By Geoffrey Clow | A Twinkling of the Soul Article | Updated 20 December 2025
I started writing this four days after fifteen people were murdered at a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach. A ten-year-old girl. An eighty-seven-year-old Holocaust survivor who died shielding his wife.
I couldn’t write fast enough.
In the time it took to finish this piece, the government adopted the full antisemitism envoy’s report. The IHRA definition was embedded across all levels of government. NSW Parliament was recalled to rush through protest bans. The architecture was locked in while I was still trying to describe it being built.
That speed is part of what I need to say.
Because something has already happened. Before the families buried their dead, before the wounded left hospital, the machinery of response was locked in. Laws. Definitions. Surveillance. Funding threats. Speech controls. Protest restrictions.
And I keep thinking about a question no one in power wants asked out loud.
Why does this tragedy trigger immediate fast-tracking of laws and expanded state powers, while the mass killing of Palestinians barely registers as a reason to pause, reflect, or restrain anything at all?
This piece is about how grief is differentially mobilised to expand state power, and what that reveals about whose lives count politically. It is about the machinery being built, who is building it, and what it may be used for long after the flowers at Bondi have wilted.
This is not about ranking grief. It is about how grief gets used.
On Sunday night I was scrolling X. Bondi footage, then Gaza footage, then Bondi, then Gaza. Fifteen dead on a beach. Forty-three dead under rubble the same day. One will reshape Australian law. The other won’t make the evening news.
I don’t know how to hold that. I don’t think we’re supposed to be able to. I think the whole machinery of media and politics is designed so we never have to.
But I kept scrolling. And I couldn’t look away from either.
Before You Say It
I know what’s coming.
I’ll be called antisemitic for writing this. I’ll be told the timing is indecent, that raising these questions while families are burying their dead is a moral failure. I’ll be told I’m exploiting grief, minimising tragedy, providing cover for hatred.
Let me meet that head-on.
Antisemitism is real. It is ancient, it is violent, and it killed fifteen people on Bondi Beach. Jewish Australians have every right to safety, to protection, to a political response that takes their security seriously. Nothing I write here diminishes that.
But something else is also real, and we have to be able to say it: the accusation of antisemitism has been systematically weaponised to silence criticism of Israel and suppress pro-Palestinian advocacy. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is documented by Jewish scholars, by Jewish organisations, by the very people the accusation claims to protect.
The Jewish Council of Australia, a community organisation representing non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews, has explicitly warned against conflating antisemitism with criticism of Israel. Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews Against the Occupation, and hundreds of Jewish academics globally have said the same. The weaponisation of antisemitism is not an antisemitic trope. It is an observed political strategy that Jewish people themselves are naming and opposing.
Here’s the bind: if you cannot criticise Israel without being called antisemitic, and you cannot name this pattern without being called antisemitic, then antisemitism becomes a word that protects power rather than people. It becomes a shield for impunity rather than a description of hatred.
That is not safety for Jewish people. That is the hollowing out of a word that should mean something.
So yes, the timing is uncomfortable. Four days after a massacre. But the laws being drafted won’t wait for a comfortable moment. The powers being assembled won’t pause for grief to pass. Frydenberg didn’t wait. Minns didn’t wait. Albanese didn’t wait. Yesterday, while funerals were being held, the full plan was adopted.
Silence now is not sensitivity. It is too late.
If the only acceptable time to question the expansion of state power is after it’s already locked in, then there is no acceptable time. That was the point. That’s how it worked.
So I’m writing this now. Not despite the grief. Because of what was done with it.
Before the Bodies Were Cold
The bodies were barely cold when Josh Frydenberg, former federal Treasurer and once considered the Liberal Party’s next prime minister before losing his seat in 2022, stood at the Bondi Pavilion memorial site and demanded Prime Minister Anthony Albanese accept “personal responsibility for the death of 15 innocent people, including a 10-year-old child.”
A memorial. For the dead. And he demanded political accountability for a terrorist attack.
And then the demands: ban pro-Palestinian protests, which he called “incubators of hate.” Prosecute people chanting “from the river to the sea.” Ban Hezbollah and Hamas flags. Tighter immigration checks. A royal commission.
Here’s what Frydenberg didn’t mention: there is no indication of any link between pro-Palestinian protests and the alleged shooters. None. Sajid Akram came to Australia from India in 1998, under then-Prime Minister John Howard’s conservative government. His son Naveed was born here. Police say they were motivated by Islamic State ideology.
Not Palestine solidarity. Not the protest movement. Not the people who have been marching against genocide for two years.
The demands being made have nothing to do with what actually happened. The people being targeted had nothing to do with the attack. The tragedy is the vehicle. The agenda existed before Sunday.
Within hours, NSW Premier Chris Minns, the Labor leader of New South Wales (the state where Bondi is located), announced plans to restrict protests following terrorism designations. Note that: this is Labor, not the conservative Coalition. The machinery is bipartisan.
He called them “extraordinary powers not seen before in any jurisdiction in the country,” and said it like it was a selling point.
Here’s what the laws will do: the police commissioner will be able to suspend the entire protest authorisation system after a terrorism incident. The declaration lasts two weeks and can be renewed for up to three months. It can be applied to specific locations or statewide. Parliament is being recalled before Christmas to rush this through.
Minns acknowledged the proposal has constitutional problems. Australia has an implied right to freedom of political communication. He said it would need to be “drafted in a particular way” to survive legal challenge. The NSW Supreme Court struck down similar laws as unconstitutional in October. He’s reintroducing them anyway.
The NSW Council for Civil Liberties, the state’s leading civil rights organisation, called it “reckless and damaging political opportunism,” noting that “connecting the horrific events of the Bondi attack in any way with recent protests continues the harmful trend of conflating criticism of the actions of the Government of Israel with antisemitism.”
Greens MP Sue Higginson, justice spokesperson for Australia’s third-largest political party, warned: “If the Government is hell bent on doing this they must at the very least make such powers temporary, otherwise this move will be read in history as disingenuous opportunism.”
When asked if the legislation was targeting pro-Palestine rallies, Minns said it would be a “blanket rule,” while specifically citing “protests about international events” as his concern.
This is political capture in real time. A politician admitting he’s designing laws to work around constitutional rights, using a massacre as justification, unable to say when those restrictions would end.
The Hierarchy of Grief
In Australia, Jewish people make up less than half a percent of the population. Palestinian Australians, Muslims, First Nations people, refugees, disabled people, the poor, the incarcerated: many experience systemic violence, exclusion, and state neglect every day.
Yet when Jewish Australians are threatened, governments move fast. When Palestinians are bombed, starved, displaced, or erased, governments mumble about complexity.
When antisemitism rises, it is framed as a threat to democracy itself. When Islamophobia rises alongside it, it gets a paragraph. When Indigenous people die in custody, it gets a report. When Gaza is flattened, it gets a disclaimer.
This is not accidental. It is political.
Fear Is the Most Useful Currency in Politics
After Bondi, the government didn’t just offer condolences or security measures. It reached for structure. Definitions. Databases. Monitoring. Funding levers. Visa screening. Protest controls. Media oversight.
This is the oldest move in the book.
A violent act occurs. Fear spikes. The public wants reassurance. Politicians promise action. And “action” quietly becomes expanded authority.
Here’s what makes this moment different: the concerns being raised now were raised in July, when the antisemitism envoy’s report was released, months before anyone was shot.
The Jewish Council of Australia called the funding approach “Trumpian,” warning it “echoes the authoritarian playbook used by figures like Donald Trump, using funding as a weapon to enforce ideological conformity.”
Academics warned that recommendations to withdraw funding from universities and cultural institutions could be “weaponised to censor opinion and silence dissent.”
The Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, the peak body representing Palestinian Australians, called the plan “a profound threat to Australian democracy, civil liberties, and the right to peaceful protest.”
Those weren’t fringe voices. They weren’t just pro-Palestinian activists. They were Jewish Australians, legal experts, and civil liberties organisations reading the same document and seeing the same danger.
Yesterday, the government adopted the plan in full. The concerns were noted and overridden. The attack didn’t create the policy agenda. It ended the debate.
This is not to say the attack created bad faith. It is to say it removed friction. The machinery was ready. The opposition was silenced. The moment arrived.
The Architecture of Silence
This is no longer proposal. This is policy.
Yesterday, the Albanese government adopted the full Segal report. Here is what that means in practice.
The IHRA definition of antisemitism, and why it matters.
At the heart of this machinery is a definition. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism is now embedded across all levels of Australian government. Understanding what this definition does, and doesn’t do, is essential.
The IHRA definition was drafted in 2004 by Kenneth Stern as a data-collection tool for monitoring antisemitism in Europe. It was never designed to be a legal instrument or a speech code. The core definition is brief and largely uncontroversial: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.”
The problem is the eleven “contemporary examples” attached to it. Several of those examples relate specifically to Israel:
- Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination (e.g., claiming Israel’s existence is a racist endeavour)
- Applying double standards to Israel
- Using symbols associated with classic antisemitism to characterise Israel
- Comparing Israeli policy to that of the Nazis
- Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the State of Israel
Under these examples, calling Israel an apartheid state, as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Israeli organisation B’Tselem have done, could potentially be classified as antisemitic. Criticising Israel’s policies more vocally than you criticise other nations could be classified as antisemitic. Describing Zionism as a settler-colonial project, a mainstream academic position, could be classified as antisemitic.
This is not a neutral tool. It is a political instrument that risks blurring the line between bigotry against Jewish people and criticism of a state.
The man who wrote it says so himself.
Kenneth Stern has spent years publicly warning against exactly this use. He has testified to the US Congress that weaponising the definition to suppress campus criticism of Israel threatens academic freedom and “chills speech.” In 2024, over 1,200 Jewish academics signed an open letter opposing the definition’s adoption in US federal law, calling it “a dangerous conflation of criticism of Israel with antisemitism.”
When asked about Stern’s concerns, Special Envoy Jillian Segal told ABC Radio: “The train has moved on, if I might put it that way, and Kenneth Stern has been left behind.”
The author of the definition says it’s being misused. The government’s response: he’s irrelevant now.
A credible alternative exists, and was rejected.
In 2021, over 200 scholars of antisemitism, the Holocaust, and Jewish history created the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism specifically because they saw the IHRA definition being weaponised. The Jerusalem Declaration explicitly states:
- Criticising or opposing Zionism as a form of nationalism is not antisemitic
- Evidence-based criticism of Israel as a state, including its policies and founding principles, is not antisemitic
- Boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) are legitimate forms of political protest and not inherently antisemitic
- Comparing Israel’s policies to other historical cases, including settler-colonialism or apartheid, is not antisemitic
This is not a fringe document. It was drafted by leading scholars in the field, people who have devoted their careers to studying antisemitism and the Holocaust. It provides a rigorous definition that protects Jewish people from genuine hatred while preserving the right to criticise a state.
The Australian government could have adopted this definition. It chose not to. It chose the definition that conflates criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews.
That was a political choice. It tells you what this is actually about.
The person wielding this definition.
It matters who gets to define antisemitism for a nation. So look at who Jillian Segal actually is.
Segal was appointed as Australia’s first Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism in July 2024, a position created after sustained lobbying by pro-Israel communal organisations following October 7, 2023. The role was designed to address rising antisemitism. But look at who was chosen to fill it.
She has been Chair of the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce since 2015. She is the immediate past president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the main representative body for Australia’s Jewish community, which has historically taken a strong pro-Israel stance. She sits on the international board of Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, a Tel Aviv-based research institution.
In November 2023, as Israel was bombing Gaza, Segal co-signed a statement condemning Foreign Minister Penny Wong, Australia’s top diplomat, and the Labor government for calling on Israel to “cease the attacking of hospitals.” She opposed Australia’s support for a UN resolution calling for a ceasefire.
Read that again. The person now defining antisemitism for Australia publicly condemned the government for asking Israel to stop bombing hospitals.
Her husband, John Roth, through their family trust, donated $50,000 to Advance Australia in the 2023-24 financial year, the equal second-largest donation to the organisation that year. Advance is a far-right political lobby group, backed by wealthy conservative donors, that led the successful campaign to defeat the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum. When this was reported, Segal claimed her husband’s politics are separate from her own.
And when Nazis prominently attended a protest march in Melbourne on 31 August this year, Segal, the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, made no public comment or condemnation.
This is the person deciding what counts as antisemitism in Australia. This is the person whose definition is now embedded across all levels of government. This is the person who dismissed the concerns of the man who actually wrote the IHRA definition by saying “the train has moved on.”
The conflict of interest is not subtle. It is structural. The person defining antisemitism is an Israel advocate who condemned calls to stop bombing hospitals, whose family funds far-right politics, and who stayed silent when actual Nazis marched in Australian streets.
Whatever the stated intent, the effect is to protect Israel from criticism. The architecture to do so is now law.
What else is in the machinery:
Visa screening for beliefs. The Home Affairs department will assess visa applicants for “antisemitic views or affiliations.” Under the IHRA definition now adopted as policy, this creates the potential for criticism of Israel to be flagged. A Palestinian academic, a human rights researcher, a journalist who covered Gaza: all could potentially face additional scrutiny at the border for their documented views on a documented genocide.
Media monitoring for “false or distorted narratives.” The report mandates mechanisms to monitor media coverage and prevent narratives deemed false or distorted. Who decides what’s distorted? When every major human rights organisation on earth is documenting genocide in Gaza, and the Australian government refuses to use the word, which narrative is “false”?
Funding as a weapon. Universities, cultural institutions, and individual researchers face defunding if they “facilitate, enable or fail to act against antisemitism.” The special envoy’s office can terminate public grants where recipients engage in what it defines as “antisemitic speech or actions.” This isn’t about protecting Jewish students. It’s about controlling what can be taught, researched, and said.
Protest restrictions. NSW is recalling parliament before Christmas to rush through laws giving the police commissioner power to suspend the entire protest authorisation system after a terrorism incident, for two weeks initially, renewable up to three months, applicable statewide. The NSW Supreme Court struck down similar laws as unconstitutional in October. Minns is reintroducing them anyway, calling them “extraordinary powers not seen before in any jurisdiction in the country.” The machinery to shut down Palestine solidarity protests has been built in plain sight, using Jewish grief as cover.
Charity sanctions. Organisations that “promote antisemitic speakers” or “engage in conduct that promotes antisemitism” face losing their deductible gift recipient status. Under the IHRA definition, hosting a Palestinian speaker or platforming criticism of Israeli policy could potentially qualify.
This is not protection. This is infrastructure for control.
The Playbook
This playbook is not new. It has been used before, and we know where it leads.
After September 11, the United States passed the Patriot Act within weeks. Expanded surveillance. Secret courts. Indefinite detention. The powers were supposed to be temporary. They became permanent. Twenty years later, the infrastructure remains, now used for purposes far beyond terrorism.
Australia followed. ASIO’s powers expanded. Metadata retention became law. Journalists faced prosecution for reporting on national security matters. Each expansion was justified by emergency. None were rolled back when the emergency passed.
