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Burgess said the nature of antisemitic incidents moved beyond threats and harassment in 2024 to direct attacks on Jewish people and institutions.
By Shula Rosen
Australian intelligence chief Michael Burgess told a national commission that antisemitism in Australia had been “left unchecked” and became “normalized” before the Bondi Beach massacre that killed 15 people during a Chanukah celebration last December.
Burgess, director-general of security for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, said authorities raised the country’s terrorism threat level to “probable” in August 2024 after determining the likelihood of terrorist violence had increased.
The threat level had previously been lowered in November 2022 from “probable” to “possible,” which Burgess described as the second-safest category on Australia’s five-tier national scale.
He said the earlier downgrade followed the defeat of the Islamic State group in the Middle East and a decline in foreign fighter recruitment.
Speaking before the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, Burgess said Jewish Australians became increasingly exposed to violence as anti-Jewish hostility intensified across the country.
“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 commission was established to examine the circumstances leading up to the Bondi attack.
Burgess said the nature of antisemitic incidents changed beginning in late 2024, moving beyond threats and harassment to direct attacks on Jewish people and institutions.
“From late 2024,” he said, antisemitism escalated from “threatening, intimidating behavior to direct targeting of people, businesses, and places of worship.”
He cited vandalism and arson attacks involving homes, schools, synagogues, and vehicles in the months before the Bondi massacre.
Burgess also said the intelligence agency determined that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was behind attacks on a kosher restaurant 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.
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