One might say blame is the province of the failed. In the aftermath of the Bondi shooting in December 2025, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) was quick to suggest that the two gunmen had been harboured and trained in a country with known active terrorist cells only to step back this insinuation a few days later. The AFP Commissioner stated there was no evidence to suggest that the two gunmen had received training or conducted preparatory steps when they were recently in that country. Had the gunmen been radicalised during this recent overseas trip or had their intent to commit this unspeakably violent crime been formed long before their father-son trip to a country that has long mired its own people in a rollercoaster life of corruption and poverty, and has long held a reputation for being the most dangerous place for journalists and those who would stand by their right to free speech? We know the what and the how. What some of us cannot say, for fear of censure, yes, even in our own seemingly fiercely democratic and relatively free Australia is that deep down, we also know the why. Our current Prime Minister, in rejecting calls to mount a costly and politicised Royal Commission into the incident, expressed this white elephant, albeit in veiled political prose: ‘what we should do is go to the heart of what occurred and importantly, how do we make sure that this never happens again?’
Three white-appearing women host their salon in the courtyard of a well-known local cafe and they talk, loudly. Their voices carrying confidence, anger and incredulity. Their topic Hannukah and the matter of one of their teaching colleagues, who they agree speaks in an affected cloying snail-like manner and is apparently way too young to be put in this cushy position. In her north American accent, one of the blonde women is saying a lot of things about a lot of things, but as the group is unapologetically loud, all of us who are merely trying to enjoy our coffee under the glorious Sydney summer sun cannot escape hearing what we don’t necessarily want to hear in spite of our inward protestations. Coffee in peace with my phone in hand giggling at an Insta reel is what the doctor ordered, but no. The Bondi shooting, they say, is like 9/11 all over again. Is it though? They feel tense and judged wherever they go, people asking them if they are Jewish when they talk about Hannukah. It reminds me of the time one of my neighbours asked me if I was of Chinese heritage because of the Chinese New Year bunting my child had hung on our front door. How very dare my neighbour? [Of course, I didn’t feel tense, I was more like, of course it’s only natural they would enquire given the context. It seemed to show care and empathy]. Mind you, my family and I get asked at least once a week where we’re from – if people are being polite – , and a racist epithet or two gets hurled our way – when people just feel like having a go – even when we’re silent as the grave just trying to get home from work on Sydney’s infamously inefficient public transport. But of course, it’s not about this. What it’s about exactly, this feeling tense and judged and excluded and dehumanised at any random time, is something more. Perhaps, as lawyers might say, it’s about perspective and proportionality, or perspective on proportionality. Perhaps it’s to do with these women at the cafe/salon saying among other things, that Israel’s illegal settlements in the Palestine and the Gaza strip aren’t illegal, that the IDF is merely protecting Israel’s citizens, and that, more importantly, it is the birthright of every Jewish person to return and to settle in Israel because every Jewish person is ‘indigenous’ to Israel. And to Palestine? So much to unpack. So much…What about the Palestinians? Are they indigenous to Palestine? Or should Palestine be treated as the British empire treated Australia before the judicial system corrected its gigantic historical error of perspective, as terra nullius, land belonging to no one before the Jewish settlers came in droves after WWII? I suppose what we have to remember is that neither Palestine nor Australia were ever terra nullius. Only that in Australia’s case, it took an empathetic judge or two in the High Court to sway legal opinion and therefore change societal conversation to one which was more solidly grounded in fact, that Aboriginal Australians were in fact human beings who had lived in Australia for tens of thousands of year prior to the arrival of white colonial settlers. Much the same can be said for Palestine/Israel. The current Israeli government hasn’t been shy about calling Palestinians base animals. The challenge is not not to repeat history but to learn valuable lessons painfully got, so it seems. Many of the illegal settlers in Occupied Palestine had in fact never even been anywhere near the lands they’re occupying now until they decided it was time to claim their birthright as they’d been told by successive post-WWII Israeli governments. Not only that, many would have to go a very long way back indeed, perhaps even to the time of Jesus Christ to find any ancestors tying them to the ancient lands in which they claim indigeneity. Then we wonder why people might be driven to hatred and to commit hateful acts towards their fellows… Even when the answer is staring us right square in the proverbial? Perhaps some of us might have been used to the idea that the colonised and oppressed, having so little real power to effect lasting social change on their own and the capacity to get their kin and families out of the suffocating stranglehold of their oppressors, that they might have already got used to their hopeless circumstances and simply give up altogether. Alas, it ain’t so for once again, history is a great teacher. For in the human mind, hope springs eternal. And it seeks justice, it seeks dignity, it seeks recognition of its humanity even in the face of its oppressors’ continued countlesss and remorseless humiliations. So eventually its cries for justice, unheeded and dismissed for so long by the world, yes, shows up in hateful forms. In the recent Bondi shootings, the second worse recorded civilian gun violence in Australian modern history, it showed up in the form of a father and son who knew they were essentially committing suicide, and it’s a fair assumption that they expected to die by cop. They didn’t want to live. What they wanted was to send a message. A hateful message, to be sure, a criminal act without excuse or justification. But we’re not looking to discover excuse nor justification. We know the act was wrong. What we are looking for is an explanation. What is baffling is that we think it’s going to be much more esoteric and profound that it really is. But explanation, the why, isn’t so difficult to come by because it is palpable, it’s on the surface, and has been waiting to burst for a very long time.
So in asking ourselves who is to blame for the existence of this father and son duo and why this terrible act occurred, the mirror might be a good starting point. How did we, as a society, manage to grow and to foment such hatred in people who might have lived alongside anyone of us at any given time, just living day by day, anonymously and quietly, in our comparatively peaceful neighbourhoods? How did the ongoing spectacle that is the Israeli regime’s massacre, starvation and decimation of Palestinian people and lands and neighbourhoods, and the remorseless ongoing debasement of Palestinian lives foment such hatred? Can we really honestly say that we do not know who is to blame? More mirrors in the house, please.