After the Christchurch massacre, New Zealand rushed through gun reforms, reasonable, many argued. But also expanded powers to classify content as “objectionable,” criminalising its distribution. The definition has since been contested in cases involving protest material and political speech.
The pattern is consistent:
A horrific act occurs. The public is traumatised and fearful. Politicians promise swift action. Laws are drafted quickly, debated minimally. Powers are granted that exceed the specific threat. Those powers are never returned.
The Bondi shooting was used to complete this pattern. The architecture is now locked in.
Whose Laws Are These?
Let me step back and say something plainly.
A foreign state appears to be shaping Australian domestic law to protect itself from criticism.
That sentence should be extraordinary. It should provoke outrage across the political spectrum. And yet here we are, watching it happen in real time, documented in official reports and press conferences, and most Australians either don’t see it or feel they cannot say it.
The IHRA definition being embedded across Australian government is not an Australian initiative. It is part of a coordinated global push. The same definition has been adopted or is being pushed in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, France, everywhere Israel faces significant criticism. The same pattern: local tragedy or rising tensions, followed by rapid adoption of speech-restricting frameworks that happen to insulate Israel from accountability.
The Special Envoy position was created after lobbying by pro-Israel organisations. The person appointed to fill it chairs the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce, condemned calls for Israel to stop bombing hospitals, and sits on the board of an Israeli research institution. Her report, now adopted in full, would give her office the power to defund universities, sanction charities, screen visa applicants for their views on Israel, and monitor media for “false narratives” about a genocide that every major human rights body says is happening.
This is not conspiracy. This is lobbying. This is how power works when it has enough money, enough institutional access, and enough political cover.
And the political cover is grief. Real grief. Legitimate grief. Grief for fifteen people murdered on a beach.
But grief does not give a foreign state the right to shape another nation’s laws. Grief does not suspend democratic scrutiny. Grief does not mean we stop asking who benefits from the machinery being built.
Israel is not Australia’s government. Israeli interests are not automatically Australian interests. The protection of Israel from international criticism is not a legitimate goal of Australian domestic policy. And yet that is exactly what this architecture appears designed to achieve.
What does it mean when a democracy outsources its definition of acceptable speech to a foreign state’s advocacy apparatus?
What does it mean when criticising that state’s documented war crimes becomes, by legal definition, a form of bigotry?
What does it mean when the institutions meant to protect us, universities, media, civil society, are threatened with defunding if they say what the evidence shows?
It means we are no longer talking about antisemitism. We are talking about sovereignty. We are talking about whether Australia is a country that makes its own laws based on its own values, or a country that imports legal frameworks designed to serve another nation’s strategic interests.
That question should trouble everyone, left, right, and centre. It should trouble Jewish Australians who did not ask for their grief to be converted into this. It should trouble anyone who believes that democracy requires the right to dissent, to protest, to name what is happening in the world without fear of institutional punishment.
This is not about being anti-Israel. It is about being pro-Australia. Pro-democracy. Pro-truth.
And right now, all three are under threat.
Antisemitism Is Real. So Is Its Political Use
Antisemitism is real. It has a long, violent history. It killed fifteen people on Bondi Beach. Jewish people have every right to safety, dignity, and protection.
But something else is also real, and pretending otherwise is dishonest.
When antisemitism becomes a central organising principle of politics, rather than a specific harm to be addressed, it becomes useful to power.
Useful to governments that want to criminalise protest. Useful to institutions that want to discipline universities. Useful to states that want to conflate criticism with hatred. Useful to anyone who benefits when debate collapses into fear.
This does not require antisemitism to be invented. It only requires it to be foregrounded, amplified, and weaponised.
That is exactly what has happened.
The Genocide That Cannot Be Named
Here is a list of institutions that have accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza:
The United Nations.
The International Court of Justice (which ordered provisional measures under the Genocide Convention).
The International Association of Genocide Scholars.
B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organisation.
Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, also Israeli.
Amnesty International. Doctors Without Borders.
Human Rights Watch.
The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights.
The International Federation for Human Rights.
The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, named after Raphael Lemkin, the man who coined the word “genocide.”
Here is the list of major independent humanitarian or human rights institutions that say Israel is not committing genocide:
There are none.
This is not a contested debate between experts. This is institutional consensus being treated as opinion, because acknowledging it would require action.
When the Australian government talks about “false or distorted narratives,” this is the narrative they mean. The documented, evidenced, legally argued reality of what is happening in Gaza, classified as distortion because it is politically inconvenient.
The “both sides” framing exists to manufacture permission for inaction. There are not two sides to this. There is overwhelming institutional consensus, and there is denial.
Palestine and the Limits of Acceptable Grief
If fifteen Jewish Australians are killed, it is a national emergency. If tens of thousands of Palestinians are killed, it is a geopolitical issue.
If Jewish students feel unsafe, universities face funding cuts. If Palestinian students watch their families die on livestream, they are told to be civil.
If antisemitism is named, laws move. If genocide is named by every major human rights body on earth, governments hedge.
That tells us something about whose lives are considered destabilising enough to matter.
On March 16, 2025
On March 16 of this year, Reuters published an article: “Israeli strikes kill 15 people in Gaza over past day, Palestinian medics say.”
Fifteen people.
Does anyone remember that day? Does it stand out in your memory as significant?
I don’t remember it. I have no idea who those people were. I never saw their names. I never saw their pictures. No western officials denounced their deaths. No media gave wall-to-wall coverage.
So I forgot.
I will never forget Bondi. Someone could mention it to me thirty years from now and I’ll know exactly what they’re talking about. My society made an infinitely bigger deal about fifteen deaths in Sydney than fifteen deaths in Gaza. So Bondi will stick.
And if I’m honest, I made a bigger deal of it too. I’ve felt sick about the shooting since Sunday. Partly because of what’s being done with it politically. But also because I felt genuine grief for those who died and their families.
Even after years of trying to notice how my society normalises the killing of Palestinians, I’m still caught in it. I felt Bondi in my chest. I don’t remember March 16.
I wasn’t born this way. This was learned. If I could see the world through fresh eyes, it would never occur to me that fifteen people murdered in Australia should matter more than fifteen people murdered in Palestine.
Palestinians don’t love their families less than Australians do.
Who Pays the Price?
Not Jewish people. Not Palestinians.
Everyone.
Because when protest becomes “intimidation,” workers lose the right to strike. When universities are policed for ideology, research dies. When media is monitored for “false narratives,” truth narrows. When visas are screened for beliefs, dissent becomes suspicious. When funding is used as a weapon, compliance replaces conscience.
This is how democracies rot. Quietly. Respectably. With the language of safety and cohesion.
This Isn't Protection. It's Control.
Real protection looks like confronting antisemitism without criminalising dissent.
Real protection looks like opposing Islamophobia with the same urgency.
Real protection looks like allowing people to speak, protest, grieve, and criticise power without fear.
What we watched instead was fear being laundered into policy.
Not because fifteen deaths don’t matter.
But because fear matters more to power than consistency ever will.
And it happened while we were still crying.
Refuse the Chill
If protest is criminalised, what remains?
This is the question they don’t want asked, because once it’s spoken, people start answering it.
The laws being passed acknowledge their own fragility. Minns admitted the protest restrictions need to be “drafted in a particular way” to survive constitutional challenge. The NSW Supreme Court struck down similar laws in October. The court has confirmed it can hear urgent applications, including protest matters, every day of the year. This architecture is being built on contested ground.
It will be challenged. In courts. In the streets. In exactly the spaces they are trying to close.
The purpose of these laws is not enforcement. It is silence. They work by making people afraid to speak before anyone is charged. The chilling effect is the point. The goal is not to prosecute every protester. The goal is to make you wonder if you’ll be prosecuted, and stay home.
