Australia investigating potential foreign influence amid wave of antisemitic attacks
Twelve people arrested by counterterror task force don’t share antisemitic ideology expressed in their crimes, cops say, as Australia passes new, bipartisan hate crime laws
A wave of antisemitic attacks has roiled Australia, with a dozen arrests for vandalizing or setting homes, schools, and synagogues on fire since October and hundreds more charged in just over a year with crimes targeting Jews.
The attacks in areas where Jewish people live have provoked an outpouring of condemnation — and a fraught and complicated debate about who’s to blame. But in a rare moment of unity, Australia’s federal lawmakers on Thursday advanced hate crime laws almost unanimously.
“We want people who are engaged in antisemitic activities to be caught, to be charged and to be put in the clink,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters.
“This is a time of national crisis,” opposition leader Peter Dutton said.
Jewish organizations and hate researchers have recorded drastic spikes in hate-fueled incidents against Jews since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel — when some 3,000 terrorists invaded the Jewish state, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages — that triggered the subsequent war in the Gaza Strip.
Antisemitic episodes in the two biggest cities, Sydney and Melbourne — home to 85% of Australia’s Jewish population — have drawn the highest profile because they are severe, unusual and public.
Since November they’ve included:
- A trailer filled with explosives used in the mining industry and a list of Jewish targets discovered on Sydney’s outskirts;
- Firebombing of a Melbourne synagogue, with one person hurt. Defacement of another with Nazi symbols and pro-Palestine graffiti;
- A Jewish childcare center set on fire;
- Jewish schools in Sydney and Melbourne daubed with white supremacist graffiti;
- Three Jewish businesses torched;
- The former home of a prominent Jewish leader sprayed with graffiti;
- Cars defaced and windows smashed in areas where Jews live.
Counter-terrorism officials have arrested 12 people in connection with those crimes. Nearly 200 more have been charged since October 2023 in the state of New South Wales – where Sydney is located – with crimes linked to antisemitism, police say.
Who’s committing the crimes?
Investigators are examining whether criminals for hire were paid by foreign actors to carry out the recent attacks, leaders of the task force said in January. They did not specify what foreign interests they believed were responsible.
Days later, officials said the 12 arrested by the task force don’t share the antisemitic ideology expressed by their crimes, underscoring suggestions that the acts were orchestrated abroad.
The revelations were strange — but not unprecedented, analysts said.
“It’s not completely new, the connection between ideological groups and criminal groups,” said Matteo Vergani, a researcher of hate and extremism with Deakin University. “What’s new is that it usually happens in relation to larger scale terrorist attacks. So that is surprising.”
What’s behind the rise?
Lawmakers in speeches this week said the October 7 attacks by Hamas provoked an outburst of antisemitism at levels Australia had not registered before.
In tense public debates echoing those in the United States and elsewhere, right-leaning lawmakers and some Jewish leaders — among them Peter Wertheim from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry — have accused pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel demonstrators, particularly “progressives” and university students, he said, of fueling the crimes.
Demonstrators use opposition to Israel to target Jews and give antisemitism “a new social license,” he said.
What’s the government’s response?
Albanese’s center-left government on Thursday approved measures in the House of Representatives that will create new and bolstered hate crime offenses protecting a raft of characteristics, including race, religion and gender.
Amendments from the opposition include the imposition of mandatory prison terms for terrorism offenses — which the prime minister had rejected before —- and for displaying hate symbols.
The bill passed 117 votes to 13. It’s expected the Senate will pass it into law.
Other initiatives since last January include:
- Imposing sanctions on Terrorgram, an online white supremacist terrorism financing network;
- Criminalizing Nazi salutes;
- Making doxing — the sharing of personal information online — illegal after a list of Australian Jews was published on the internet in 2024;
- Appointing national envoys to address Islamophobia and antisemitism;
- Some states have passed their own laws; New South Wales also revealed proposed hate crime measures Thursday.
What’s different in Australia?
By all measures, anti-Jewish hate has spiked across the US, Europe and the United Kingdom since the October 2023 Hamas attack — even though many leaders have denounced the surge — prompting tens of thousands of Jews to leave Europe, according to some figures.
However, Australia’s situation had distinctive factors, analysts said. One was the claim that the primary agitators could be based abroad.
Another was the shock of such hate in a country far from the Middle East where a small community of Jews — fewer than 120,000 people, or about 0.5% of the population — has lived relatively peacefully, said Wertheim.
Australia’s restrictive gun laws might have led the perpetrators to commit vandalism crimes, Vergani said. Semiautomatic rifles were outlawed in Australia after a gun massacre in 1996.
But the episodes have also driven a fraught political climate ahead of a national election due by May 17.
Why are politicians debating it?
Antisemitic attacks have led national news and prompted daily questions for Albanese — and claims of inaction from his main political opponent, conservative Liberal party leader Dutton.
Meanwhile, Dutton’s detractors have lambasted him for politicizing the crimes — a charge he has rejected — and for urging a freeze on visas for Palestinians fleeing the war.
Vergani said Jewish people tell him they have not experienced such hatred in Australia before.
“They’ve never in their lives had this continuous feeling that something bigger could happen,” he said.
