We don't mourn fascists
Liberal capitulation and the Chabad shooting at Bondi
The following text has been written in close consultation with members of my extended community, including Indigenous people across three continents and antizionist Jewish comrades. In particular, I’m indebted to Amanda Gelender and Dr Mohamed Abdou whose camaraderie, analysis, and editorial contributions to this post have been essential.
On 14 December, an event hosted by the Zionist Jewish-supremacist organisation Chabad was targeted by shooters on Bondi Beach. While this was immediately and widely reported as an ‘antisemitic attack’ at an ‘innocent Hannukah gathering’, Chabad is in fact a network of centres and institutions which actively, publicly, and extensively helps to facilitate the ongoing Zionist and Euro-American imperialist holocaust of Palestine.
In 2023, IOF soldiers proudly unfurled a banner to launch a ‘Chabad in Gaza,’ erecting a large menorah atop bombed ruins of Gaza’s neighbourhoods, ‘celebrating Hannukah’ upon a mountain of Palestinian families crushed to death by relentless 2,000-pound bombs. This audacious display of Jewish Zionist colonisation — under the guise of Hannukah — illustrates the deep fascism of a community that, while enacting a genocide, insists upon perpetual Jewish victimhood, purity, and impunity.
Ben Gvir, Israel’s sadistic ‘minister of national security’, who wears a gold ‘noose’ pin in favor of increased Palestinian executions, has been warmly welcomed at Chabad chapters by Chabad rabbis globally, including the organisation’s headquarters on occupied Lenni Lenape territory (Brooklyn).
Chabad flags featured at the Israeli settler rallies blocking desperately needed food and aid from entering Gaza. On its website, Chabad states that every child killed in Gaza is a human shield whose death is a ‘tragic inevitability’.
The Chabad of Bondi holds regular events to advance settler-colonisation in Palestine amidst the ongoing extermination of Gaza. Zionist zealot and Bondi Chabad event organiser Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who was killed in the shooting, visited the West Bank earlier this year to support the eradication of Palestinians, fundraise for the IOF, spew anti-Palestinian racism, and gleefully sign Gaza-bound missiles.
‘We don’t mourn fascists’ has been a popular refrain from the Australian left. How quickly this slogan is discarded when the idyll of colonial Bondi is ruptured. This reactionary effort to perform respectability and avoid accusations of ‘antisemitism’ is futile. It capitulates to Zionist framing, intentionally wastes our time, feeds institutionalised Islamophobia, and further calcifies a false analysis of ‘antisemitism’.
Within hours of the Chabad shooting, misinformation was disseminated, accepted as fact, and quickly blended with disinformation and propaganda from Australian colonial and imperialist sources. The story was immediately written by Zionist lobbyists, Zionist politicians, Zionist police, and Zionist ‘witnesses’, then quickly adopted, solidified, and uncritically amplified by the Australian left.
Progressive organisations and community leaders hurriedly produced an avalanche of formal public statements, rushing to co-sign the Zionist rhetoric of ‘rising antisemitism’, ‘terrorism’, and ‘social cohesion’. The shooting was immediately condemned as an antisemitic hate crime, a framing shared by major Australian Palestine solidarity groups, ‘antizionist’ collectives, and Benjamin Netanyahu.
Avoiding any mention of Chabad, these statements from the left impulsively mourned the loss of ‘innocent lives’. Whiteness, Jewishness, and the backdrop of Bondi Beach were enough to bestow every person killed with default innocence and virtue. This played directly into the hands of Zionists and their calculated media. As a result, few people would have known that the targeted event was the broad-daylight celebration of a violent supremacist organisation deeply complicit in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians.
Each of these statements offered some version of ‘tragic here, tragic there’, ‘bigotry on both sides’, ‘as in Gaza, so in Bondi’, ‘our safety is intertwined’, and so on. After two years of annihilation, an ever-expanding, daily catalogue of Zionist-perpetrated tortures, abductions, sexual violence, mass destruction, engineered starvation, and the ongoing massacre of hundreds of thousands, these false equivalencies are objectively absurd. Palestinians should not be compared to their oppressors.