The response is to refuse the chill.
Document. Bear witness. Name what is happening while it is happening. Write it down. Screenshot it. Send it to journalists. Create the record that will be needed later.
Support the legal challenges. Support the civil liberties organisations preparing to fight these laws in court. Support the journalists who are still reporting what’s actually happening.
And support the Jewish organisations who are also opposing this: the Jewish Council of Australia, Jewish Voice for Peace, Independent Jewish Voices, the scholars who see their community’s trauma being weaponised and are saying so. These are Jewish Australians standing against this machinery. They are not fringe. They are not self-hating. They are refusing to let their grief be converted into someone else’s power.
When they tell you that opposing these laws is antisemitic, remember: Jewish people are leading that opposition. When they tell you that protest endangers Jewish safety, remember: the protesters had nothing to do with the attack.
Do not let them purchase your silence with your own grief. Do not let them convert your horror at fifteen deaths into permission for what comes next.
The circle of compassion is not widened by narrowing who is allowed to speak. It is widened by insisting, even against every pressure to stay quiet, that Palestinian lives matter as much as Israeli lives, that Australian democracy is not for sale, and that grief is not a blank cheque for authoritarianism.
They are counting on exhaustion. They are counting on fear. They are counting on decent people looking away because the fight feels too hard and the costs feel too high.
Don’t look away.
What We Must Become
Sunday was an awful, dark day. Hundreds of lives directly devastated. Thousands more indirectly. The trauma will reverberate through families for generations. The sorrow is palpable, in the streets, at the supermarket, in the silence of strangers.
And this is appropriate. This is what fifteen deaths ought to feel like. This is what mass murder feels like when it hasn’t been normalised for you.
That’s the measure.
Every massacre of Palestinians should shake the earth the way Bondi has. Every death toll from Gaza should hit us the way the death toll from Sydney did. Feel how hard this hits, and then translate it to Gaza. This is happening there every day.
Einstein wrote, toward the end of his life:
“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty.”
Humanity won’t survive unless we grow into this. We are too destructive. We hurt each other and our environment too much. We destroy everything around us trying to shore up wealth and resources for ourselves, and it is not sustainable.
We have to become better. More caring. Less susceptible to propaganda. A society driven by truth and compassion rather than lies and profit.
That is the only way through this.
Where This Ends
When the state decides which grief counts, it eventually decides which voices don’t.
And it never stops where it starts.
Author's Note: On Trauma and Gaslighting
I work as a trauma-informed counsellor. I wasn’t going to write this part. But fuck it.
I’m tired.
I’m tired of watching Palestinian families dig their children out of rubble with their bare hands, on my phone, while I’m making coffee, and then being told that my horror at this is the problem. That naming it is hate. That the people documenting their own extermination are the threat to social cohesion.
I’m tired of watching Jewish Australians carry genuine, legitimate, bone-deep fear, fear that just got validated in the worst possible way, and then watching that fear get strip-mined by politicians who don’t give a shit about them. Turned into talking points. Converted into laws that will be used against everyone, including the Jewish people speaking out against this, who are being erased from the conversation like they don’t exist.
I’m tired of the gaslighting.
That’s what this is. Let’s call it what it is.
Gaslighting is when someone makes you doubt your own perception. When the thing you saw with your own eyes gets renarrated until you start wondering if you’re the crazy one.
You watched Frydenberg stand at a memorial, a fucking memorial, and demand the Prime Minister accept personal responsibility for a terrorist attack, then pivot to banning protests that had nothing to do with the shooters.
You watched Chris Minns openly admit he’s designing laws to get around constitutional rights.
You watched the Australian government adopt sweeping surveillance and censorship powers while families were still identifying bodies.
You saw it. It happened. And now you’re being told: this is protection. This is safety. This is keeping us together.
Bullshit.
You are not crazy. Your perception is not faulty. You are watching institutional abuse happen in real time, dressed up in the language of care.
I’ve sat with survivors of coercive control for years. I know what it looks like when someone is told their reality isn’t real. When their pain is reframed as the problem. When speaking up gets labelled as the abuse. When the system that’s supposed to protect them becomes the thing that harms them.
This is that. At scale. To all of us.
Palestinian Australians are being told their grief is dangerous. Jewish Australians are being told their safety requires everyone’s silence. The rest of us are being told that noticing the contradiction makes us antisemitic, or crazy, or both.
And the people who see through it, who are saying wait, this doesn’t add up, are being made to feel like they’re alone. Like no one else sees it. Like maybe they’re the problem.
You’re not alone. I see it too.
The trauma of this moment isn’t just the deaths. It’s the aftermath. It’s the suffocation of being unable to speak plainly about what is happening. It’s the loneliness of seeing something clearly and being told you’re imagining it.
Trauma healing requires truth. It requires being able to say: this happened. It requires someone to say back: yes, it did. I saw it too.
That’s what this piece is trying to do. Bear witness. Say the thing. Refuse to let the gaslighting settle into accepted reality.
If you’re struggling, with the news, with the grief, with the disorientation of watching the world go mad while everyone pretends it’s fine, your response isn’t too much. It’s the right amount for what’s happening.
And if you need someone to talk to, I’m here. That’s what Twinkling of the Soul is for. Survivors supporting survivors. People who’ve been through the machinery of institutional abuse and come out the other side.
You’re not crazy. You’re awake.
That’s harder. But it’s better.
— Geoffrey
Whose Deaths Matter Enough to Change the Law?
By Geoffrey Clow | A Twinkling of the Soul Article | Updated 20 December 2025
I started writing this four days after fifteen people were murdered at a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach. A ten-year-old girl. An eighty-seven-year-old Holocaust survivor who died shielding his wife.
I couldn’t write fast enough.
In the time it took to finish this piece, the government adopted the full antisemitism envoy’s report. The IHRA definition was embedded across all levels of government. NSW Parliament was recalled to rush through protest bans. The architecture was locked in while I was still trying to describe it being built.
That speed is part of what I need to say.
Because something has already happened. Before the families buried their dead, before the wounded left hospital, the machinery of response was locked in. Laws. Definitions. Surveillance. Funding threats. Speech controls. Protest restrictions.
And I keep thinking about a question no one in power wants asked out loud.
Why does this tragedy trigger immediate fast-tracking of laws and expanded state powers, while the mass killing of Palestinians barely registers as a reason to pause, reflect, or restrain anything at all?
This piece is about how grief is differentially mobilised to expand state power, and what that reveals about whose lives count politically. It is about the machinery being built, who is building it, and what it may be used for long after the flowers at Bondi have wilted.
This is not about ranking grief. It is about how grief gets used.
On Sunday night I was scrolling X. Bondi footage, then Gaza footage, then Bondi, then Gaza. Fifteen dead on a beach. Forty-three dead under rubble the same day. One will reshape Australian law. The other won’t make the evening news.
I don’t know how to hold that. I don’t think we’re supposed to be able to. I think the whole machinery of media and politics is designed so we never have to.
But I kept scrolling. And I couldn’t look away from either.
What You Will Find IN Ths Article
Before You Say It
I know what’s coming.
I’ll be called antisemitic for writing this. I’ll be told the timing is indecent, that raising these questions while families are burying their dead is a moral failure. I’ll be told I’m exploiting grief, minimising tragedy, providing cover for hatred.
Let me meet that head-on.
Antisemitism is real. It is ancient, it is violent, and it killed fifteen people on Bondi Beach. Jewish Australians have every right to safety, to protection, to a political response that takes their security seriously. Nothing I write here diminishes that.
