The Bondi Beach massacre, anti-Semitism, and the global link between violence and identity
An article by Bruno Montesano with an introduction.
Bruno Montesano, a Jewish Italian progressive writer, has written a sterling piece on the relation between the Bondi massacre and global fractures. His work serve a bigger audience. I have put this latest piece, published in Valigia Blu through Deepl and made some stylistic changes, corrections and factual clarifications for a non-Italian audience.
Some of what he observes about antisemitic and tankist tendencies of some on the fringes of the left not be new to readers (we certainly see this in some wildly popular social media posters in Australia) , but he is observing this as an Italian progressive confronting what is occurring there and in the rest of Europe. That is what makes his point of view about the crisis of the universalist, cosmopolitan state in Europe versus dogmatic forces ( on the left and right so interesting. His pairing of Russia and Israel as the embodiment of deadly state power is also something I’d never thought of. We are overwhelmed by concerns from the Anglosphere and don’t get this perspective
Thus he argues that “the deadly [Bondi] attack should be viewed in the context of a broader shift in global political conflict in which violence plays a central role…If the cosmopolitan and universalist project towards which international law tended – together with European experimentation – arose in response to the massacres that took place on European soil, today we are seeing the return of state violence – Israel and Russia embody the most deadly side of sovereign power, whether national or imperial – and of groups without legal recognition but equally definable by the combination of force and identity, requirements that are indispensable but insufficient for modern statehood.”
Here is the full article
The anti-Semitic attack in Sydney on December 14, 2025, in which 15 people were killed and 60 wounded, is the most serious attack against Jews since October 7, 2023.
However, the deadly attack should be viewed in the context of a broader shift in global political conflict in which violence plays a central role.
The attackers were Naveed Akram and Sajid Akram, and according to the latest reports, their ideological motivation was Islamic fundamentalism. They were disarmed by a Muslim man, Ahmed el Ahmed. The fact that the religion of the perpetrators and the hero is the same has made it possible to defuse, at least in part, the appeal of the deadly rhetoric of the clash of civilizations, fueled by widespread Islamophobia.
This episode, together with the murders of other Jews in Manchester, Washington, and Boulder over the past year, has reopened the debate on the rise of anti-Semitism, this time with quality viewpoints.
However, discussion on this issue has been poisoned by the political use of the category of anti-Semitism and by the overlap, in both senses, from the right and the left, between Jews and Zionists—the victims were being attacked as “Zionists” and not as “Jews.”
At the same time, the Israeli and global far right have used accusations of anti-Semitism to delegitimize legitimate anti-Zionist political criticism, which has been particularly heated in response to the genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, yet largely nonviolent. The center-left has frequently done the same, in England and Germany.
At the same time, since many Jewish representatives in the diaspora identify with the state of Israel and its government, the term Zionist—understood as synonymous with racist or fascist—easily becomes synonymous with being Jewish .
Contemporary ‘real’ Zionism is certainly comparable to racist extremism, but in fact, it has a more complex history and, even today, many people identify as Zionists without sharing the project of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population. Furthermore, the attackers called their victims “Zionists” – Anna Foa herself, before her latest book, was certainly considered a left-wing Zionist, as was Gad Lerner, to give the most well-known examples [Anna Foa is a distinguished historian of Italian Jewry and public intellectual; Gad Lerner a well known Italian journalist - L.S]
Differing from how many on the left think, there is therefore no necessary incompatibility between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, but the assessment of the spread of anti-Semitism is undoubtedly exaggerated.
However, it is not only ideological reasons that contribute to the sense of danger and threat, but also the crystallization of the Jewish experience, made up of two millennia of persecution. The psychological and experiential precipitate—filtered through oral family and community tradition, as well as the enormity of the Nazi genocide—thus amplifies the sense of insecurity.
However, the massacre of Jews at Bondi Beach on the first night of Hanukkah must be viewed in a broader context: “a piecemeal third world war” (Pope Francis [ Francis has used words like this on a number of occasions to describe interconnected conflicts around the world- L.S.].
In this sense, Bondi Beach is not simply a symptom of a flare-up of global anti-Semitism – which certainly exists – but rather of a global conflict in which violence and identity are welded together for the sake of ethnic or religious homogeneity.
If the cosmopolitan and universalist project towards which international law tended – together with European experimentation – arose in response to the massacres that took place on European soil, today we are seeing the return of state violence – Israel and Russia embody the most deadly side of sovereign power, whether national or imperial – and of groups without legal recognition but equally definable by the combination of force and identity, requirements that are indispensable but insufficient for modern statehood.
For several decades now, sovereign states have no longer been the only perpetrators of violence. In addition to private militias such as the Wagner Group, there are also armed groups with varying degrees of political legitimacy: the case of Afghanistan, where former jihadists have gone from being enemies to be defeated to representatives of the state, or Gaza, where Islamist militias are financed by Israel to fight Hamas – show that those considered terrorists can, if necessary, become reliable political partners. It is no coincidence that, from a certain point of view, ‘terrorist’ is the name given to revolutionaries who have been defeated or have not yet been victorious.
