The road back to a better Australia

Picture this: children walking out of school. One has a Magen David around her neck. Another has a Hebrew emblem on his blazer. No one asks them to tuck it in. No one tells them to cover it.

There are no cement bollards. No security guards. Their parents are waiting on the pavement, talking about the weekend. It is ordinary.

They are Australians and they are Jews, and they are not hiding either part. That is my vision for the future of Australia.

I have friends who removed mezuzot from their homes because they feared becoming targets. That kind of fear belongs in stories about Europe in the 1930s.

The antidote to antisemitism is not caution. It is pride. A stronger Jewish identity. The confidence to say: this is who I am.

To understand why that future feels distant, we need only look at what Australia was, and what it has become.

Jews have been part of this country’s story from the beginning. Australia was a democratic, peace-loving country that, on the whole, treated minorities well. Growing up here, I never sensed antisemitism in the way we experience it today.

Something changed, gradually, and particularly after October 7. It was not one thing, but several things together, each making the other worse.

There was the national broadcaster. I grew up watching ABC’s Behind the News (BTN) at school, like generations of Australian children. Following October 7, BTN was teaching children that Israel was intentionally withholding baby formula from babies in Gaza, cutting off electricity, that Israel was simply “the baddies”, full stop. Because most Jews support Zionist ideals and the existence of the State of Israel, it followed, in the logic of what was being broadcast, that all Jews must be horrible people. Australian children were learning this from a young age, watching something paid for by Australian taxpayers’ money. For many Australian children, this became their first and sometimes only exposure to the issue.

There was also radicalisation, both imported and homegrown. ASIO confirmed Iranian-linked operatives had been involved in attacks against Jewish targets on Australian soil. But the hardest thing to accept is that the young man who carried out the Bondi Beach attack was born in Australia. He grew up here. He was radicalised here. This is something Australia must reckon with. The warning signs were there. The writing had been on the wall and everyone had turned a blind eye.

And yet, inside the Bondi Pavilion where my son was celebrating his bar mitzvah that same evening, something else was happening.

Strangers ran in from the beach, some without shoes, some carrying children, some still in their swimming clothes. A Muslim family in hijabs ran in too. We closed the doors and waited. For two painstaking hours, Jews, Muslims and Christians were together in lockdown – Australians hiding from the same danger.

My Israeli husband welcomed the Muslim family to eat the kosher food laid out for the celebration. Later, people asked why we had let unknown Muslims into our venue. The answer was simple: they are Australians. Everyone who ran through that door was in danger. We were not enemies. We were people.

That is the seed for the future we can aspire to. The door that stayed open.

The road back to the Australia I want runs through education, media responsibility, government accountability and leadership willing to name what is happening rather than explain it away. None of this is simple, and none of it is beyond a country that has managed harder things.

Most Australians have never met a Jew. That gap in lived experience is where misinformation fills in. We punch well above our weight in this country – but we cannot punch our way out of an information war on our own. When antisemitism appears, it must be challenged early. Silence is one of the things that allowed the warning signs to be ignored.

Holocaust education must be taught properly in every Australian school. Governments must take warnings about radicalisation seriously. Institutions must be held accountable.

The Royal Commission gives Australia a chance to honestly examine what has happened, listen to the warnings that were ignored, and take meaningful steps to ensure it does not happen again.

We will not get back to the Australia we loved overnight. But we cannot stop until the mezuzah can return to the doorpost. Until a child can wear a Magen David on the train and no one looks twice. The distance between here and there is significant. But crossing it is the responsibility of everyone who understands what is at stake.

Sarah Vanunu is the JNF Israel emissary (shlichah) to Australia. She grew up in Sydney, made aliyah 20 years ago and returned on shlichut post October 7. A longer version of this article was originally published in the journal Prophecy: The Road Through.