But something else is also real, and we have to be able to say it: the accusation of antisemitism has been systematically weaponised to silence criticism of Israel and suppress pro-Palestinian advocacy. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is documented by Jewish scholars, by Jewish organisations, by the very people the accusation claims to protect.
The Jewish Council of Australia, a community organisation representing non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews, has explicitly warned against conflating antisemitism with criticism of Israel. Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews Against the Occupation, and hundreds of Jewish academics globally have said the same. The weaponisation of antisemitism is not an antisemitic trope. It is an observed political strategy that Jewish people themselves are naming and opposing.
Here’s the bind: if you cannot criticise Israel without being called antisemitic, and you cannot name this pattern without being called antisemitic, then antisemitism becomes a word that protects power rather than people. It becomes a shield for impunity rather than a description of hatred.
That is not safety for Jewish people. That is the hollowing out of a word that should mean something.
So yes, the timing is uncomfortable. Four days after a massacre. But the laws being drafted won’t wait for a comfortable moment. The powers being assembled won’t pause for grief to pass. Frydenberg didn’t wait. Minns didn’t wait. Albanese didn’t wait. Yesterday, while funerals were being held, the full plan was adopted.
Silence now is not sensitivity. It is too late.
If the only acceptable time to question the expansion of state power is after it’s already locked in, then there is no acceptable time. That was the point. That’s how it worked.
So I’m writing this now. Not despite the grief. Because of what was done with it.
Before the Bodies Were Cold
The bodies were barely cold when Josh Frydenberg, former federal Treasurer and once considered the Liberal Party’s next prime minister before losing his seat in 2022, stood at the Bondi Pavilion memorial site and demanded Prime Minister Anthony Albanese accept “personal responsibility for the death of 15 innocent people, including a 10-year-old child.”
A memorial. For the dead. And he demanded political accountability for a terrorist attack.
And then the demands: ban pro-Palestinian protests, which he called “incubators of hate.” Prosecute people chanting “from the river to the sea.” Ban Hezbollah and Hamas flags. Tighter immigration checks. A royal commission.
Here’s what Frydenberg didn’t mention: there is no indication of any link between pro-Palestinian protests and the alleged shooters. None. Sajid Akram came to Australia from India in 1998, under then-Prime Minister John Howard’s conservative government. His son Naveed was born here. Police say they were motivated by Islamic State ideology.
Not Palestine solidarity. Not the protest movement. Not the people who have been marching against genocide for two years.
The demands being made have nothing to do with what actually happened. The people being targeted had nothing to do with the attack. The tragedy is the vehicle. The agenda existed before Sunday.
Within hours, NSW Premier Chris Minns, the Labor leader of New South Wales (the state where Bondi is located), announced plans to restrict protests following terrorism designations. Note that: this is Labor, not the conservative Coalition. The machinery is bipartisan.
He called them “extraordinary powers not seen before in any jurisdiction in the country,” and said it like it was a selling point.
Here’s what the laws will do: the police commissioner will be able to suspend the entire protest authorisation system after a terrorism incident. The declaration lasts two weeks and can be renewed for up to three months. It can be applied to specific locations or statewide. Parliament is being recalled before Christmas to rush this through.
Minns acknowledged the proposal has constitutional problems. Australia has an implied right to freedom of political communication. He said it would need to be “drafted in a particular way” to survive legal challenge. The NSW Supreme Court struck down similar laws as unconstitutional in October. He’s reintroducing them anyway.
The NSW Council for Civil Liberties, the state’s leading civil rights organisation, called it “reckless and damaging political opportunism,” noting that “connecting the horrific events of the Bondi attack in any way with recent protests continues the harmful trend of conflating criticism of the actions of the Government of Israel with antisemitism.”
Greens MP Sue Higginson, justice spokesperson for Australia’s third-largest political party, warned: “If the Government is hell bent on doing this they must at the very least make such powers temporary, otherwise this move will be read in history as disingenuous opportunism.”
When asked if the legislation was targeting pro-Palestine rallies, Minns said it would be a “blanket rule,” while specifically citing “protests about international events” as his concern.
This is political capture in real time. A politician admitting he’s designing laws to work around constitutional rights, using a massacre as justification, unable to say when those restrictions would end.
The Hierarchy of Grief
In Australia, Jewish people make up less than half a percent of the population. Palestinian Australians, Muslims, First Nations people, refugees, disabled people, the poor, the incarcerated: many experience systemic violence, exclusion, and state neglect every day.
Yet when Jewish Australians are threatened, governments move fast. When Palestinians are bombed, starved, displaced, or erased, governments mumble about complexity.
When antisemitism rises, it is framed as a threat to democracy itself. When Islamophobia rises alongside it, it gets a paragraph. When Indigenous people die in custody, it gets a report. When Gaza is flattened, it gets a disclaimer.
This is not accidental. It is political.
Fear Is the Most Useful Currency in Politics
After Bondi, the government didn’t just offer condolences or security measures. It reached for structure. Definitions. Databases. Monitoring. Funding levers. Visa screening. Protest controls. Media oversight.
This is the oldest move in the book.
A violent act occurs. Fear spikes. The public wants reassurance. Politicians promise action. And “action” quietly becomes expanded authority.
Here’s what makes this moment different: the concerns being raised now were raised in July, when the antisemitism envoy’s report was released, months before anyone was shot.
The Jewish Council of Australia called the funding approach “Trumpian,” warning it “echoes the authoritarian playbook used by figures like Donald Trump, using funding as a weapon to enforce ideological conformity.”
Academics warned that recommendations to withdraw funding from universities and cultural institutions could be “weaponised to censor opinion and silence dissent.”
The Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, the peak body representing Palestinian Australians, called the plan “a profound threat to Australian democracy, civil liberties, and the right to peaceful protest.”
Those weren’t fringe voices. They weren’t just pro-Palestinian activists. They were Jewish Australians, legal experts, and civil liberties organisations reading the same document and seeing the same danger.
Yesterday, the government adopted the plan in full. The concerns were noted and overridden. The attack didn’t create the policy agenda. It ended the debate.
This is not to say the attack created bad faith. It is to say it removed friction. The machinery was ready. The opposition was silenced. The moment arrived.
The Architecture of Silence
This is no longer proposal. This is policy.
Yesterday, the Albanese government adopted the full Segal report. Here is what that means in practice.
The IHRA definition of antisemitism, and why it matters.
At the heart of this machinery is a definition. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism is now embedded across all levels of Australian government. Understanding what this definition does, and doesn’t do, is essential.
The IHRA definition was drafted in 2004 by Kenneth Stern as a data-collection tool for monitoring antisemitism in Europe. It was never designed to be a legal instrument or a speech code. The core definition is brief and largely uncontroversial: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.”
The problem is the eleven “contemporary examples” attached to it. Several of those examples relate specifically to Israel:
Under these examples, calling Israel an apartheid state, as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Israeli organisation B’Tselem have done, could potentially be classified as antisemitic. Criticising Israel’s policies more vocally than you criticise other nations could be classified as antisemitic. Describing Zionism as a settler-colonial project, a mainstream academic position, could be classified as antisemitic.
This is not a neutral tool. It is a political instrument that risks blurring the line between bigotry against Jewish people and criticism of a state.
The man who wrote it says so himself.
Kenneth Stern has spent years publicly warning against exactly this use. He has testified to the US Congress that weaponising the definition to suppress campus criticism of Israel threatens academic freedom and “chills speech.” In 2024, over 1,200 Jewish academics signed an open letter opposing the definition’s adoption in US federal law, calling it “a dangerous conflation of criticism of Israel with antisemitism.”
