The other big news item this weekend comes from Australia, where before dawn on Friday morning arsonists burned down a Melbourne synagogue. Before looking at this terrible assault, it’s worth noting something that happened last month: the former Israeli justice minister Ayelet Shaked came to Australia to give a series of talks and was denied entry into the country upon her arrival. Shaked described this as “a brutal political act” which happened because the country’s government “is confused between good and evil.”

Prior to October 7, there was relatively little anti-Semitism, or even virulent anti-Israel agitation, in Australia. Many of the country’s Jews in fact thought they were better off than their brethren in the United States, let alone in Britain or France. That all changed on October 8, when a mob gathered at the Sydney Opera House calling for Jewish blood. Justin Amler writes that

the most shocking aspect of Friday’s events is that the Jewish community is not even that surprised. . . . Only last week, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry released a report on anti-Semitism that showed incidents of Jew-hatred increased by a staggering 316 percent since October 7, 2023. And it’s likely that this is only a conservative figure, as many incidents go unreported.

In the past month alone, we’ve seen an attack in the Sydney suburb of Woollahra where cars were defaced with anti-Israel slogans. We’ve seen an Israeli tourist in Townsville being called a “dirty filthy f—ing Jew”, and we’ve seen anti-Israel protests at the Great Synagogue in Sydney, where the only person moved on by police was a Jewish man accused of a “breach of the peace” when he unfurled an Israeli flag opposite the protesters.

[W]e cannot understand why the government appears unable to condemn anti-Semitism without also talking about Islamophobia. Thus, attempting to be evenhanded, it decided it has to appoint a special envoy to combat Islamophobia alongside its special envoy to combat anti-Semitism. Attempts to equate the two are rooted in ideology or politics, not facts. Using comparable metrics, the number of anti-Semitic incidents dwarfs the number of Islamophobic incidents.

Meanwhile, in incident after incident, law enforcement seems determined to . . . abet mobs in making the streets and campuses unsafe for anyone who is visibly Jewish—moving Jews away from public areas “for their own safety” rather than confronting the protesters over their potential or actual violence.

And this brings us back to the banning of Ayelet Shaked, with which the government signaled that the Jewish state alone was anathema, and that the normal legal rules don’t apply to it—or, by extension, those who support it.

With the IDF engaged in ground maneuvers in both northern and southern Gaza, and a plan about to go into effect next week that would separate more than 100,000 civilians from Hamas’s control, an end to the war may at last be in sight. Yet there seems to be no agreement within Israel, or without, about what should become of the territory. Efraim Inbar assesses the various proposals, from Donald Trump’s plan to remove the population entirely, to the Israeli far-right’s desire to settle the Strip with Jews, to the internationally supported proposal to place Gaza under the control of the Palestinian Authority (PA)—and exposes the fatal flaws of each. He therefore tries to reframe the problem:

[M]any Arab states have failed to establish a monopoly on the use of force within their borders. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Sudan all suffer from civil wars or armed militias that do not obey the central government.

Perhaps Israel needs to get used to the idea that in the absence of an entity willing to take Gaza under its wing, chaos will prevail there. This is less terrible than people may think. Chaos would allow Israel to establish buffer zones along the Gaza border without interference. Any entity controlling Gaza would oppose such measures and would resist necessary Israeli measures to reduce terrorism. Chaos may also encourage emigration.

Israel is doomed to live with bad neighbors for the foreseeable future. There is no way to ensure zero terrorism. Israel should avoid adopting a policy of containment and should constantly “mow the grass” to minimize the chances of a major threat emerging across the border. Periodic conflicts may be necessary. If the Jews want a state in their homeland, they need to internalize that Israel will have to live by the sword for many more years.