Dipak Kurmi
Bondi Beach has never been merely a geographical location on Australia’s eastern rim; it has long functioned as a social metaphor for the country itself. To Australians and to many who have lived and made lives there, Bondi symbolises an unguarded openness, a shared civic commons where difference dissolves into the routines of everyday civility. It is a place where social hierarchies flatten, where migrants and locals, worshippers and surfers, joggers and families inhabit the same physical and moral space without ceremony or fear. Such spaces matter not because they are extraordinary, but because they normalise coexistence. When terror and violence intrude into a place like Bondi, it is not only innocent lives that are lost; something more elemental is shaken, tied to the assumption that public life can be conducted without dread.
That rupture arrived on Sunday, December 14, when an attack during a Hanukkah gathering at Bondi Beach transformed a moment of communal celebration into one of horror. Several people were killed, many more were injured, and a space associated with ease and coexistence became, however briefly, a site of terror. Australian authorities have described the incident as a terrorist attack fuelled by antisemitic intent, a characterisation that places the violence squarely within a long and troubling history of religious hatred seeking expression through indiscriminate brutality. While investigations continue and details are still being pieced together, the cumulative meaning of the event is already unmistakable. Violence directed at a religious community, carried out in one of the nation’s most cherished public spaces, strikes at the core of plural civic life. That it occurred during Hanukkah, a festival centred on light, renewal and resilience in the face of persecution, deepens the sense of moral revulsion and symbolic injury.
Terrorism and extremism are often misdescribed as distorted forms of politics or belief, but such language grants them a seriousness they do not deserve. At their core, they are assaults on the very possibility of shared life, attempts to make fear the organising principle of public space. They aim not only to kill, but to alter how people see one another, to replace ease with suspicion and familiarity with vigilance. In that sense, the power of violence lies less in its immediate spectacle than in its capacity to linger, reshaping behaviour long after the physical damage has been repaired. When a beach, a market or a place of worship becomes associated with fear, the social contract that sustains everyday coexistence begins to fray.
This reflection is not offered from a position of distance. Having lived for many years in Melbourne and continuing to spend time in Australia, I have experienced first-hand the country’s quiet commitment to an open, everyday peace. For my family and me, that commitment has carried particular resonance, shaped as we are by memories of conflict in Kashmir, where the fragility of coexistence was learned not in theory but through loss. Australian decency is rarely performative or self-congratulatory. It is embedded in ordinary interactions on trams, in neighbourhoods, on beaches where pluralism is practised rather than proclaimed. Bondi, in this sense, is not exceptional; it is emblematic of a broader social ethic that treats diversity as unremarkable and shared space as a given.
It is precisely for this reason that violence at Bondi feels so dislocating. The beach is democratic and unpretentious, belonging to no one and everyone at once. It is sustained by an unspoken social contract of mutual regard, a trust that allows strangers to share proximity without anxiety. Families picnic alongside tourists, migrants pray or celebrate alongside joggers and swimmers, all bound by the assumption that public space is neutral ground. When violence intrudes into such a setting, it punctures more than physical safety. It unsettles the deeper belief that trust, rather than fear, can govern collective life. Public spaces like Bondi matter because they are where societies rehearse everyday coexistence, where difference becomes ordinary through repetition and habit. An attack in such a space is never random in its effects; its true damage lies in its capacity to make people withdraw from one another.
The Bondi attack must also be understood within a wider and deeply troubling global trend. Antisemitism, once assumed by many to have been relegated to the margins of history in liberal democracies, has re-emerged into public life. It does not always announce itself through organised movements or formal politics; more often, it advances through the slow normalisation of hostility, through rhetoric that dehumanises, and through the targeting of communities in spaces once considered unquestionably safe. Extremist violence feeds on such climates, drawing legitimacy from silence, equivocation or the reluctance to name hatred for what it is. When antisemitic intent is minimised or contextualised away, the conditions for further violence are quietly laid.
Australia has long taken pride, with considerable justification, in having kept large-scale political violence at the margins of its public life. Its strong institutions, high levels of social trust and the post–Port Arthur gun control regime introduced after the 1996 mass shooting in Tasmania have often been cited as safeguards against the patterns of violence seen elsewhere. That record remains significant, but it now feels newly fragile, not because it has failed, but because it must be actively renewed. The lesson of Bondi is not that openness was a mistake, but that openness requires constant moral and civic maintenance.
From an Indian vantage point, this vulnerability is painfully familiar. India has lived for decades with the reality that terrorism and communal violence are not solely about spectacular acts of destruction. Their most enduring damage lies in the slow erosion of civic trust. Once violence enters markets, buses, places of worship and public squares, everyday life itself becomes politicised. People begin to move differently, to gather cautiously, to see identity where they once saw neighbours. The aftermath of violence can be as consequential as the violence itself. Overreaction can hollow out public life and normalise exceptional measures; underreaction can embolden extremism. Most dangerously, the search for easy explanations rooted in faith, origin or identity can fracture societies far more deeply than the original act.
This is the wider debate into which Bondi must be situated. What is at stake is not only questions of policing or intelligence failures, important though they are. The deeper issue is normative and moral. How do open societies respond to terror without surrendering the values that make them open in the first place. How do they strengthen security without turning shared spaces into zones of suspicion. Bondi Beach confronts Australians, and others watching closely, with a difficult paradox. Openness is both a strength and a vulnerability. Beaches, parks, festivals and markets are powerful symbols of democratic life precisely because they are shared and accessible. Yet that same openness makes them targets for those who seek to disrupt coexistence.
As someone shaped by both Indian and Australian experiences, I am acutely aware that plural societies endure not because they eliminate difference, but because they domesticate it through restraint, mutual recognition and everyday decency. These achievements are fragile, sustained less by declarations than by repeated acts of civic courage: the refusal to generalise, the insistence on shared humanity, the quiet defence of common space. Australia’s response in the days ahead will matter well beyond its borders, not only in how it delivers justice or strengthens security, but in how it speaks about belonging, responsibility and restraint.
Bondi Beach will recover. The sand will be cleared, routines restored and life resumed, as it always does. Yet the deeper task is moral and political. It is to ensure that what Bondi represents, openness, ease and shared life, is not quietly surrendered in the name of safety. For Australia, as for India, the lesson is stark and shared. The defence of open societies does not lie in retreat or fear, but in the steady, everyday work of living together without dread, even when the light is challenged.
(The writer can be reached at dipaknewslive@gmail.com)
