
Mind you, not all instances of hidden agenda grammatical opportunism and mistruth are necessarily bad. Authorities may misuse terms like terrorism to shake society out of complacency and/or expand their legitimate deterrent or preventive reach via expanded powers of surveillance and arrest with cause. The emotive weight of terms like terrorism may allow legislative and institutional reforms that provide legal and operational latitude that previously did not exist but which are needed inn the face of fluid and evolving threat scenarios. On the other hand, the risks of official misuse of terms like terrorism are obvious, to which can be added media misuse for reasons other than objective reporting of the facts and political and interest group misuse of terms in pursuit of partisan and sectorial advantage.
War criminal and corrupt fraudster Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempt to blame the attacks on Australia’s recognition of the right to Palestinian Statehood is the most patently crude of recent attempts to take advantage of the situation for self-serving purposes. He is far from alone, as pro- and anti-gun lobbies have jumped into action over the issue and then, of course, pro-Israel and pro-Palestine lobbies blanket the media with their respective takes on who/what/when/why/how. The objective truth does not matter here. What matters is the public weight of the sectorial spin.
We can assume that counter-terrorism authorities in Australia (now under the microscope because one of the gunmen was monitored for some time as a possible ISIS sympathiser and was known to. hold a legal firearms license and six hunting weapons), are acutely aware of what the attack really was but prefer in any event to fall into line when it comes to brandishing the terrorism accusation. As for other Western governments and media, the uncritical use of that label suits their specific interests quite well.
By way of another aside, please note that “ISIS influenced” is not equivalent to “ISIS” or “ISIS directed.” The killers showed little fire control in using their weapons (such as one providing covering fire for the other) and demonstrated little tactical acumen like effectively using cover and efficient angles of fire to their front and rear, instead scurrying around while firing indiscriminately into the crowd and at arriving police. Theirs was not the work of proficient and disciplined assassins trained by and serving in a militia, but instead appears be that of weekend warriors with limited time at the shooting range. They were still deadly, but they may not be actual members of ISIS. In fact, no claims of intellectual or material authorship of the attack have been made ISIS or any affiliate group.
Another unacknowledged mistruth is the constant reference to the “Israel-Hamas” conflict and the events of October 7, 2023. No serious person disputes that Hamas committed unspeakable atrocities on that day, including crimes against humanity. They deserved what came to them. However, had Israel limited itself to pursuing, locating and killing every single person involved in the attacks with some “collateral” damage thrown in because of the “fog of war,” relatively few people other than rabid Islamicists would have objected. October 7 was too barbaric for the global community to tolerate and for a very brief moment, much like the US after 9/11, the world majority stood in sympathy for and solidarity with the Israeli people (as distinct from the Israeli government)..
Like the US after 9/11, Israel squandered that goodwill. We will not dwell on the backdrop to October 7 here (the intelligence failures, the clandestine Israeli support for Hamas prior to the attacks, the unspoken agenda of conquest shared by radical Jewish ethno-nationalist elements in the Knesset and wider Israeli community, including by foreign-born illegal settlers on Palestinian land in the West Bank). What we will address is a simple fact that is crucial to understanding the inevitability of sequels such as that at Bondi Beach.
That fact is that the conflict in Gaza is not between Hamas and Israel. It may have started that way, but Israel’s response, an act of collective punishment of an entire population that quickly became a prolonged process of ethnic cleansing that has now become a UN-recognized genocide, and which has moved into the West Bank, makes the conflict an Israel-Palestinian war. It has also spilled into Lebanon, home to many Palestinians, under the pretext of eliminating Hezbollah (and by connection, Iranian interference in the Levant). The war is grossly one-sided and is being waged against an entire people, not just armed insurgents and their immediate political leaders and supporters. Truth be really told, it is civilizational in nature and seen by the (willing and unwilling) participants exactly as that.
It is this war–an Israeli war of annihilation designed to pave the way for permanent occupation and annexation of Palestinian lands–that has ripped off the scab of global antisemitism. Primordial antisemitic prejudices now combine with modern grievances and anti-Jewish tropes in the face of global indifference to the suffering of the Palestinian people. Western liberal democracies do nothing or side with Israel. Authoritarians of the Left and Right steer clear of the fight or cut secret deals with Israel in order to keep commercial, diplomatic and security ties flowing. Regardless of thousands of protests and millions of marchers, the situation has not appreciably changed and instead we hear open commentary about US-backed development of Gaza as a tourist destination. Needless to say, anger, frustration, hopelessness and feelings of powerlessness begin to mount. In that mix, hatred rises and eventually–inevitably given human nature–violence happens.
That is why semantic precision is necessary. The conflict in Gaza is not between Hamas and Israel but waged by Israel against the Palestinian people, That started the sequel-chain involving antisemitism (which gathered “old school” hatred of Jews such as that of neo-Nazis and Groypers with modern anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist hatred), and pushed its eventual descent into, at a minimum, hate crimes (such as the Australian arson and graffiti attacks on Jewish centres leading up to the Bondi attacks), and now perhaps a mass murder event that may be an act of (even if unlikely if we are honest in our use of the term) terrorism.
The sad and often unspoken fact is that signal events like the Gaza conflict bring out suppressed hatred and prejudices as well as opportunistic corporate, social, political and ideological agendas that seek to frame the narrative about the event and its sequels in specific self-serving fashion. Unfortunately, the media and political commentariat in NZ is not immune from that syndrome.