In the scramble to distance themselves from ‘terrorism’, Australian progressives have also failed to engage meaningfully with Islam, or offer any coherent analysis of its varied and disparate political formations, allowing Zionist media to fill the gap with collapsed definitions and orientalist tropes.
The majority of these statements were made on the premise of Australian exceptionalism: This kind of thing shouldn’t happen here. Bondi Beach is a prized settler playground within the walled garden of empire. While violence is cordoned off, amassed, and normalised in places like Palestine, violence simply does not belong on an iconic Aussie beach (bloody British colonial crime scene on stolen Bidiagal, Birrabirragal, and Gadigal land notwithstanding).
Violence that impacts the affluent beneficiaries and perpetrators of imperialism is deserving of special attention, elaborate memorials, rolling media coverage, and international headlines. White, Jewish settler victimhood demands exceptional, heightened grief. While the colonised are bulldozed into mass graves, the death of a single coloniser must shake the earth.
This reveals a foundational white supremacy that Australian progressives (including many non-white diaspora) have not yet begun to reckon with.
And yet, Australia’s commitment to imperialist violence abroad, and against First Nations people, will inevitably and increasingly replicate itself within ‘polite, respectable Australia’ as individual acts of violence. For the countless victims of Euro-American imperialism — for the wretched of the earth — violence and fascism are not ‘on the rise’. These lands and communities are already in a state of constant war: a war of self-defence, a war for life.
In the same vein, Césaire insists that the brutality of the colonial periphery will eventually manifest as an escalation of state violence within its most comfortable metropoles. The past fortnight has revealed the extent to which this inevitability offends liberal sensibilities; the extent to which — even now — Australians have othered, invisibilised, and externalised their own violence.
In the immediate wake of the Chabad shooting, the Australian left rallied around a call for ‘unity’ against ‘racism’. Racism, however, is not simply an ambient ‘prejudice’, it is a systemic power dynamic of oppression, which on these stolen lands — first and foremost — targets First Nations people. In 2025 alone, the violence of Australian policing has led to 33 Aboriginal deaths ‘in custody’. Settlers of colour, particularly refugees, are also subjected to systemic violence. Muslims are heavily policed, surveilled, and institutionally discriminated against. The majority of Jewish people, however, have been deputised into whiteness and do not experience structural or state-based racism in Australia.
In the 27 months since the liberatory Al-Aqsa Flood operation, Jewish voices, Jewish ‘feelings’, and Jewish ‘grief’ have been centred and prioritised at the insistence of Zionist propagandists and the Australian Palestine solidarity movement alike. Zionists do this to further their settler-colonial agenda through the narrative of perpetual Jewish victimhood and exceptionalism; professed antizionists do this in an attempt to prove that they are not ‘antisemitic’. However, the outcome is often the same: comfortable, palatable, liberal settler voices with a monopoly on violence are affirmed in their power and influence, through which they dilute and gatekeep revolutionary principles, while throwing real decolonial resistance (like that of the brave mujahideen in Gaza) under the bus.
In 1895, Theodore Herzl wrote that ‘the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies’. Zionists orchestrated and manufactured ‘antisemitic’ violence from the earliest days of plotting and forming the Zionist entity. Perpetual Jewish victimhood and false accusations of ‘antisemitism’ have always been a core element of the Zionist propaganda machine.
Early Jewish Zionists staged ‘antisemitic’ operations like bombing Jewish sites across West Asia and North Africa to increase the settler-squatter population of Jews in Palestine, an attempt to outnumber and overpower the native Palestinian population. Israel also mercilessly mowed down and incinerated its own expendable settlers on October 7th, implementing the Hannibal Directive as first noted by Refaat Alareer and subsequently reported by the Electronic Intifada.
Mere months ago, Australian politicians claimed that the burning of a Melbourne synagogue door was an elaborate plot by the ‘antisemitic’ Iranian government; a nonsensical and evidence-free accusation nonetheless amplified and accepted as truth by highly regarded liberal organisations such as the Jewish Council of Australia. Eventually, even Australia’s fascist police force and colonial court system had to concede that the much-hyped ‘antisemitic hate crimes’ in Melbourne’s south eastern suburbs and ‘antisemitic threats’ in New South Wales were not, in fact, motivated by antisemitism.
