Back in February, I spent three days embedded with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese while reporting a TIME cover story on his world-first under-16 social media ban. But while observing parliamentary sessions in Canberra and visiting flooded towns in northern Queensland, it was starkly apparent that neither children’s mental health nor extreme weather was necessarily top of the national agenda.
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Albanese’s press conferences and spot news appearances were dominated by the same topic: rising antisemitism following a spike in the vandalism of synagogues and harassment of Jewish people. The burning question was whether American support for Israel’s offensive in Gaza, and Canberra’s close alliance with the U.S., was putting Australian Jews in danger.
“The Australian government doesn’t have a direct role in the Middle East,” Albanese told me on his Australian Air Force 737 when asked about the issue. “We’re not participants. We don’t supply weapons. Overwhelmingly, Australians want there to be peace. And they don’t want conflict brought here.”
Read More: A Timeline of Rising Antisemitism in Australia Since the Gaza War
That last hope was sadly shattered on Sunday when at least 15 people were killed and dozens more injured after two gunmen opened fire on a crowd of hundreds at Sydney’s Bondi Beach. The exact motive has yet to be determined, but given that the victims had gathered to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, Albanese decried the attack as “antisemitism” and “a horrific act” of “terrorism.”
According to police, the two attackers were a 50-year-old father, who was killed at the scene, and his 24-year-old son, named as Naveed Akram, who was tackled and disarmed by a bystander and remains under arrest in a Sydney hospital in critical condition. It is Australia’s deadliest mass shooting in three decades, with victims aged between 10 and 87, including two rabbis and at least one Holocaust…
