Thirteen Jews and two others were murdered in cold blood, and dozens more maimed, while relaxing, laughing, eating and singing - gathered at Bondi Beach to mark the start of the Jewish festival of Hanukkah on December 14.
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This was the deadliest terror attack in Australia's history and the deadliest terror attack against Jews anywhere in the world since Hamas' hordes murdered 1200 people in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
October 7 left Australia's Jewish community deeply shocked - yet December 14 did not.
December 14 was the predictable culmination of a climate that had been building for years - an attack cooked over the fanned flames of an Islamist-leftist convergence that many preferred not to confront.
Islamist terrorism has targeted and taken Australian lives, at home and abroad, for more than two decades.
Concurrently, significant parts of the Australian left have embraced increasingly extreme positions on Israel and "Zionism", often divorced from both basic morality and factual reality.
October 7 proved catalytic, cementing an unholy alliance in which elements of the left were prepared to overlook the nature of their Islamist fellow travellers in pursuit of a common enemy: Israel and, by extension, all pro-Israel Jews and "Zionists", who they were determined to paint collectively as all "racists", "genocide-enablers", "baby killers", "terrorists" and modern day Nazis.
For two years, Australia's Jewish community warned that unless governments and authorities confronted these concurrent and connected trends - the normalisation of anti-Semitism, the indulgence of ubiquitous anti-Israel protesters repeatedly breaking the law, and anti-Semitic sermons by some imams - the trajectory would end in bloodshed.
Those warnings were dismissed as paranoia, special pleading, or a Machiavellian attempt to silence criticism of Israel.
The failure to act has deep roots.
Arguably, the breakdown in Australia's willingness to confront extremist Islamism began in the 1980s, when the Hawke Labor government sacrificed principle for politics by ignoring the unfiltered antisemitism of Egyptian-born Sheikh Taj El-Din al-Hilaly.
In 1988, Hilaly delivered a sermon describing Jews as "descendants of apes and pigs", "the underlying cause of all wars threatening the peace and security of the whole inhabited earth," and claimed that Jews used "sex and abominable acts of buggery, espionage, treason and economic hoarding" to control the world.
Hilaly, who was in Australia on an illegally overstayed tourist visa issued in 1982, paid no penalty for this vile racism.
In 1990, while PM Bob Hawke was overseas, acting PM Paul Keating granted Hilaly a permanent visa.
Even as he rose to be the "Mufti" of Australia's Muslim clerics, Hilaly was a repeat offender. And evidenced by the anti-Semitic and pro-Hamas rhetoric of far too many imams today, what was once beyond the pale became normalised.
The overlap between Islamists and sections of the left is a shared rejection of Israel's legitimacy and a recycling of antisemitic tropes about how the illegitimate power and influence of Jews supposedly threatens our society.
For two years, Jews have run the gauntlet in public and private spaces, constantly accused of being baby killers and enablers of genocide, doxxed, boycotted, and told they deserve no "cultural safety" given their inherent evilness.
Dozens of Jewish cultural, educational and religious institutions were firebombed, vandalised or graffitied.
This life-changing and life-threatening conduct was routinely dismissed by too many as insignificant when weighed against Palestinian suffering in Gaza.
When Jews said chants such as "Globalise the Intifada", "Death to the IDF" and "From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free" were calls for violence, they were gaslit.
Since October 7, the Albanese government has reinforced the perception that it shares much of the left's unreasoning hostility towards Israel, and its policies are guided more by political calculation than moral urgency.
Meanwhile, the government seemed completely unable to talk about the anti-Semitism crisis afflicting this country without also raising Islamophobia - an unrelated problem - in the same sentence.
The government's initial response after December 14 deepened these concerns.
PM Anthony Albanese's failure to immediately offer Jewish survivors of December 14 the pastoral care expected of a national leader was glaring.
Anti-Semitism seemed absent as a priority issue in the agenda of the emergency national cabinet convened after the massacre, which focused on gun control.
Questioned whether his government had done enough to prevent the attack, the PM insisted that anti-Semitism did not suddenly begin when he took office.
No - but it did explode to unprecedented levels under his watch.
He has now admitted more could have been done and agreed to implement some of the recommendations of the anti-Semitism envoy he appointed, after five months of neglect.
This is welcome. But all Australians, including the PM need to now recognise that December 14 was a bloody line in the sand, and we desperately need to identify and confront all the elements that led to its crossing.
- Allon Lee is a senior policy analyst at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council
