My son had planned to be at Bondi. Will hate follow him wherever he goes?

9 hours ago 1

Opinion

December 19, 2025 — 5.00am

Follow our live coverage of the Bondi shooting here.

Before I say what I’m about to say, I need to tell you one thing. Which is that I, too, know the rapture that seems to spread like liquid through your chest when your toddler sits on you and declares brightly, but matter of factly: “I was going to pee on you, but then I realised – you’re my joy!”

Still, as I walked to work on Monday morning, a thought bloomed. Maybe I should never have had my three children.

Because, just the night before, on Sunday evening, I had spent hours scrolling through WhatsApp messages from Jewish friends and acquaintances on a group chat. “Have they got the shooters? My eldest daughter is there,” wrote one. This was only minutes after Naveed and Sajid Akram started shooting their long rifles aimed at Jewish people at Bondi Beach.

Another wrote of having escaped Bondi on foot, leaving her car there, after running and hiding with her 12-year-old daughter. Yet another friend, who was at the same Hanukkah celebration with her niece, had taken her to the emergency department to remove shrapnel from the child’s head.

A family member texted to say that a colleague’s father had been murdered.

My son had planned to be there. He was getting ready to leave for Bondi with friends when he heard the news.

As Jews, we know that hate stalks us wherever we go.

So, by the next morning, after circling through the immediate, scratchy feelings of panic – what if my son had been there? Do I need to tell my children to not go to communal Jewish gatherings? Ever? – the thought dawned on me: why bring yet another generation of Jewish children into this world?

Countless leaders and analysts have been saying, on repeat, for the last two years, that we mustn’t let overseas hatreds and battles snake their way onto our shores. We can’t let our social fabric tear.

Each time, I’d think: “Must be nice to feel that you can escape hatred; simply move out of its path, as you would to let someone pass by on the footpath.”

Because, as Jews, we know that hate stalks us wherever we go. By the time my grandmother and her family left Poland in 1929, nationwide boycotts of Jewish businesses were being encouraged, and anti-Jewish violence was growing. She moved to Canada, where she was taunted for her foreign accent, and Jews were banned, along with dogs, from visiting Toronto’s most popular beach.

And of course, the hate follows me here, too.

To think that Jewish people could somehow, if we just tried hard enough, insulate ourselves from hatreds that we see play out overseas. That is a fatal misunderstanding of the threats that Jews, and other groups who are hated wherever they go, have always faced.

And now, after the tragic murder of, at the time of writing, 15 innocent people at Bondi, I wonder whether other Australians’ understanding of who they are, and where we all live, might have changed forever. The lucky country? Maybe, the deluded country?

For decades, most people here have lived with a foundational identity myth: that Australians are first and foremost, far away. From everything. “So far away,” as Robert Hughes put it in The Fatal Shore.

Into the 1600s, maps didn’t even feature Australia but, rather, an outline with the phrase, “Great Southern Land”.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese meets Bondi hero Ahmed al Ahmed at St George Hospital on Tuesday,

And, of course, Australia hasn’t moved. The country is still bloody far away from the rest of the world. But that didn’t stop the rain of bullets that spilt blood on Australia’s most famous beach on Sunday.

And it’s no comfort to Peter Meagher, a non-Jewish, and beloved, member of Randwick’s Rugby Club, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, who managed to survive the dangerous work as a police officer for nearly 40 years, only to be gunned down at the Hanukkah celebration where he was enjoying his later-in-life passion, photography.

Neither he nor any of those killed, such as Holocaust survivor Alexander Kleytman, or 10 year-old Matilda, were saved by the 17,000 or so watery kilometres between Australia and Britain, the so-called “Tyranny of Distance”, as historian Geoffrey Blainey put it, that kept Australia from the influences of Europe.

That this tragedy has brought to light the horrific reality that non-Jewish Australians, too, are now vulnerable to the evil unleashed by ancient hatreds might just be iconically Australian. It’s long been said that distance made everything come to Australia late. Colour TV. Contraband copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. “Even the 1960s came to Australia in the 1970s,” as the saying goes.

But this is where my children were born. And it’s where I’ve chosen to raise them.

Perhaps we are the canary in the coal mine, a sound of alarm to the rest of you, that you, too, could get caught in the crossfire, as so many non-Jewish Australians were on Sunday evening.

But we are truly, tragically, in this together. As are all of our children.

As one non-Jewish colleague wrote to me on Monday, to express empathy over the violence that had struck the Jewish community: “You despair for the kids who think this is how the world is now. I remember being seven, and the only thing I had to worry about was finding a tap in somebody’s front yard to drink from after riding my bike around unsupervised all day.”

His was just one of countless messages I’ve received from friends and colleagues. Of support, and love. Some wrote to pass on messages to my children, to let them know: “We are standing with Jewish Aussies.” We may be in this horrific new (and old) world together. But let’s really be in it together, in the best of ways. Let’s help keep each other’s children safe. Because, like yours, mine are truly the best of me.

Samantha Selinger-Morris is the host of The Morning Edition for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.