Historian hopes Bondi wakes the West up

Historian Lord Andrew Roberts of Belgravia says he hopes the Bondi Beach massacre will be remembered as the moment the West woke up, and that Australia could lead the way in the struggle against antisemitism.

Roberts, a member of Britain’s House of Lords who chaired the October 7 Parliamentary Commission Report, was shown around Archer Park by Arsen Ostrovsky, who was shot in the December 14 attack.

“The fact that it’s so lovely and people are so happy and it’s a relaxed place makes it all the more obscene that somebody should have destroyed that,” Roberts told The AJN. “I’ve been to a lot of massacre sites, sadly, and this was more powerful because I heard directly from one person who was tied up in it.”

Roberts is in Australia to deliver the John Bonython Lecture at the Centre for Independent Studies’ 50th anniversary gala dinner.

He said future historians would be struck by how the world responded to October 7, calling it “the exact opposite of what you would imagine”.

“It has blamed the victims rather than the perpetrators, and that’s unusual in history,” he said.

The underlying causes, he said, were a 3000-year history of antisemitism – “a repulsive bacillus that exists in human nature” – and the fact that Israel’s conduct after October 7 had been misunderstood, deliberately so, “by some very bad actors who are far better at social media than philosemites are”.

The report he chaired had three aims, Roberts said. The first was memorialising the 1182 people killed on October 7.

“Very often you can have a name on a wall, but it doesn’t explain how somebody died, where they were, what they were, who they were,” he said. The second was to counter denial with a fully documented, footnoted and evidentiary record, “so that people in the future are not going to be able to get away with these lies”.

The third was to explain how the attack was carried out, drawing on Hamas’s own planning documents and footage. “It’s an unusual thing, I think, in warfare, to see quite the level of ferocity of killing frenzy that was unleashed,” he said.

He compared it to the 1937 Nanjing massacre, and said the brutality was deliberate.

Roberts was scathing about social media companies operating in Australia without local moderators, an issue raised at the Royal Commission, and pointed to Ostrovsky’s experience as an example.

“Within hours of his being shot in the head, it was alleged that he was acting,” he said.

Given the money social media companies make, he said, they should be compelled to employ compliance officers locally to take down lies and hoaxes. “Otherwise we are in danger of civilised norms just breaking down,” he said.

Asked how history would look back on this period, Roberts returned to Bondi.

“I hope that it will see it as a turning point, where people really do wake up to the dangers of what faces us all,” he said.

“On the assumption that the Royal Commission comes up with hard-hitting and impressive recommendations for action, and on the assumption that the politicians take those recommendations and put political capital behind them and actually ensure they are seen through, this could be a moment when we will be able to look to Australia as leading the way in telling us what can be done in the struggle against antisemitism. That’s my hope.”