Against the backdrop of the decline of US hegemony and the rise of China (and BRICS), we are witnessing, on the one hand, the weakness of international law and, on the other, the apparent paradox of a global conflict within the international right. From the United States to Iran, from Italy to Russia, the forces commonly understood as progressive lack strength and, when they do have it, they lack a perspective that is up to the challenges of the present.
The crisis of the US-led unipolar order and of supranational institutions – which were never really “in good shape,” with Europe as a fragile clay pot among variously aggressive powers – has made it difficult to adopt an internationalist point of view, abandoned after the anti-globalization phase of Genoa and Seattle.
The cynicism and weakness of the European and Western ruling class with regard to the genocide in Gaza is matched by that of part of the critical left, which has regressed to crude partisan positions with regard to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
From the point of view of public opinion, the war against Ukraine, after the horror of Assad, has shown the limits of those who practice so-called “anti-imperialism of fools”: anyone who is not the United States or Europe – from the “axis of resistance” to Putin – is a representative or ally of the oppressed. Such a point of view results in the situation of other groups’ situations being regarded homogenously rather than as heterogeneous. Paradoxically they are then “read” in a more positive limelight because of this simplification.
Multiplicity becomes uniformity, and the ideological, class, strategic, and interest differences that divide each group are erased. Non-Western oppression becomes freedom, resistance—even when it is the exact opposite, as in the case of Hamas and its system of alliances—and an imperialist invasion such as Russia’s becomes a legitimate reaction to the enlargement of the Atlantic Pact, according to a misunderstood sense of ‘realism’ or so-called geopolitics.
This point-of-view, made up of essentialisations and national characteristics that are always the same (the thesis that Russia ‘has never invaded’ corresponds to the concern about a Germany that is rearming, considered ontologically imperial and, in the worst interpretations, intrinsically ‘Nazi’).
This interpretative collapse has been aided by certain strands of research simplified for the use and consumption of activists who need dichotomous categories and radical simplifications in order to interpret and act: this is why Ukraine becomes “a country of Nazis,” NATO becomes the primary and immovable engine of evil in the world, Hamas becomes a benign force of liberation, and so on.
Jürgen Habermas, faced with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, with the so-called coalition of the willing, described the political field as divided between those who felt “resentment” against the alleged abstractions of a “bloodless moralism” which, through international law, wished to “tame” state power, and the alternative of neoconservative and Straussian [Leo Strauss ] armed unilateralism—a truly “revolutionary” force.
Even then, the “world organization” was “unable to compel member states that violated its rules to guarantee their citizens a democratic and constitutional order.”
Norberto Bobbio [Italian philosopher] spoke of a third absent party, a “third” power with respect to the parties in conflict. Thus human rights policy remains narrow and selective selective and subject to the constraints of the veto power of the powers sitting on the UN Security Council. We are still in that situation, but without any form of optimism, mired in the nationalist horizon of geopolitics.
The transformations of global capitalism have led to a coexistence of states and concentrations of capital in which political and economic functions can be, from time to time, in the hands of one or the other. Sovereign law without power—just think of how easily Netanyahu can ignore the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant, even in Europe.
Europe, which was defined by the New York Times as the second world power at the time of the Iraq war, is fact accompanied by a generally weak global civil society, with a few exceptions, such as in Italy for the Flotilla or, at times, in various global cities, from London to New York to Cairo.
The post-national experiment of the European Union is constantly on the verge of implosion, due to its inherent flaws, insufficient ambition and, above all, the flourishing of extreme right-wing forces within it that want to rewind the tape of shared functions and resources and return to a Europe of nations, held together by that patriarchal and reactionary nightmare that is its Judeo-Christian roots. Progressive forces also contribute to this weakness – think of Danish Social Democratic leader Mette Frederiksen, committed to undermining the European (and not European Union) space of rights that is the ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights), together with Labour’s Keir Starmer in pursuit of Farage on the issue of racism.
Habermas, based on the peculiarity of his reflection on German guilt, has taken a highly controversial position with regard to the genocide in Gaza [Jürgen Habermas has said there is no genocide & defended Israel -L.S]
However, in a recent speech, he correctly observed that, precisely when Europe seems to be on the verge of collapse, more Europe is needed (echoing Hölderlin’s [19th century German intellectual] well-known and much-quoted motto: “Where danger grows, so too does that which saves”).
Similarly, the project of a cosmopolis is becoming increasingly necessary, even if it lacks the legs to walk on and faces multiple obstacles—from the need to reform the composition of the Security Council to the selection mechanisms of the General Assembly, to mention only the first ones relating to the United Nations, which is itself under attack from the United States.
And thus a transnational movement is needed, against war and identity politics, which fights not for one side or the other in the various conflicts that exist, but fights for the abolition of identity distinctions, also with a view to redistributing power and resources.
