People stand near flowers laid as a tribute at Bondi Beach to honor the victims of a mass shooting that targeted a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach on Sunday, in Sydney, Australia, Dec. 16, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Flavio Brancaleone

On Sunday, August 3, 2025, Sydney’s most recognizable landmark became the stage for one of the largest anti-Israel mobilizations Australia had witnessed.

New South Wales Police estimated that 90,000 people crossed the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Organizers claimed the number was far higher. Politicians, unionists, activists, and public figures celebrated what they called the “March for Humanity”. A giant portrait of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was visible near the front. Yet supporters praised the event as peaceful, inspiring, and historic.

That description avoided the harder question: what exactly was being legitimized?

Many marchers were undoubtedly motivated by concern for Palestinian civilians. But the spectacle was overwhelmingly directed against Israel. There was no comparable mass demand for Hamas to release the hostages, surrender power or end the war it began on October 7, 2023. The victims of Hamas were largely absent from this supposed display of universal humanity.

The march was a warning that hostility towards Israel had moved from the political fringes into the mainstream, and that many of those promoting it had become increasingly indifferent to the antisemitism and extremism traveling alongside it.

Extreme anti-Zionism was repeatedly normalized, rewarded and separated from its consequences. Slogans associated with violence were defended as activism. The demonization of Israel was presented as moral clarity. Jewish Australians who warned that anti-Zionism was spilling into antisemitism were accused of trying to silence criticism.

The message received by extremists was not necessarily that violence was authorized. It was that the target had been morally isolated.

Israel was portrayed not simply as a country whose government could be criticized, but as uniquely evil and illegitimate. Zionists were increasingly spoken of as people beyond sympathy or protection. Because most Australian Jews have a connection to Israel, the distinction between attacking “Zionists” and intimidating Jews became increasingly meaningless in daily life.

The figures show this was not imagined. A July 2026 J7 report found that antisemitic abuse and vandalism in Australia had risen by 246 percent since October 7, the steepest increase among major Jewish diaspora communities. The Australian Human Rights Commission also found that more than 90 percent of religious Jewish respondents in its university study reported experiencing racism.

The Bondi beach massacre during Hanukkah 2025, was not created by one march. It came after more than two years in which warning signs were rationalised, Jewish fear was minimized and public institutions repeatedly failed to draw clear boundaries between legitimate advocacy and the glorification of extremism.

Even the Government now accepts that the massacre must be examined in that broader context. The Royal Commission’s terms require it to investigate the drivers of antisemitism, ideological and religious extremism, and radicalization in the lead-up to the Bondi attack. We should not prejudge its findings, but neither should we pretend that the atmosphere preceding the attack is irrelevant.

The lesson is not that protest should be prohibited or that concern for Palestinians is illegitimate. The lesson is that participation carries responsibility.

Those who walked across the bridge cannot simply retreat behind their personal intentions. They helped make the event powerful. Politicians and organizations that endorsed it gave the movement respectability. Anyone who saw the image of Khamenei, witnessed the erasure of Hamas and the hostages, and continued marching made a choice not to let those things disturb their solidarity.

I wonder whether those who supported the march understood what their participation meant at the time. Did they realize they were not simply expressing concern for Gaza, but lending their numbers, reputations, and political authority to a movement in which hostility towards Israel, Zionists and increasingly Jews had become acceptable?

More importantly, do they understand what it means now?

After Bondi, after the documented rise in antisemitism, has there been any honest reflection? Do the politicians, organizations and public figures who celebrated the march recognize that Jewish warnings were not exaggerations, distractions or attempts to silence debate?

Or do they still believe that good intentions absolve them from examining what their support helped normalize?

A democratic society must protect protest. It must also retain the moral confidence to judge what is being promoted and the courage to reconsider when the consequences become impossible to ignore.

The Harbour Bridge march did not pull the trigger at Bondi. But it was part of a period in which hostility towards Israel became socially fashionable, anti-Zionist extremism was excused and Jewish warnings were dismissed.

The bridge was not the cause of Bondi. It was a warning. The question now is whether those who applauded it have finally understood what they were applauding.

Michael Gencher is Executive Director StandWithUs Australia.