When asked about Stern’s concerns, Special Envoy Jillian Segal told ABC Radio: “The train has moved on, if I might put it that way, and Kenneth Stern has been left behind.”
The author of the definition says it’s being misused. The government’s response: he’s irrelevant now.
A credible alternative exists, and was rejected.
In 2021, over 200 scholars of antisemitism, the Holocaust, and Jewish history created the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism specifically because they saw the IHRA definition being weaponised. The Jerusalem Declaration explicitly states:
This is not a fringe document. It was drafted by leading scholars in the field, people who have devoted their careers to studying antisemitism and the Holocaust. It provides a rigorous definition that protects Jewish people from genuine hatred while preserving the right to criticise a state.
The Australian government could have adopted this definition. It chose not to. It chose the definition that conflates criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews.
That was a political choice. It tells you what this is actually about.
The person wielding this definition.
It matters who gets to define antisemitism for a nation. So look at who Jillian Segal actually is.
Segal was appointed as Australia’s first Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism in July 2024, a position created after sustained lobbying by pro-Israel communal organisations following October 7, 2023. The role was designed to address rising antisemitism. But look at who was chosen to fill it.
She has been Chair of the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce since 2015. She is the immediate past president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the main representative body for Australia’s Jewish community, which has historically taken a strong pro-Israel stance. She sits on the international board of Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, a Tel Aviv-based research institution.
In November 2023, as Israel was bombing Gaza, Segal co-signed a statement condemning Foreign Minister Penny Wong, Australia’s top diplomat, and the Labor government for calling on Israel to “cease the attacking of hospitals.” She opposed Australia’s support for a UN resolution calling for a ceasefire.
Read that again. The person now defining antisemitism for Australia publicly condemned the government for asking Israel to stop bombing hospitals.
Her husband, John Roth, through their family trust, donated $50,000 to Advance Australia in the 2023-24 financial year, the equal second-largest donation to the organisation that year. Advance is a far-right political lobby group, backed by wealthy conservative donors, that led the successful campaign to defeat the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum. When this was reported, Segal claimed her husband’s politics are separate from her own.
And when Nazis prominently attended a protest march in Melbourne on 31 August this year, Segal, the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, made no public comment or condemnation.
This is the person deciding what counts as antisemitism in Australia. This is the person whose definition is now embedded across all levels of government. This is the person who dismissed the concerns of the man who actually wrote the IHRA definition by saying “the train has moved on.”
The conflict of interest is not subtle. It is structural. The person defining antisemitism is an Israel advocate who condemned calls to stop bombing hospitals, whose family funds far-right politics, and who stayed silent when actual Nazis marched in Australian streets.
Whatever the stated intent, the effect is to protect Israel from criticism. The architecture to do so is now law.
What else is in the machinery:
Visa screening for beliefs. The Home Affairs department will assess visa applicants for “antisemitic views or affiliations.” Under the IHRA definition now adopted as policy, this creates the potential for criticism of Israel to be flagged. A Palestinian academic, a human rights researcher, a journalist who covered Gaza: all could potentially face additional scrutiny at the border for their documented views on a documented genocide.
Media monitoring for “false or distorted narratives.” The report mandates mechanisms to monitor media coverage and prevent narratives deemed false or distorted. Who decides what’s distorted? When every major human rights organisation on earth is documenting genocide in Gaza, and the Australian government refuses to use the word, which narrative is “false”?
Funding as a weapon. Universities, cultural institutions, and individual researchers face defunding if they “facilitate, enable or fail to act against antisemitism.” The special envoy’s office can terminate public grants where recipients engage in what it defines as “antisemitic speech or actions.” This isn’t about protecting Jewish students. It’s about controlling what can be taught, researched, and said.
Protest restrictions. NSW is recalling parliament before Christmas to rush through laws giving the police commissioner power to suspend the entire protest authorisation system after a terrorism incident, for two weeks initially, renewable up to three months, applicable statewide. The NSW Supreme Court struck down similar laws as unconstitutional in October. Minns is reintroducing them anyway, calling them “extraordinary powers not seen before in any jurisdiction in the country.” The machinery to shut down Palestine solidarity protests has been built in plain sight, using Jewish grief as cover.
Charity sanctions. Organisations that “promote antisemitic speakers” or “engage in conduct that promotes antisemitism” face losing their deductible gift recipient status. Under the IHRA definition, hosting a Palestinian speaker or platforming criticism of Israeli policy could potentially qualify.
This is not protection. This is infrastructure for control.
The Playbook
This playbook is not new. It has been used before, and we know where it leads.
After September 11, the United States passed the Patriot Act within weeks. Expanded surveillance. Secret courts. Indefinite detention. The powers were supposed to be temporary. They became permanent. Twenty years later, the infrastructure remains, now used for purposes far beyond terrorism.
Australia followed. ASIO’s powers expanded. Metadata retention became law. Journalists faced prosecution for reporting on national security matters. Each expansion was justified by emergency. None were rolled back when the emergency passed.
After the Christchurch massacre, New Zealand rushed through gun reforms, reasonable, many argued. But also expanded powers to classify content as “objectionable,” criminalising its distribution. The definition has since been contested in cases involving protest material and political speech.
The pattern is consistent:
A horrific act occurs. The public is traumatised and fearful. Politicians promise swift action. Laws are drafted quickly, debated minimally. Powers are granted that exceed the specific threat. Those powers are never returned.
The Bondi shooting was used to complete this pattern. The architecture is now locked in.
Whose Laws Are These?
Let me step back and say something plainly.
A foreign state appears to be shaping Australian domestic law to protect itself from criticism.
That sentence should be extraordinary. It should provoke outrage across the political spectrum. And yet here we are, watching it happen in real time, documented in official reports and press conferences, and most Australians either don’t see it or feel they cannot say it.
The IHRA definition being embedded across Australian government is not an Australian initiative. It is part of a coordinated global push. The same definition has been adopted or is being pushed in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, France, everywhere Israel faces significant criticism. The same pattern: local tragedy or rising tensions, followed by rapid adoption of speech-restricting frameworks that happen to insulate Israel from accountability.
The Special Envoy position was created after lobbying by pro-Israel organisations. The person appointed to fill it chairs the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce, condemned calls for Israel to stop bombing hospitals, and sits on the board of an Israeli research institution. Her report, now adopted in full, would give her office the power to defund universities, sanction charities, screen visa applicants for their views on Israel, and monitor media for “false narratives” about a genocide that every major human rights body says is happening.
This is not conspiracy. This is lobbying. This is how power works when it has enough money, enough institutional access, and enough political cover.
And the political cover is grief. Real grief. Legitimate grief. Grief for fifteen people murdered on a beach.
But grief does not give a foreign state the right to shape another nation’s laws. Grief does not suspend democratic scrutiny. Grief does not mean we stop asking who benefits from the machinery being built.
Israel is not Australia’s government. Israeli interests are not automatically Australian interests. The protection of Israel from international criticism is not a legitimate goal of Australian domestic policy. And yet that is exactly what this architecture appears designed to achieve.
What does it mean when a democracy outsources its definition of acceptable speech to a foreign state’s advocacy apparatus?
What does it mean when criticising that state’s documented war crimes becomes, by legal definition, a form of bigotry?
What does it mean when the institutions meant to protect us, universities, media, civil society, are threatened with defunding if they say what the evidence shows?
It means we are no longer talking about antisemitism. We are talking about sovereignty. We are talking about whether Australia is a country that makes its own laws based on its own values, or a country that imports legal frameworks designed to serve another nation’s strategic interests.
That question should trouble everyone, left, right, and centre. It should trouble Jewish Australians who did not ask for their grief to be converted into this. It should trouble anyone who believes that democracy requires the right to dissent, to protest, to name what is happening in the world without fear of institutional punishment.
