The head of Australia’s domestic intelligence agency testified that anti-Jewish sentiment had become commonplace and went unaddressed prior to a deadly incident at Bondi Beach that claimed 15 lives during a Hanukkah gathering last December.
Michael Burgess, who serves as director-general of security for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, delivered these statements while appearing before the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, a panel established to examine circumstances that led to the Bondi incident.
“There is no doubt that the war in the Middle East invoked a range of emotions in Australia,” Burgess told the commission. “Some of those violent aspects … and those behaviors, including antisemitism that, in our view, were left unchecked, were therefore normalized and gave more permission for violence … and Jewish Australians were on the receiving end.”
The intelligence leader explained that anti-Jewish hostility grew more severe starting in late 2024, evolving from harassment and intimidation into physical assaults aimed at Jewish individuals and organizations.
“From late 2024,” he said, antisemitism escalated from “threatening, intimidating behavior to direct targeting of people, businesses, and places of worship.”
Burgess pointed to destructive acts and fire-bombing incidents against residences, educational facilities, houses of worship, and automobiles in the period leading up to the Bondi incident.
According to Burgess, the intelligence organization also concluded that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps orchestrated strikes against a kosher dining establishment in Sydney and Melbourne’s Adass Israel Synagogue.
“They use their network of proxies and agents to do their bidding, and that is to bring harm to Jewish people wherever they are in the world,” he said.
The security official revealed that his agency elevated Australia’s national terrorism alert status to “probable” in August 2024 following an assessment that terrorist incidents had become more likely.
The alert level had been previously reduced in November 2022 from “probable” to “possible,” which Burgess characterized as the second-lowest designation on the nation’s five-level threat system.
He explained that the prior reduction came after the collapse of the Islamic State group in the Middle East and a decrease in foreign fighter recruitment efforts.
