With so little known about the spate of antisemitic attacks being carried out in Australia, terrorism and espionage are beginning to look increasingly the same.
With so little known about the spate of antisemitic attacks being carried out in Australia, terrorism and espionage are beginning to look increasingly the same.
Opinion
January 24, 2025 — 4.30am
There is so much that is so self-evidently awful about the current spate of antisemitic attacks in Sydney that one feels trite even pointing it out. That the firebombed synagogues and childcare centres, the torched homes and cars and businesses (including non-Jewish ones by mistake) represent a true outrage, worthy of the condemnation they have received, and which cannot be allowed to stand. That such violence – which has all the immediate hallmarks of terrorism – overwhelmingly chooses its victims not personally, but as Jews. That they are targeted not as people, but as the opposite: representatives of an un-people. That the spectres this must evoke in the Jewish imagination, of stories both ancient and merely generations old, are of the most horrific sort.
But beyond all that, so little is self-evident. Just how little became clear this week when the Australian Federal Police raised the prospect that overseas groups are paying mercenary criminals in cryptocurrency to undertake these attacks.
“We believe criminals for hire may be behind some incidents,” Commissioner Reece Kershaw revealed on Wednesday. “So part of our inquiries include who is paying these criminals, where these people are, whether they are in Australia or offshore, and what their motivation is”.
In an instant, it became almost impossible for us to say what we are dealing with. “There is still a lot of work to be done, and we are not ready to rule anything in or out,” Kershaw added. So, as it stands, and until the police know more, we don’t know who’s behind all this. We don’t know where they are. We don’t even know why it’s happening.
What if, for instance, we’re looking at a concerted campaign from a hostile foreign government? To be honest, the thought had never occurred to me, but this is precisely the scenario France has contemplated over the past two years in the wake of two separate antisemitic graffiti campaigns. The first, involving some 60 stars of David being stencilled across Parisian buildings, ultimately led to a Moldovan couple being arrested, and authorities identifying a pro-Russian Moldovan businessman as that couple’s handler – they suspect at the behest of Russia’s security services. The second concerned the defacement of Paris’ Holocaust Memorial, it seems by two Bulgarians, and again, believed to be at Russian security services’ direction.
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That sort of thing, of course, would not be entirely new. Perhaps the closest example was the KGB’s “swastika graffiti operation” unleashed on West Germany over a couple of months in 1959. This was a sudden spike of 833 antisemitic acts – including the now sadly familiar desecration of synagogues with swastikas – calibrated to tear West German society apart and destroy its international reputation. And it partly worked: anti-German sentiment reached the point that some British companies started sacking German employees and cancelled existing contracts with West German companies. West Germany’s fledgling position in NATO even came under question.
Back then, this sort of thing required classic espionage: East German agents crossing the border and infiltrating the West German far-right. Now, though, you can simply purchase such services on the dark web, and using encrypted apps.
This, I suspect, is why the government is warning us not to presume this is the work of a foreign government, or even avowedly anti-Israeli proxies for one like Hamas and Hezbollah. Once violence becomes a digitised global market, it depends even less on the vast apparatus of the state; it comes frictionlessly within the reach of, say, organised crime. Indeed, police suspicions of hired low-level criminals in this case appear to stem from previous police investigations into that underworld. In this version of events, antisemitic firebombings are a variation on the firebombings of more than 100 tobacco stores we’ve seen in Victoria over the past two years.
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The possibilities here traverse plenty of territory between terrorism and espionage, which is confounding because they imply quite different responses. If these attacks are as they first appeared – something in the vicinity of terrorism and hate crime in the sense we’ve tended to understand it – they raise a series of concerns about radicalisation and the rapidly tearing social fabric. If they are cases of organised crime branching out into politics, that suggests a slightly different brand of terrorism in which a concept like radicalisation seems less relevant. Radicalisation usually describes a process by which people come to embrace violence. Organised crime, however, embraced violence long ago. That makes it less a matter of social cohesion and more one of criminal expansion. Espionage, meanwhile, is a different beast entirely: an attempt to tear a social fabric that might otherwise be intact, if a little worn.
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The trouble is that in our age, these quite different kinds of violence increasingly look the same. Even terrorism – once the preserve of networks and cells executing elaborate plans – has come to resemble everyday crime: individuals taking it upon themselves to stab people on the street, for example. If nations and gangs alike can now, with similar ease, outsource attacks on their foes to something like the gig economy, we’re witnessing a remarkable democratisation of violence in which the possibilities for it multiply, and terrify.
I would well understand, in this moment, if Jewish Australians, especially those living in eastern Sydney, had little interest in teasing out these different species of violence. For them, the fear is the same and the violence is real, whatever the ultimate source. But the implications are profound for all of us because when violence is democratised in this way, when it is commoditised and rendered as a service, there’s no telling who the buyers might eventually be. And who, then, could confidently say where it ends?
Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist. He is a lecturer in politics at Monash University and co-host of Channel Ten’s The Project.
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Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author and academic. He is a lecturer in politics at Monash University and co-host of Channel Ten’s The Project.
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