8 hours ago
9
The Bondi attack was an unutterably cruel event, all the more horrifying for being ours, and we can’t stop ourselves saying so. It is a sword that fell on the necks of two sets of Australians. Yet again, young Australian Jews will be asking parents why they are hated, and that is heartbreaking. In a different sense, so will young Muslims.
During their apparent sojourn in a Campsie B&B, the alleged terrorists could not have been confident of their own survival, but they must have been confident in producing a reaction. It is a matter of civic pride that a Muslim man accosted one of the gunmen and took a weapon from him; a matter of a small yelp of praise and gratitude amid the cruelty.
In all this, there is a tendency to decide politicians are to blame. But the truth is that in cases of such egregious savagery as this, our democracy feels inadequate – that’s why the events are so scary. And there are good grounds to wonder why the father had so many legal firearms to call on. Yes, that should have rung a preventive bell. The reasonable Australian equation is that we can march for a general cause, we can argue for it, but we cannot physically punish those who oppose us.
Netanyahu, a man of politics I cannot agree with, blames the PM for backing a two-state solution. But when has a one-state solution ever worked, except by obliteration or disappearance of the second group? I find it hard to believe that two-state appeasement motivated the killers one way or another, and if I am wrong, then I apologise. We trip ourselves up in these situations. Events like Bondi are designed to do that. Pluralism does not countenance or condone spilled blood; it is far more along the lines of what Syrian Muslim Ahmed al Ahmed did in disarming one of the shooters for a time.
By the way, wasn’t it sinisterly interesting that one of the alleged shooters appeared to signal some people away, as if saying that he did not want to kill non-Jews? This was just another dubious and sinister aspect of the attack. Among the people killed was a former cop with an Irish name, Meagher. For the truth is, none of us can be fully shielded once terror speaks. We have to trust our neighbours. There is no peace by setting one group of society against another.
So, if the desperate opposition stoops low enough, they will now masquerade as the best hope of the Jewish community. But it will also be the grossest form of opportunism, for the awful truth is that the very multiplicity of our causes means we would prefer a society where police are not armed with rifles at every event of joy and camaraderie. That is the unspeakable irony.
Attacks such as these are designed to shut up debate; to drive one side to a rancour, and serve to make government more radical, while encouraging acts of radicalism from one’s own side so that the cauldron boils over, stoked from every side.
At the end of the day, would more police have been a remedy on the terrible evening? If a relative of mine had been threatened, I might say yes. Terror begs these questions as it does of so much of what we do. But after experiencing that extra protection, I might find them an excessive presence.
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Thomas Keneally is a novelist. He is the author of more than 40 books, including the Booker prize-winning novel Schindler’s Ark
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