15 May Terms of Belonging – Afterword
On 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel killed approximately 1,200 people, the great majority of them civilians, and around 250 people were taken hostage into Gaza. About 364 people were murdered at the Nova Music Festival near Kibbutz Re’im, while others were killed in nearby kibbutzim, towns and military bases. The attack remains the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust.
Two nights later the sails of the Sydney Opera House were illuminated in blue and white, the colours of the Israeli flag, as a gesture of solidarity following the Hamas attacks. Portions of the eastern sails were washed in blue and white light suggestive of the flag itself, while in some projections the Star of David was also visible. Against the darkness of Sydney Harbour, the effect was solemn rather than celebratory, more akin to a civic vigil than a political demonstration.
But the unintended consequence was a political demonstration that shattered Australia Fair. The atmosphere was less like an orderly political rally than an emotionally charged confrontation. Video footage showed tightly packed groups surging across the Opera House steps, chanting slogans and jeering toward police and media cameras while flares cast smoke and red light across the forecourt. Palestinian flags were waved throughout the crowd and there were later allegations that Hamas flags and other prohibited symbols had also appeared. What was not disputed was the presence of explicitly anti-Jewish chants, which quickly became the centre of national controversy. The scenes shocked many Australians who had assumed such public expressions of sectarian hatred belonged to another country, or another century.
What unsettled me almost as much as the protest itself was the hesitancy of parts of the political and cultural establishment to describe plainly what had occurred. The instinct often seemed less to condemn than to contextualise, less to draw a civic line than to explain why the anger had emerged. The Sydney Opera House is not merely another public building. It stands at Bennelong Point beside Sydney Cove, only a short distance from the place where the First Fleet landed in January 1788 and where modern Australia began. That such scenes could unfold there, on the steps of the country’s most recognisable civic landmark, deeply unsettled many Australians.
Eighteen months later, on 22 February 2025, I travelled to Sydney to attend Simone Young’s performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony featuring Israeli contralto Noa Beinart at the Opera House. I was there in time to enjoy a drink in the foyer and to share the muted excitement of others gathering for this monumental work of the orchestral repertoire. Tony Burke, then Minister for Home Affairs and Minister for the Arts, was among them. From time-to-time people approached him with brief greetings but, as far as I could tell, he, like me, was alone.
It was during that evening at the Opera House that the ideas which eventually became Terms of Belonging began to take shape in my mind. Having lived abroad from 1973 to 2002, I had missed much of Australia’s transition from the White Australia policy to multiculturalism and did not fully understand the social and political forces that had driven it. Perhaps this project would complete my education.
What followed was an attempt to understand not simply how Australia had changed, but why, despite its enormous diversity, it had remained for so long one of the most stable multicultural societies in the world. Australia had absorbed successive waves of migration from Europe, Asia and the Middle East with remarkably little of the sustained communal conflict that had troubled many other societies.
The more I researched the subject, the more I came to believe that this success had not occurred accidentally. Australia benefited from prosperity, strong institutions and decades of relative economic stability, but those factors alone were not enough to explain the country’s cohesion. Migrants were generally encouraged to participate in Australian civic life rather than live entirely apart from it. The country asked comparatively little in ideological terms, but it expected certain habits of coexistence in return: respect for the law, democratic institutions, equality between men and women, religious tolerance and a willingness to place civic peace ahead of older sectarian loyalties.
Researching the book also reminded me how anxious earlier Australians had often been about newcomers. Irish Catholics, southern Europeans, Jews, Chinese migrants and later Vietnamese refugees all encountered periods of suspicion and hostility. Yet over time most became part of the national story. The old sectarian divide between Protestants and Catholics, which had shaped much of the Australia I grew up in, gradually weakened as successive generations developed a stronger sense of common Australian identity.
For that reason, I came to believe that multiculturalism itself was not the central problem confronting Australia. Diversity alone does not inevitably produce fragmentation. What matters is whether a society retains a sufficiently strong common culture to integrate difference into a broader civic framework. Once those shared assumptions weaken, diversity can harden into mutual suspicion and parallel identities that no longer trust one another or the institutions meant to hold them together.