This is not about being anti-Israel. It is about being pro-Australia. Pro-democracy. Pro-truth.
And right now, all three are under threat.
Antisemitism Is Real. So Is Its Political Use
Antisemitism is real. It has a long, violent history. It killed fifteen people on Bondi Beach. Jewish people have every right to safety, dignity, and protection.
But something else is also real, and pretending otherwise is dishonest.
When antisemitism becomes a central organising principle of politics, rather than a specific harm to be addressed, it becomes useful to power.
Useful to governments that want to criminalise protest. Useful to institutions that want to discipline universities. Useful to states that want to conflate criticism with hatred. Useful to anyone who benefits when debate collapses into fear.
This does not require antisemitism to be invented. It only requires it to be foregrounded, amplified, and weaponised.
That is exactly what has happened.
The Genocide That Cannot Be Named
Here is a list of institutions that have accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza:
The United Nations.
The International Court of Justice (which ordered provisional measures under the Genocide Convention).
The International Association of Genocide Scholars.
B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organisation.
Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, also Israeli.
Amnesty International. Doctors Without Borders.
Human Rights Watch.
The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights.
The International Federation for Human Rights.
The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, named after Raphael Lemkin, the man who coined the word “genocide.”
Here is the list of major independent humanitarian or human rights institutions that say Israel is not committing genocide:
There are none.
This is not a contested debate between experts. This is institutional consensus being treated as opinion, because acknowledging it would require action.
When the Australian government talks about “false or distorted narratives,” this is the narrative they mean. The documented, evidenced, legally argued reality of what is happening in Gaza, classified as distortion because it is politically inconvenient.
The “both sides” framing exists to manufacture permission for inaction. There are not two sides to this. There is overwhelming institutional consensus, and there is denial.
Palestine and the Limits of Acceptable Grief
If fifteen Jewish Australians are killed, it is a national emergency. If tens of thousands of Palestinians are killed, it is a geopolitical issue.
If Jewish students feel unsafe, universities face funding cuts. If Palestinian students watch their families die on livestream, they are told to be civil.
If antisemitism is named, laws move. If genocide is named by every major human rights body on earth, governments hedge.
That tells us something about whose lives are considered destabilising enough to matter.
On March 16, 2025
On March 16 of this year, Reuters published an article: “Israeli strikes kill 15 people in Gaza over past day, Palestinian medics say.”
Fifteen people.
Does anyone remember that day? Does it stand out in your memory as significant?
I don’t remember it. I have no idea who those people were. I never saw their names. I never saw their pictures. No western officials denounced their deaths. No media gave wall-to-wall coverage.
So I forgot.
I will never forget Bondi. Someone could mention it to me thirty years from now and I’ll know exactly what they’re talking about. My society made an infinitely bigger deal about fifteen deaths in Sydney than fifteen deaths in Gaza. So Bondi will stick.
And if I’m honest, I made a bigger deal of it too. I’ve felt sick about the shooting since Sunday. Partly because of what’s being done with it politically. But also because I felt genuine grief for those who died and their families.
Even after years of trying to notice how my society normalises the killing of Palestinians, I’m still caught in it. I felt Bondi in my chest. I don’t remember March 16.
I wasn’t born this way. This was learned. If I could see the world through fresh eyes, it would never occur to me that fifteen people murdered in Australia should matter more than fifteen people murdered in Palestine.
Palestinians don’t love their families less than Australians do.
Who Pays the Price?
Not Jewish people. Not Palestinians.
Everyone.
Because when protest becomes “intimidation,” workers lose the right to strike. When universities are policed for ideology, research dies. When media is monitored for “false narratives,” truth narrows. When visas are screened for beliefs, dissent becomes suspicious. When funding is used as a weapon, compliance replaces conscience.
This is how democracies rot. Quietly. Respectably. With the language of safety and cohesion.
This Isn't Protection. It's Control.
Real protection looks like confronting antisemitism without criminalising dissent.
Real protection looks like opposing Islamophobia with the same urgency.
Real protection looks like allowing people to speak, protest, grieve, and criticise power without fear.
What we watched instead was fear being laundered into policy.
Not because fifteen deaths don’t matter.
But because fear matters more to power than consistency ever will.
And it happened while we were still crying.
Refuse the Chill
If protest is criminalised, what remains?
This is the question they don’t want asked, because once it’s spoken, people start answering it.
The laws being passed acknowledge their own fragility. Minns admitted the protest restrictions need to be “drafted in a particular way” to survive constitutional challenge. The NSW Supreme Court struck down similar laws in October. The court has confirmed it can hear urgent applications, including protest matters, every day of the year. This architecture is being built on contested ground.
It will be challenged. In courts. In the streets. In exactly the spaces they are trying to close.
The purpose of these laws is not enforcement. It is silence. They work by making people afraid to speak before anyone is charged. The chilling effect is the point. The goal is not to prosecute every protester. The goal is to make you wonder if you’ll be prosecuted, and stay home.
The response is to refuse the chill.
Document. Bear witness. Name what is happening while it is happening. Write it down. Screenshot it. Send it to journalists. Create the record that will be needed later.
Support the legal challenges. Support the civil liberties organisations preparing to fight these laws in court. Support the journalists who are still reporting what’s actually happening.
And support the Jewish organisations who are also opposing this: the Jewish Council of Australia, Jewish Voice for Peace, Independent Jewish Voices, the scholars who see their community’s trauma being weaponised and are saying so. These are Jewish Australians standing against this machinery. They are not fringe. They are not self-hating. They are refusing to let their grief be converted into someone else’s power.
When they tell you that opposing these laws is antisemitic, remember: Jewish people are leading that opposition. When they tell you that protest endangers Jewish safety, remember: the protesters had nothing to do with the attack.
Do not let them purchase your silence with your own grief. Do not let them convert your horror at fifteen deaths into permission for what comes next.
The circle of compassion is not widened by narrowing who is allowed to speak. It is widened by insisting, even against every pressure to stay quiet, that Palestinian lives matter as much as Israeli lives, that Australian democracy is not for sale, and that grief is not a blank cheque for authoritarianism.
They are counting on exhaustion. They are counting on fear. They are counting on decent people looking away because the fight feels too hard and the costs feel too high.
Don’t look away.
What We Must Become
Sunday was an awful, dark day. Hundreds of lives directly devastated. Thousands more indirectly. The trauma will reverberate through families for generations. The sorrow is palpable, in the streets, at the supermarket, in the silence of strangers.
And this is appropriate. This is what fifteen deaths ought to feel like. This is what mass murder feels like when it hasn’t been normalised for you.
That’s the measure.
Every massacre of Palestinians should shake the earth the way Bondi has. Every death toll from Gaza should hit us the way the death toll from Sydney did. Feel how hard this hits, and then translate it to Gaza. This is happening there every day.
Einstein wrote, toward the end of his life:
“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty.”
Humanity won’t survive unless we grow into this. We are too destructive. We hurt each other and our environment too much. We destroy everything around us trying to shore up wealth and resources for ourselves, and it is not sustainable.
We have to become better. More caring. Less susceptible to propaganda. A society driven by truth and compassion rather than lies and profit.
That is the only way through this.
Where This Ends
When the state decides which grief counts, it eventually decides which voices don’t.
And it never stops where it starts.
Author's Note: On Trauma and Gaslighting
I work as a trauma-informed counsellor. I wasn’t going to write this part. But fuck it.
I’m tired.
I’m tired of watching Palestinian families dig their children out of rubble with their bare hands, on my phone, while I’m making coffee, and then being told that my horror at this is the problem. That naming it is hate. That the people documenting their own extermination are the threat to social cohesion.
