Growing up, I was part of a Jewish family that did not celebrate Christmas. Many of the Jewish families at our reform synagogue made secular gestures toward the holiday: gifts under a tree or a trip to see Santa at Macy’s. But with Christmas, my vaguely religious mother drew a line: no Rudolph, no carols, no Christmas goose. Let the goys have it. Our December would be Hanukkah. For my mother, these eight days would be a gentle shield against cultural erasure. In a time before Adam Sandler’s stylings turned Hanukkah into the most celebrated of our holidays in the goyishe world, this meant that in high school I was often asked about “Jewish Christmas.”

That’s part of what makes the Jewish massacre at Bondi beach so obscene: These antisemitic monsters chose Hanukkah, the holiday that has most connected Jewish culture to the world—my mother’s gentle shield against cultural erasure—to commit mass murder. As of this writing, the count is 15 dead and 27 injured. One of the injured is Ahmed al Ahmed, the hero of Bondi Beach who wrested a gun away from one of the shooters.

And now our world’s least principled actors are telling us, without any justification, why this happened and drawing actionable conclusions about it before anyone actually knows the motivations of the killers—namely, linking the violence to support of Palestine. The dead have one use to these people: They exist to justify Israel’s conquest of Gaza and the Palestinian blood that now will surely be shed. Facts be damned.

Sure enough, in the wake of Bondi Beach, Netanyahu set a land-speed record in finding a camera to stand in front of to blame the massacre on the Australian government’s recognizing a Palestinian state. The New York Times’ Bret Stephens published an article the next morning, while the rest of us were still in shock, titled “Bondi Beach Is What ‘Globalize the Intifada’ Looks Like.” David Frum did the same at The Atlantic with “The Intifada Comes to Bondi Beach.“

Don’t buy their bullshit. They are exploiting our dead. They are tying this tragedy to their own nationalist project for personal gain. They are relentless in their message that standing for Palestinian existence in the face of annihilation makes you party to this atrocity, which is an obscene lie.

Many Jews, including myself, have shouted from the hills that Judaism and Zionism are two separate sets of ideas. Judaism is a religion with 5,000 years of history. Zionism is an expansionist, supremacist ideology propping up a state that’s younger than Goldie Hawn. We have argued that it is, in fact, an act of antisemitism to conflate the two, with the implication that to be a faithful Jewish person translates into supporting the leveling of Gaza and the mass killings of children. Our opponents in this fight to define our culture and religion have been gargantuan: the might of both US political parties; organizations like AIPAC; a university system equating pro-Palestinian protest with antisemitism; and the David Ellison/Bari Weiss media offensive aimed nakedly at whitewashing Israel’s crimes.

Current Issue

April 2026 Issue

What the Bondi Beach massacre has shown is that these people and organizations have made life far more unsafe for Jews around the world by bonding our existence with theirs. If, indeed, the shooter was targeting Jewish people in response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, then these same ghouls have made a fear many Jews share come true: that people will seek retribution for the actions of war criminals like Benjamin Netanyahu.

Plus, there is a grander strategy to this. If we can believe that attacking Gaza and slaughtering families will actually prevent attacks like Bondi Beach—an utterly upside-down proposition—then we can sit silent as Netanyahu breaks the Gaza ceasefire, as he did over the weekend. That particular breaking of the ceasefire, according to Axios, even managed to piss off the White House. So Netanyahu must have been thrilled to go back to his happy place: blood libel against his political opponents. It seems like Netanyahu’s guiding political principle is to prove Voltaire’s line, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

While those fighting war crimes are being equated with killers, the Christian Zionists—and lest we forget, there are more Christian Zionists in the United States than all Jewish people combined—continue to be embraced by organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and promoted by opportunistic vultures like Bari Weiss. These are people—and they lurk throughout the corridors of Trump’s White House—who love Israel and hate Jews. To see Weiss turn CBS News, the house that Murrow built, into a toilet of Charlie Kirk conspiracies is to see someone willing to profane the public’s right to know in the service of foreign objectives. For Weiss, it’s a devil’s bargain. Better to rule in Hell.

Meanwhile, the names of the dead at Bondi Beach are being released. People should read every story. Learn about people like Holocaust survivor Alexander Kleytman, who died by bodily protecting his wife, Larisa, also a Holocaust survivor, from the bullets. Feel every tragedy. Do this for them. And do it for Palestinians, who aren’t nameless statistics but people worthy of their own recognition, their own narratives, and each one’s own singular memory.

Please remember that, above all else, there are two sides. One is committed to ending our world’s addiction to hatred, violence, and needless bloodshed. The other stands with a supremacist death cult, willing to justify their own crimes in the wake of every violent tragedy—tragedies that they egg on through their commitment to ethnic cleansing.

In the coming month, Netanyahu will undoubtedly tell the Hanukkah story as a fable of a plucky minority, miraculously victorious in battle against brutal invaders. He will drape his story with the bodies of Bondi Beach, saying that the Israelis are the Maccabees succeeding against all odds.

That’s a lie. The Maccabees of 2025 are those standing against a tide that comprises not only Israeli military might but the whole of the United States government, much of the mainstream media, and all of those who aim to exploit the tragedy of Bondi Beach. We, not they, are proud Maccabees, fighting against a different cultural erasure from what my mother feared.

It’s not Christians with tinsel and holiday cheer trying to erase who we are. It’s Zionists committed to branding our beautiful religion with the stain of genocide and preventing us from preventing a Bondi Beach from ever happening again.