Yet while I was writing Terms of Belonging, Australia itself was becoming more uneasy. Jewish schools increased security. Synagogues hired guards. Muslim organisations reported hostility and abuse directed at ordinary families who had no connection whatsoever to extremism or violence. Public discussion became more brittle and cautious. Many Australians simply withdrew from difficult conversations altogether. It became easier to remain silent than to risk saying the wrong thing.
What made these anxieties harder to dismiss was that Australia’s own security agencies were becoming more concerned as well. On 5 August 2024, the Prime Minister and the Director-General of Security jointly announced that ASIO was raising the National Terrorism Threat Level from POSSIBLE to PROBABLE. In ASIO’s assessment, that meant there was now a greater than fifty per cent chance of an onshore terrorist attack or attack planning within the following twelve months. The threat level remained at PROBABLE throughout 2025.
That decision should probably have provoked a deeper national conversation than it did. ASIO was not a political movement or a media organisation. It was the country’s principal domestic intelligence agency warning publicly that Australia’s security environment had deteriorated. Yet much of the political response remained cautious and managerial, reluctant to confront openly the growing tensions around social cohesion, sectarian conflict and civic integration.
Even so, daily life largely continued as before. People gathered at cafés, attended concerts, watched football and worried about mortgages and school fees. Increased security outside synagogues and Jewish schools quietly became part of the urban landscape. For most Australians these developments remained background anxieties rather than immediate realities.
Terms of Belonging was finally published in the last week of November 2025. I was uncertain how it would be received. The subject itself had become difficult to discuss calmly in Australia. Public debate around immigration, multiculturalism, antisemitism and social cohesion often seemed trapped between moral accusation on one side and political opportunism on the other. I had tried, as far as possible, to write neither as an ideologue nor as a partisan, but simply as someone attempting to understand what had changed in Australian life and what still held the country together.
What surprised me was the number of responses recognising the unease the book was describing. Some readers agreed strongly with its arguments, others disagreed with parts, but many seemed relieved simply to encounter a discussion of these questions that did not immediately collapse into slogans or tribal loyalties. Jewish Australians wrote about feeling suddenly uncertain in a country where many had previously felt entirely secure. Muslim Australians wrote, often thoughtfully and generously, about their own fears of being collectively associated with extremism and violence they rejected completely.
The strongest responses often came from migrants themselves. Many had chosen Australia precisely because it had historically avoided the sectarianism, ethnic conflict and political instability that had damaged the societies they or their parents had left behind. They understood perhaps more clearly than most native-born Australians how fragile civic trust can become once communal suspicion begins to harden. Van, who arrived by boat from Saigon in 1972, sent a text thanking me for my “positive view on the settlement of the Vietnamese boat people like me”.
It was precisely because ordinary Australian life still appeared outwardly stable that Bondi proved so psychologically shocking when it came.
On 14 December 2025, thousands of people gathered at Bondi Beach for the annual Chanukah by the Sea celebration. Families had come from across Sydney’s eastern suburbs and beyond. The promenade near the pavilion was crowded with food stalls, music and dancing while families gathered for prayers, celebrations and the lighting of the menorah. The event had been publicly advertised for weeks and organisers had worked closely with police and local authorities to manage the crowds.
Shortly after three o’clock, two men carrying semi-automatic rifles emerged from a vehicle near the beachfront and walked toward the main festival area. Witnesses later said the men began firing almost immediately into the crowd gathered near the stage and food stalls. Panic spread within seconds as families ran across the sand and into nearby cafés, surf clubs and side streets.
By the time police killed one gunman and captured the other, more than thirty people were dead and over twenty others seriously wounded. Many of the victims were families who had attended the festival together. The death toll would almost certainly have been higher had several people not intervened. One man tackled one of the attackers before being shot and badly wounded himself. Others dragged injured strangers to safety while paramedics and police fought to secure the beachfront and evacuate survivors.