I’m tired of watching Jewish Australians carry genuine, legitimate, bone-deep fear, fear that just got validated in the worst possible way, and then watching that fear get strip-mined by politicians who don’t give a shit about them. Turned into talking points. Converted into laws that will be used against everyone, including the Jewish people speaking out against this, who are being erased from the conversation like they don’t exist.
I’m tired of the gaslighting.
That’s what this is. Let’s call it what it is.
Gaslighting is when someone makes you doubt your own perception. When the thing you saw with your own eyes gets renarrated until you start wondering if you’re the crazy one.
You watched Frydenberg stand at a memorial, a fucking memorial, and demand the Prime Minister accept personal responsibility for a terrorist attack, then pivot to banning protests that had nothing to do with the shooters.
You watched Chris Minns openly admit he’s designing laws to get around constitutional rights.
You watched the Australian government adopt sweeping surveillance and censorship powers while families were still identifying bodies.
You saw it. It happened. And now you’re being told: this is protection. This is safety. This is keeping us together.
Bullshit.
You are not crazy. Your perception is not faulty. You are watching institutional abuse happen in real time, dressed up in the language of care.
I’ve sat with survivors of coercive control for years. I know what it looks like when someone is told their reality isn’t real. When their pain is reframed as the problem. When speaking up gets labelled as the abuse. When the system that’s supposed to protect them becomes the thing that harms them.
This is that. At scale. To all of us.
Palestinian Australians are being told their grief is dangerous. Jewish Australians are being told their safety requires everyone’s silence. The rest of us are being told that noticing the contradiction makes us antisemitic, or crazy, or both.
And the people who see through it, who are saying wait, this doesn’t add up, are being made to feel like they’re alone. Like no one else sees it. Like maybe they’re the problem.
You’re not alone. I see it too.
The trauma of this moment isn’t just the deaths. It’s the aftermath. It’s the suffocation of being unable to speak plainly about what is happening. It’s the loneliness of seeing something clearly and being told you’re imagining it.
Trauma healing requires truth. It requires being able to say: this happened. It requires someone to say back: yes, it did. I saw it too.
That’s what this piece is trying to do. Bear witness. Say the thing. Refuse to let the gaslighting settle into accepted reality.
If you’re struggling, with the news, with the grief, with the disorientation of watching the world go mad while everyone pretends it’s fine, your response isn’t too much. It’s the right amount for what’s happening.
And if you need someone to talk to, I’m here. That’s what Twinkling of the Soul is for. Survivors supporting survivors. People who’ve been through the machinery of institutional abuse and come out the other side.
You’re not crazy. You’re awake.
That’s harder. But it’s better.
— Geoffrey
more insights
What Family Court Does to a Person
If family court has made you feel flattened, unreal, or split from the person you were before the proceedings started, this is about what that process does. The waiting that nobody warns you about. The strangers who handle your worst experience as a file. The legal language that strips the heat from your own story. The months between hearings that your body keeps score of. And the quiet, unseen work of holding onto yourself while a system processes you.
The Person With No Edges
She is the first to offer and the last to leave. She does not say no. This is not because she is unable to form the word. It is because the word, in her internal architecture, is wired to a consequence that predates her adult life. No, in the house she grew up in, did not mean no. It meant the particular kind of parental coldness that a child experiences not as disagreement but as annihilation.
The Part of You That Dies With Them
You still buy two avocados. It has been eight months and you are standing in the supermarket on a Thursday evening and you have put two avocados in the bag. You will not realise until you get home. The second avocado was not a mistake. It was a reflex. The hand remembering what the mind has been told but the body has not yet agreed to, which is that the person who ate the other avocado is not coming home.
Trauma Literacy Matters
The teacher calls the mother in on a Wednesday. The boy has been hitting other children, hiding under desks, screaming when touched. The teacher uses words like “defiance” and “escalation.” The mother does not explain what the house was like before his father left. The meeting ends. The boy stays on red. This is what trauma illiteracy looks like. Not cruelty. Not indifference. Just a room full of people who are looking directly at the thing and cannot see it.
Addiction Is an Attempt to Silence Shame
There is a man at a dinner party and he is on his third glass of wine before the entrée has arrived. No one mentions it, because no one mentions it. He is not thinking about alcohol. He is thinking about the moment, perhaps forty minutes from now, when the conversation will thin out and there is nothing between him and the quiet. Addiction is not a pleasure problem. It is a pain problem. And you cannot punish someone out of pain.
Poor Treatment, Not Poor Mental Health
Who hurt them? That’s the question I want to ask every time someone talks about “low mood” or “poor coping” as if distress just appears from nowhere. Most of the people I’ve worked with were not mysteriously unwell. They were reacting to something real. But we’ve learned to tell a tidier story. Call it “poor mental health” and nobody has to say “abuse.” That shift does real harm. Because when we stop at the label, when we never name the cause, we end up treating the smoke and ignoring the fire.
What Trauma Survivors Know That Textbooks Miss
This article is about the expertise that doesn’t come with a certificate, the knowledge survivors of abuse and trauma develop at 3am, alone, with no manual. It explores the gap between studying trauma and living inside it, and makes a case for why what you’ve learned by staying alive deserves recognition. It’s written for people who’ve had to figure things out for themselves, those who’ve survived abuse, coercive control, childhood trauma, or neglect. Content includes references to suicidality and childhood trauma.
What to Do When Your Employer Excludes You From Work
Workplace abuse doesn’t always come with shouting or threats. Sometimes it comes as silence: no emails, no meetings, no work, while you remain employed and expected to be grateful. This article explains workplace ostracism and systematic exclusion, why it causes real psychological harm, and what options exist when being paid to be invisible becomes the weapon.
What Trauma-Informed Support Actually Feels Like
If you search “trauma-informed” online, you’ll find a lot of content. Six principles. Posters. Policies. Gentle marketing copy. Academic reviews explaining that everyone defines it differently and measures it differently. None of it is useless. But most of it isn’t written for the person it’s meant to protect. In all of it, the survivor is discussed. The survivor is rarely the reader.
So this is written for the person who is sitting in the room, trying to work out whether they are safe. Not on paper. In their body.
Grief Sharpens Against Banality
This isn’t an article about grief. Not really. It’s about what happens when that very special someone you loved is dead and you’re still here, and the love didn’t get the memo. It keeps showing up, in cars, in kitchens, at 2am, in the self-checkout queue at Woolies. Uninvited. Inconvenient. Sometimes unwelcome. If you’ve lost someone, you might recognise this. The presence that arrives without warning. The way your body knows something before your brain catches up. The cost of carrying it in public spaces while the world keeps demanding you function. This piece doesn’t explain grief or offer steps through it. It doesn’t try to comfort you or teach you anything. It just says: this is what it’s like.
What Therapists Mean by “Parts”
What therapists call “parts” isn’t fragmentation or pathology. It’s your nervous system running multiple survival strategies at once. This article translates parts work out of therapy-speak and into real, recognisable moments, and explains why understanding it this way can actually change how your body responds now.
When Workplace Abuse Hides in Plain Sight
Some of the most damaging workplace abuse doesn’t look like abuse at all. It looks like silence. Like being kept but ignored. Like policies that protect the organisation, not you. Like being slowly erased while everything remains “procedurally correct.” It happens in what doesn’t occur, in communication that stops, in roles that vanish, in processes that exist until you try to rely on them. This article names the patterns of covert workplace harm that are easy to deny, psychologically destabilising over time, and designed to leave people questioning their own memory, reactions, and worth rather than the systems causing the damage.