Israel has urged Australia to act against a surging “epidemic of antisemitism” across the country as left-wing Prime Minister Anthony Albanese meekly pleaded his Labor government was doing all it could to combat attacks he belatedly acknowledged include terrorism targeting the local Jewish community.
A Jewish school and two other properties in Sydney were sprayed with antisemitic slurs, authorities said on Thursday, a day after police said they had foiled an attack involving explosives in a suburb of the nation’s biggest city, Reuters reports.
Police continue to investigate the latter after an abandoned caravan was found 11 days ago on Sydney’s outskirts filled with power gel explosives alongside the address of a Sydney synagogue.
The amount uncovered could create a bomb with a blast zone of around 130 feet, officers said.
Albanese has refused to say whether he was briefed on the same day even after months of antisemitic arson, window-smashing and graffiti in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia’s most populous cities, concentrated in the areas where many Jewish people live.
Children from the local Jewish community look at the tributes left outside the firebombed Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne on December 10, 2024. (WILLIAM WEST/AFP via Getty Images)
A woman holds an Israeli and Australian flag during a demonstration near the burnt Adass Israel Synagogue, calling for justice and unity in Melbourne. The Jewish community in Melbourne gathered for a rally near the Adass Israel Synagogue in Ripponlea following an arson attack by men dressed in black. (Michael Currie/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
On Thursday afternoon, ABC News reports the Labor leader defended his belated decision to convene a meeting of cabinet’s national security committee immediately after the terror plot was discovered.
“I don’t intend to go through operational matters, nor do we go through the detail of what’s discussed at cabinet meetings, or national cabinet meetings, or national security committee meetings,” Albanese said.
“I get ongoing briefings everyday, I get a national security briefing and indeed just this morning we had a full meeting of the national security committee.”
Albanese’s comments came after Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said the caravan discovery was “intolerable” and declared an “epidemic of antisemitism is spreading in Australia almost unchecked”.
“This joins a long list of antisemitic attacks in Australia, including setting fire to a childcare centre in Sydney, firebombing a synagogue in Melbourne, and many other antisemitic attacks,” Sa’ar said in a post on X.
“We expect the Australian government to do more to stop this disease!”
The Federal government has faced a barrage of domestic criticism it has been flat-footed in responding to antisemitism since last month, when the Adass Israel Synagogue was torched in an alleged terror plot, the ABC report notes.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said antisemitism had been allowed to fester in Australia since Hamas launched its terrorist attack on October 7.
He pointed to pro-Palestinian protests and months-long encampments on university campuses as moments where the prime minister should have intervened, but did not do so.
“It is deeply disturbing to see the circumstances now unfolding in New South Wales, but entirely predictable,” Dutton said.
“When the prime minister hasn’t stood up and been strong and renounced all of this activity over the last 15 months or so, of course it’s going to escalate.”
Peter Wertheim from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry said many in his community were anxious.
“We are angry because we are seeing that the Australia that we have been fortunate enough to live in ourselves, a land of freedom, fair-mindedness, civilized norms of behavior and the rule of law, is starting to slip away from us,” he said.
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