The Lobby Is Milking the Bondi Beach Attack To Silence Critics of Israel’s Genocide

Jonathon Cook. December 16, 2025

It is years of dedicated work by the Israel lobby that has ensured the mass murder of Palestinians is viewed by governments, the media and parts of the Jewish community as entirely legitimate

I, for one, am struggling to stomach the spew of hypocrisy from pro-Israel groups like the Community Security Trust and its policy director, Dave Rich, in the wake of Sunday’s Bondi Beach attack.

Establishment media, on the other hand, appear to have a bottomless appetite for efforts by Israel apologists to exploit the genuine fear and grief of the Jewish community to advance a political agenda – one designed to silence criticism of Israel over its two-year slaughter and maiming of Palestinian children in Gaza.

Predictably, the supposedly liberal Guardian once again gave Rich a prominent slot in its comment pages, this time to spin the attack in Sydney into a demand for silencing opposition to Israel’s genocide.

Here are extracts from Rich’s piece in italics, followed by my observations. His all-too-obvious double standards and his glaring misdirection ploys should have disqualified this piece from publication. But the British media simply can’t get enough of this kind of bilge.

Rich: “The mobile phone footage of two gunmen calmly taking aim at families enjoying a Hanukah party is utterly chilling. It takes a special kind of dehumanisation, an ideology of pure hatred and self-righteous conviction, to do that.”

If Rich is so troubled by issues of dehumanisation, why has he remained so steadfastly mute about the long and utterly chilling dehumanisation of Palestinians by Israel and by its lobby groups, including his own organisation? Remember, Israeli leaders called the Palestinians “human animals”. It is decades of that kind of dehumanisation that laid the ground for Israel’s genocide. It is precisely because of such dehumanisation that the live-streamed horrors of the past two years made barely any impact on the Israeli public or on opinion among Israel’s supporters.

The truth is it is Rich and his fellow pro-Israel lobbyists who are the ones in the grip of an “ideology of pure hatred” – one that chooses to excuse the mass murder of children when they are Palestinian, blown to pieces and starved for months on end by the very state he identifies with.

Rich: “The whole basis of western liberal democracy, the belief in shared values within a diverse society, is endangered by these attacks.”

No, it’s not the Bondi Beach attack that has endangered “western liberal democracy”. That was irreversibly hollowed out when western leaders chose to actively collude in Israel’s genocide and defy the rulings of the world’s most respected legal institutions, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. Western liberal democracy was hollowed out when these leaders chose to side with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and prioritise his exterminationist agenda over the rule of law………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

The real emergency is a rampant anti-Palestinian racism that has utterly normalised genocide and been given institutional support across the West. It is anti-Palestinian racism, not “antisemitism”, that is the consequence of “two years of turning a blind eye, taking the easy path and ignoring the warnings”. Make no mistake: alongside the grief and the defiance, people with a conscience are angry at the two-year genocide endorsed by our governments. And they have every right to be. https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2025-12-16/bondi-beach-silence-critics-israel-genocide/