Bondi, Bell and blind spots

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has at last done the thing many said he must and others feared he would avoid: he has called a Royal Commission into antisemitism and the Bondi terror attack, handing the chair to former High Court justice Virginia Bell.

For Jewish Australians, it certainly does give us reassurance but it’s a test as well.

On December 14, 2025 at Bondi, a summer evening by the beach turned into a hunt. The victims were not random. They were targeted in a way that made sense only if you knew who they were. The attack confirmed a certain fear that had been building. Since October 7, 2023, many Jewish schools have operated behind heavier security, some synagogues have hired more guards, and families weighed up whether to take mezuzot off their front doors.

With this in mind, what’s interesting is that Albanese keeps coming back to the words “social cohesion”. He says this Royal Commission is about unity and bringing Australians together. Sounds comforting on the surface but for many Jews, “social cohesion” can end up as a polite way of avoiding a hard look at who has made Jews feel unsafe in their own streets.

Rallies about Gaza have often sounded, to Jewish ears, like rehearsals for a world where chants about intifada and wiping out Israel are just normal city noise.

The real test for this Royal Commission is whether it asks the hard question: how did we get from “never again” to “again, here, now” so fast, and how will Jewish life be openly safe again instead of hiding antisemitism behind warm words about cohesion?

Into that question walks Virginia Bell.

Her CV is technically impressive – Redfern Legal Centre, the NSW courts, then more than a decade on the Australian High Court. She is seen as intelligent and courteous, with a strong instinct for civil liberties like free speech and protest. In most eras that would be the obvious kind of judge you’d want. Now though, it feels more complicated.

In 2017, Bell helped decide a High Court case that struck down parts of Tasmania’s anti-protest laws for going too far against Australia’s protection of political speech. Since then, that ruling has been used to fight very strict protest limits, and it helped shape the legal climate that let a big pro-Palestine “March for Humanity” go ahead over the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

For many Jewish families, that march did not look like a careful test of free speech – it looked like thousands of people, some with signs or chants they experienced as threatening or even annihilationist.

In Melbourne, a Jewish couple I know personally were ushered away by police and accused of breaching the peace as they tried to enter a ticketed event at the Town Hall, while the path was cleared for the angry protesters outside. From this angle, it feels like a system that shields loud movements but hesitates when a small minority says: this scares us. How is that social cohesion?

On paper, the Royal Commission tells Bell to do three main things: map how widespread antisemitism is and what drives it, review how police and security agencies handle antisemitic threats, and go through the Bondi attack step by step to see what was known, missed or mishandled.

Inside the Jewish community, people read Bell’s appointment in very different ways. Some see a serious, experienced judge who might now feel pressure to show that her defence of rights also includes the right of Jews not to be hunted in their own cities. Others see her as a symbol of a legal culture that, in their experience, has protected marches shouting about intifada more quickly than it has protected the Jewish families who feel like the implied target. The same CV. Two very different readings.

Underneath everything is one word: trust. Not “is Bell smart” – she is. The question is whether Jews can trust that this process puts them, not institutions’ reputations, at the centre, and is willing to say plainly where police, universities, governments, media and community leaders looked away when Jews said this is getting dangerous.

A Royal Commission, with open hearings and a final report, could build that trust if it is used properly: victims speaking in their own voices, experts challenged, documents dragged into the light.

Whether that happens will depend on how hard the Jewish community pushes to be heard – and how far Bell is prepared to follow the evidence, even when it becomes awkward for those who appointed her.

Bell has been asked to report by December 14, 2026, exactly one year on from the Bondi attack – so this Royal Commission will go ahead whether we like its design or not.

The only real question now is whether Jewish Australians stay on the sidelines, or step in and refuse to be footnotes in a story that is supposed to be about their safety.

Sharonne Tidhar is a Melbourne writer.