The Australian left has refused to meaningfully confront the ways in which the blunt instrument of ‘antisemitism’ is wielded to implement state-totalitarianism. Australian media, meanwhile, can barely conceal the excitement and bloodlust beneath its wall-to-wall performance of ‘grief’.
Within mere hours of the shooting, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) had already exploited the incident to re-table the outlawing of ‘doxxing’ (an intentionally slippery term intended only to shield Zionist agents from accountability), protests, and principled boycotts. The Chabad shootings may have been avoided, suggests the ‘national’ broadcaster, if only the Australian colony had capitulated to Israel harder and prosecuted those opposing genocide with a greater degree of dystopian despotism.
‘It’s OK to feel distressed after the Bondi beach attack,’ the ABC quickly assured its readers, offering ‘tips from experts’ about ‘how to cope’. This, from a shamelessly beligerent and mendacious news platform that — for 817 days — has merrily cranked the blood-stained levers of an observable, accelerated genocide.
On the day following the shooting, New South Wales political leader Chris Minns appeared on imperialist media platform Sky News. Minns proposed that the militarised private Jewish ‘Community Security Group’ (CSG), described by one of its own volunteers as a ‘natural recruiting pool’ for Mossad, be further armed. To what Indigenous or non-white communities have politicians offered guns? Who other than privileged settlers has access to heavily weaponed private security companies to ensure their safety? What consequences does the arming of settlers have on the safety of Indigenous people? And how does this mirror settlers of the Zionist entity armed by the ‘state’ to force Palestinians off their lands?
Since October 7th, the Israeli flag had become popularly and correctly understood as a symbol of this colonial hubris and entitlement to brutality. Now, this repulsive flag is riding the Chabad shooting back to legitimacy, casually appearing at every media-fuelled memorial and so, vicariously, onto the Instagram grids of progressives and left-coded news platforms.
Currently, ‘antisemitism envoy’ Jillian Segal’s full wish list of dystopian fascisms is being fast-tracked at an astonishing rate. But we cannot allow this Zionist fantasy of unfettered power on Aboriginal Land to be marketed as a ‘response’ to the Chabad shooting. This fantasy was already plotted, detailed, and fully formed, waiting for an opportune moment through which to force its implementation.
A recent headline from the liberal-imperialist Guardian, for example, frames new anti-protest laws in Victoria (including the further militarising of Victorian police against protesters) as occurring ‘in the wake of the Bondi terror attack’ — deliberately obscuring the fact that these fascist developments were comprehensively pre-loaded before the Chabad shooting, and would almost certainly have been implemented regardless.
Nor should this array of state repressions be described as unprecedented. Liberal handwringing over an imagined ‘descent’ into tyranny is misguided. Australia — like Israel and all settler-colonies — is foundationally and inherently fascist; established through violence, expanded through violence, and upheld through this same perpetual annihilatory violence.
These lands have been pillaged, poisoned, desecrated, and set ablaze by colonisers. Genocidal occupation entities cannot be reformed; they must be destroyed. Every inch of stolen land must be liberated. There was a time before Israel, America, Australia — and there will be a time after.
Thank you. You’ve courageously articulated my thoughts.
We don’t mourn fascists.
From the river to the sea, always was, always will be.
This kind of Truth must be commended in a time of cowering to reactionary forces and is sorely needed in a time, as Giles Chattelet foresaw, where we are being treated like neural cattle and being used as pawns in larger architectures of power
If I'm honest, I will say that my heart found its tenderness in mourning when I heard about the recent announcement of the death of Abu Obeida, a brave leader willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, for causes more noble than any Zionist will ever comprehend.
Beyond that there is no comparison between the two events, and conflating the Palestinian liberation struggle with Bondi is abhorrent, a cynical calculation designed to leverage even more sadistic power on an already desecrated land and people. We need to push this back with every inch of our hearts and minds.