For days afterwards the images dominated the country: bodies covered beside the promenade, abandoned prams, shoes and beach bags scattered across the sand, armed police moving through streets normally associated with cafés, tourists and surfers, grieving families waiting for news of the missing and the dead. Australians who had spent their lives believing that such sectarian mass murder belonged somewhere else suddenly found themselves confronting it at home.
What shocked many Australians was not simply the scale of the killing, but its deliberate sectarian character. This had not been an indiscriminate act of violence directed randomly at the public. The attackers had chosen a publicly advertised Jewish gathering knowing exactly who would be there. Barely two years after crowds had gathered on the steps of the Sydney Opera House shouting anti-Jewish slogans beneath sails illuminated in solidarity with Israel, Australia now found itself confronting sectarian violence on a scale not even ASIO could have thought possible.
In the weeks that followed, pressure for a full national inquiry grew. At first the government was reluctant to establish a Royal Commission, preferring existing security reviews and policing responses. But the scale of the massacre, the targeting of a publicly advertised Jewish gathering and the wider atmosphere of deteriorating social cohesion made that position increasingly difficult to maintain.
Public pressure eventually became overwhelming. Community leaders, legal figures, former security officials and representatives from across Australian public life argued that the country required more than a criminal investigation alone. Australians wanted to understand not only how the massacre had occurred, but what it revealed about the condition of the country itself.
When the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion was finally announced, its formal remit focused on security failures, extremism and institutional responses. Yet from the beginning it was clear that the inquiry touched something larger and more uncomfortable: whether Australia still possessed a strong enough shared civic culture to sustain a highly diverse society during a period of growing international instability and imported sectarian conflict.
The Commission first sat publicly in Sydney on 24 February 2026. The opening proceedings were procedural in nature, Commissioner Virginia Bell AC SC outlining the scope and structure of the inquiry before substantive hearings commenced several weeks later. When those hearings eventually began, Australians were confronted by testimony from police, intelligence officials, victims’ families, community leaders and experts in extremism and social cohesion. Much of the evidence was deeply unsettling. Witnesses described the sharp rise in antisemitic incidents after 7 October, the growing fear within parts of the Jewish community and repeated warnings from ASIO and law-enforcement agencies about an increasingly volatile security environment.
The Commission’s interim report, issued on 30 April 2026, focused primarily on security preparedness, counter-terrorism coordination and institutional responses to the deteriorating threat environment. It examined whether intelligence and law-enforcement agencies had acted effectively on mounting warnings, whether information-sharing systems were adequate and whether governments had responded sufficiently to the escalation of antisemitic intimidation and violence.
Yet even within those relatively narrow institutional findings lay a larger and more uncomfortable national question. The attack had exposed how rapidly overseas conflicts and sectarian tensions could fracture domestic trust and social stability inside a highly diverse society. For many Australians, the deeper significance of the Commission therefore extended beyond policing and intelligence failures alone. It raised many of the same questions explored in Terms of Belonging: whether Australia’s shared civic culture remained strong enough to sustain social cohesion during a period of growing international instability and ideological conflict.
Australia had faced periods of division and uncertainty before. Sectarian conflict, fears about immigration and anxieties over national identity were not new in Australian history. What had historically distinguished Australia, however, was not the absence of tension but the country’s repeated ability to absorb difference into a broader civic culture that most people still wished to share.
Whether that capacity remains as strong today is less certain. The pressures bearing down on contemporary societies are more intense than those faced by earlier generations: mass migration, globalised media, online radicalisation and the constant importation of distant conflicts into domestic political life. No Royal Commission can resolve such pressures on its own. At best, it can clarify what is at stake.
The central question raised by Bondi was therefore not simply how the attack occurred, but whether Australians still possess enough shared civic trust, restraint and common purpose to prevent fear, grievance and sectarianism from hardening permanently into parallel communities living beside one another but no longer truly together. Terms of Belonging was written in the hope that the answer to that question remains yes.
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