Bondi Beach is an icon in the national imagination – sun, families, tourists, surf, the ordinary Australian promise that public space belongs to everyone. On Sunday night, that promise was violated in the most sickening way. Gunmen opened fire at a Hanukkah celebration near Bondi, in what police and political leaders have described as a targeted antisemitic terrorist attack.
The grief is real. So is the anger. And in the first hours after an atrocity, anger rushes to find a shape, an explanation, a culprit, a “they”.
That pronoun is where ethics either holds, or breaks.
Because the deepest moral danger after violence like this is not only the violence itself, but also way our public moral language can be degraded into a kind of licensed misfiring, blame detached from responsibility; condemnation detached from agency; identity treated as evidence; strangers made into substitutes.
If we are serious about living in a liberal, plural democracy, we have to become more self-conscious about how we assign moral responsibility. That is, the maintenance of the basic moral grammar that stops a society from sliding into collective punishment.
Metaethics asks a deceptively simple question, what are we doing when we say someone ought or ought not do something; when we call an act wrong; when we say someone deserves blame?
In the best case, moral judgments are answerable to reasons. They track agency, what a person did, intended, foresaw, could control, and could have done otherwise – blame is not meant to behave like a contagious stain.
But scapegoating relies on a counterfeit picture of responsibility. It treats responsibility as transmissible by identity, as though guilt can travel along surnames, skin tones, accents, flags, or faith. It turns “is associated with” into “is responsible for”.
This is the mistake that sits beneath both antisemitism and Islamophobia. It is the same mistake wearing different costumes.
On one side, the murderous logic goes like this: Israel is doing X; Jews are Israel; therefore, Jews must pay. On the other side, the retaliatory logic threatens to run: these attackers did Y; Muslims/migrants are the attackers; therefore Muslims/migrants must pay.
Both are metaethically rotten. Both treat innocence as irrelevant. Both replace moral responsibility with tribal bookkeeping.
Many Australians hold fierce moral views about the Israel–Palestine conflict. Some are convinced Israel is committing war crimes, even genocide. Others reject those descriptions and argue Israel is acting in self-defence against terror.
But no matter where you stand on those questions, there is a moral line, you do not get to turn political condemnation into ethnic punishment.
A state is not an ethnicity. A government is not a diaspora. A military campaign is not a synagogue. A child holding a candle at a Hanukkah gathering is not a cabinet minister, not a general, not a policy, not a target.
The Bondi attack, targeting Jewish Australians as they celebrated a religious festival, was a declaration that Jewish identity itself is punishable. If that idea takes root, every Jewish Australian becomes a stand-in for geopolitics. That is how a foreign conflict becomes domestic terror, by collapsing the distinction between a people and a state.
And if, in response, we allow the reverse collapse, treating Muslims or Palestinians or migrants as a single guilty agent, we will have learned nothing. We will simply be re-enacting the same moral failure in a different direction.
If you want a workable test, try this: could the person you are tempted to blame have prevented the thing you blame them for, by choices reasonably available to them? If not, your blame is not moral judgment. It is projection.
A Muslim schoolkid in Sydney did not plan the Bondi attack. A Palestinian Australian nurse did not pull a trigger at Bondi. A migrant doctor did not write a manifesto. Just as a Jewish family in Bondi did not order an airstrike in Gaza.
If we cannot keep these distinctions straight when we are frightened and furious, we do not deserve the word “justice”.
In the numerous reports about the attack, one of the most morally important facts was not about the killers at all, it was that Muslim leaders publicly condemned the violence. That matters because it breaks the lazy story that insists communities are morally homogeneous. It is evidence, in real time, that moral agency is distributed across individuals, not pre-written by identity. Blame is non-fungible. It cannot be paid by substitutes.
You cannot “make Jews pay” for a government by killing Jews. You cannot “make Muslims pay” for terrorists by attacking Muslims. The moment you accept substitute punishment, you have abandoned justice and embraced vendetta.
And once vendetta becomes normal, everyone is unsafe, because anyone can be drafted as a substitute for someone else’s crime.
There are a few things we can do moving forwards:
First, unambiguous solidarity with Jewish Australians, materially, not just rhetorically. When a community is targeted for who they are, that community’s security becomes a national obligation.
Second, an equally unambiguous refusal of the backlash cycle. After every spectacular act of political violence, opportunists try to widen the target list, to treat “Muslim” as suspect, “Arab” as threat, “Palestinian” as extremist, “migrant” as disposable. That is copycat moral collapse.
Third, a higher standard in our public language. Media, politicians, and commentators should adopt a simple rule – name perpetrators and ideologies, not ethnicities and faiths, unless there is a demonstrable, specific reason that survives scrutiny. This is intellectual hygiene.
Finally, we must refuse the framing that says the choice is between passionate moral conviction and social cohesion. That framing is false. You can be morally outraged about Gaza; you can be morally outraged about antisemitism; you can be morally outraged about terrorism, without turning outrage into collective blame.
If we let “they” expand until it includes everyone we already feared, then the killers will have achieved more than death. They will have corrupted the moral machinery that distinguishes the guilty from the innocent.
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Roger Chao, as ever, appeals to the better parts of ourselves. It is to be wished that his perspectives on issues reach as large an audience as is possible, for we are desperately short on wisdom and wise counsel in these superficial and attention-deficit times when instant gratification serves for the instant before the demand for the next dopamine hit buries the impact of the previous moment.
Of course, wise counsel would suggest, vendettas are imprudent. There are no winners. The infamous American Hatfield–McCoy feud ended with loss and lamentation all around. The history of feuds, however, suggests that we are reluctant to let a grudge, a maltreatment, a disservice however small or gross, pass by… indeed, oftentimes, the default position is one that demands justice be served.
There will be no resolution to this existential quandary until people themselves ascend internally to a state higher than the one that demands an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
Excellent article Roger.
As history shows, “lex talionis” never works
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_for_an_eye
I suspect that this is the religious logic that Netanyahu uses to do what he has done to date.