Q&A | Peter Wertheim on the Australian Terror Attack

Peter Wertheim, member of the Order of Australia, is the co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), the preeminent body representing Australian Jewish organizations and the Australian Jewish community. Moment spoke to him early Tuesday morning in Australia, less than 48 hours after two men opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach, killing 15 and seriously wounding scores more.

You spoke to Moment almost exactly a year ago, after the antisemitic synagogue attack in Melbourne, which was characterized as a wake-up call for the Jewish community in Australia.

Yes, it was orchestrated terrorism. The Iranian regime and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were officially found to be behind it. They directed it, and they used local criminals to carry it out.

We often use the term “wake-up call” when something like this happens. But I imagine today your community is reeling.

The significant thing is, it’s not just the Jewish community that’s in shock and in mourning. If you were in Australia, you’d be able to witness this for yourself—it’s the entire country that is in shock and in mourning.

“Everybody across the spectrum has denounced this action, and that is something quite new in this country. If there’s a word for it, I’d say it’s teshuvah.”

The site of the massacre was closed off and the police directed the public not to go anywhere near it. And despite that, there has been a constant stream of people, including politicians and ministers, visiting the site. There are laying flowers, lighting candles, reciting prayers—just a stream of ordinary Australians of every background. On the radio and everywhere else it’s almost nothing but soul searching. You know, this is about a nation, not just a community. And I think that message needs to be very clearly understood outside Australia.

The people who carried out this atrocity came from part of a very small extremist group. Everybody across the spectrum, in terms of ethnic background, political voice, has denounced this action very publicly, very demonstratively. And that is something quite new that we’re seeing in this country. If there’s a word for it, I’d say it’s teshuvah–that’s what’s happening.

Whether it will be sustained remains to be seen, but everyone seems to understand that what is now called for is not just a response from government, although a response from government is certainly essential, but also a response from every sector of society. Because everything that has been happening over the last two years is now being called into question—all the street protests, the calls to “Globalize the Intifada,” the eliminationist message inherent in “From the River to the Sea,” the university encampments, the doxxing of Jewish artists and speakers and cultural workers, as well as anyone of any Israeli background, and the sewer of hate speech on social media. All of these things are now being looked at by the whole of the country, not just things that the Jewish community is sounding the alarm about, as we have done over the last two years. It’s now something the whole country has woken up to, and that’s a hopeful sign. 

Here in the United States, there’s a constant tension of trying to protect speech and to differentiate speech from, obviously, violence, but also violent intent. What are the laws like there? And are you saying that Australians are waking up to how antisemitism can escalate?

People are now starting to see the truth of what the Jewish community has been contending all along, which is that hateful words escalate into hateful actions, and hateful actions eventually escalate into murderous actions. We’ve now seen that very clearly demonstrated.

We do not have a First Amendment in Australia. We do have an implied constitutional freedom to engage in political debate, and that’s an important freedom. Of course, everyone understands the importance of free speech, but the point of difference between engaging in debate about political matters, including contentious international conflicts on the one hand, and demonizing and dehumanizing one’s opponents on the other, particularly on racial or religious grounds, is now increasingly seen to be beyond the pale. There is more clarity about that than there has been in the past. 

Laws have been passed preventing the display of Nazi symbols, the display of flags of listed terrorist organizations, prohibiting the performance of the Nazi salute in public, and so on. I don’t think any of that would be possible in the United States because of your First Amendment, but that’s already in place in Australia. But now people are looking at other things as well. Universities are looking at their current practices in terms of what is permissible speech on campus, what’s within the rubric of academic freedom, and what strays into the realm of degrading, dehumanizing and delegitimizing rhetoric, and there seems to now be a stronger resolve to enforce those differences.

What have the last few days been like for you and the Executive Council on Australian Jewry? What have your priorities been?

The first thing we did within a couple of hours of the events was set up a crisis management group (we have trained for this previously) in terms of protecting the community, protecting communal institutions, liaising with the police, with government and with our own security organization that works very closely with the police. 

There were some immediate operational considerations about physical protection, because at that stage, we didn’t know whether these two individuals were acting alone or part of a cell, and whether the crisis was over or whether it was just the beginning of something more that was going to unfold. Then we had to look at getting communications out to our community about victims’ identities and giving information to families about which hospitals they’d had been taken to. We had to ensure that, in accordance with Jewish law, that invasive autopsies of the dead were not conducted. We sought to avoid that, and that was honored; bodies were examined for the most part by ultrasound and X-ray and so on. The only interference with the bodies was the removal of bullets for forensic purposes.

Finally, we were dealing with longer-term issues in terms of the psychological impact, counseling and support services, both within the Jewish community and those made available by the government, making sure that people who needed those would have ready access to them. 

It’s been a lot of work and sleepless nights, but it had to be done, and it was done.

On top of that, my inbox is just bursting at the seams with messages of goodwill and support and love from Australians of every background—I mean, all over Australia. Things like, “I’m not a Jewish person myself, but I just wanted you to know how much we support you and respect you and how much a part of us you are.” It’s mind-boggling. And we’ve also received official messages of support from other ethnic communities and also from other faith communities. And by that, I mean the Christian churches, Shia and Sunni representative organizations, the Baha’i community, the Hindu community. All these unsolicited messages of support in life, and often expressed in heartfelt terms.

We received messages of support after October 7 and again after the August synagogue arson attack, but nothing approaching the magnitude and the breadth of the messages of support we’ve had this time. 

You said that there’s been a constant presence at Bondi Beach. Is it mainly the Jewish community turning out, or, as you said, is it more of a national response?

Initially it was the Jewish community who wanted to come together and mourn our dead. But it’s grown from there. You’ve got to understand that Bondi Beach is the people’s beach. And when I say that the whole country is in mourning, in a sense, Australians generally are mourning a loss of innocence as a country, and we are also mourning the desecration of this place of relaxation and recreation for generations of Australians. So many have wonderful memories of times spent at Bondi Beach, which are now forever going to be overshadowed by the memory of the atrocities that took place there on Sunday.

Has it been established that the two gunmen were acting alone?

That is what the Prime Minister [Anthony Albanese] has said on the advice of our intelligence agencies. They were just acting spontaneously, as it were, as a father and son, and there were no others involved. We do know that both of them had associations with extremist Islamist organizations in Australia previously, and the son in particular had been investigated as part of a broader investigation in 2019 looking at a particular Islamic center that he was associated with.

An assessment had been made at that time, apparently, but he did not then represent a risk. But that was 2019, and I guess the question is whether there was any follow-up done to monitor this particular individual to see whether there might be any change in that assessment. I’m sure there will be public inquiries.

There’s never really been a public inquiry into the financial links of some of these extremist groups with overseas governments and foundations. We are particularly concerned about the role of the Qatari government and the Qatar Foundation in some of these groups and financing radical extremism on Australian campuses. But this is not something that has been publicly investigated. 

Top image: Pavilion, Bondi Beach, Sydney. Credit: Sardaka (CC BY-SA 4.0)