By Rima Najjar
Introduction
On December 14, 2025, a father-and-son team opened fire on a crowded Chabad “Chanukah by the Sea” event, killing at least 15 (including children and rabbis) and injuring dozens more in what authorities swiftly declared a targeted antisemitic terrorist act. While the antisemitic motive was undeniable, the public narrative immediately began performing a familiar, consequential act: merging the universal fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the specific political agenda of the Israeli state, thereby preparing the ground for a geopolitical response.
In the immediate coverage — interviews widely circulated and picked up internationally, including on the BBC — voices like Arsen Ostrovsky, a pro-Israel advocate injured in the attack, described the scene as an “absolute bloodbath” and “massacre,” explicitly drawing the parallel: “October 7, that’s the last time I saw this. I never thought I’d see this in Australia, not in my lifetime, on Bondi Beach of all places.” BBC segments also included Rabbi Moshe Gutnick, joint organizer of the event, criticizing government inaction on rising threats and echoing the surge in incidents since October 7. Australian and Israeli flags soon appeared prominently in visuals of memorials and vigils, stitching the attack into a broader Zionist narrative of Jewish vulnerability amid ongoing global tensions.
When I switched on the broadcast here in Amman and caught this coverage, the comparisons struck me as eerily familiar in their immediacy — the witnesses positioned as moral bridges to Israel’s narrative, the symbols snapping into place so swiftly. I turned it off in disgust.
The framing arrived faster than the facts, and my suspicion — formed not from paranoia but from memory — was that the narrative was being steered, prematurely and predictably, toward Israel’s preferred moral universe. It even caused me, momentarily, to wonder about deeper false-flag orchestration — an intrusive possibility shaped by precedent.
My reaction is not conspiratorial. It is pattern recognition — an instinct sharpened by watching premature claims harden into unquestioned truth and first narratives outlast corrections.
Historical Precedents of Reflexive Framing
This reflexive framing has a long record.
In 2017, hundreds of bomb threats targeted Jewish Community Centers and synagogues across the United States and abroad. From the first reports, the wave was framed as a surge in antisemitic terror. Fear spread quickly. Newsrooms and public officials spoke of organized extremist networks and a renewed threat to Jewish life. But when investigators finally traced the calls, one of the principal perpetrators turned out to be Michael Kadar, an Israeli-American Jewish teenager operating from Israel using spoofed phone systems and cyber tools. By the time that fact came to light, the narrative was already fixed. The correction arrived quietly, without urgency, and never displaced the initial attribution. The episode showed how swiftly meaning can congeal — and how little it matters when the meaning turns out to be wrong.
The machinery is not just fast; it is directionally biased. It reliably frames incidents within a narrative of Jews-under-siege-by-external-others, a framework that inherently calls for securitized, nationalist solutions.
More recently, in Australia, police discovered a caravan in Sydney that appeared to be packed with explosives and accompanied by a list of local synagogues. Within hours, the discovery was treated as a looming antisemitic terror attack. Officials spoke publicly of a major threat; headlines echoed the alarm. But when investigators examined the device, they found no detonator, no viable explosive mechanism, and no capacity for mass harm. The plot was ultimately deemed a fabrication — apparently staged by criminals seeking to provoke panic and manipulate the police response.
Yet the initial narrative had already saturated public discourse. What lingered was not the truth, but the emotional imprint of the first interpretation — an imprint perfectly aligned with a worldview that sees Jewish safety as perpetually contingent on state power and vigilance against a hostile outside world. The retraction was subdued, technical, and quickly forgotten.
Temporal Asymmetry and the Politics of First Narration
Taken together, these episodes reveal a dynamic far more pervasive than any question of orchestration. What they expose is temporal asymmetry — the structural advantage of whoever speaks first. The initial narrative does not merely fill a gap; it becomes the event’s remembered meaning.
We saw this on October 7, when early, unverified Israeli claims about atrocities — many later retracted or contradicted — cemented themselves in global consciousness before independent investigations began. And we saw it after 9/11, when the speed of attribution and the moral framing of a “civilizational enemy” shaped U.S. policy and public sentiment long before evidence was assessed or alternative interpretations could surface.
In each case, later facts arrived without the force to dislodge what the public had already absorbed. That is the architecture of the problem: the clock, not the evidence, determines the meaning. Time itself becomes a political instrument, and the first narrative — however speculative — becomes the one history remembers.
Hasbara’s Strategic Function
This gap is where Israeli hasbara thrives. Its strategic genius lies not merely in speed, but in conceptual conflation: it systematically maps the real, global threat of antisemitism onto the geopolitical project of Zionism. It argues, implicitly and explicitly, that the latter is the only possible answer to the former.
This logic depends on the erasure of a competing truth: that the Zionist project of national self-determination in Palestine is fundamentally premised on, and perpetuates, the denial of that same right to Palestinians. Hasbara makes this zero-sum reality invisible, reframing a political conflict over land and sovereignty as a civilizational struggle against innate hatred.
Hasbara defines the event and Western outlets absorb that definition automatically. The frame did not emerge organically; it followed a script the media has internalized to the point of reflex. Elements of the Bondi Beach coverage reflect this reflex.
Bondi Beach: Narrative Uptake and Amplification
In the Bondi Beach coverage, some Zionist and community voices raised the possibility of links to Iran or regional actors early on, drawing on prior incidents attributed to Iranian involvement, while Australian authorities quickly declared the attack a targeted act of antisemitic terrorism. The president of the Zionist Federation of Australia folded the incident into a broader narrative of rising antisemitism, attributing it to years of “unchecked” incitement and government inaction.
This framing does more than warn of prejudice; it often collapses criticism of Israel into hostility toward Jews, a move that has a long institutional history. A similar logic surfaced in 2023 when the Australian Jewish Association circulated a video claiming Gaza protesters had chanted “gas the Jews,” a claim later shown to be unsupported by police forensics, yet widely amplified at the time.
This pattern echoes earlier moments in Zionist political history. Advocacy organizations of the 1930s and 1940s and today’s groups in Australia share a repertoire: framing Jewish vulnerability in ways that consolidate political leverage, defining the permissible boundaries of Jewish identity, and portraying certain forms of dissent — whether Jewish or non-Jewish — as a threat to collective survival. In both cases, atrocity and fear become political capital.
The mechanism in past and present is the same: harness and repurpose a crisis to strengthen advocacy aims, often through narratives of Islamophobia, securitized multiculturalism, and an information ecosystem primed to read Muslim or immigrant violence as part of global terror.
How Elite Narratives Migrate Into Public Common Sense
What made this pattern impossible to ignore was how quickly it surfaced beyond the broadcast. The framing I had just watched was already circulating in public reactions, reproduced by commentators invoking security and social order — in doing so echoing the geopolitical script that hasbara had set in motion. The rapidity of this uptake revealed how deeply the narrative architecture is embedded: it does not stay in elite discourse; it migrates into everyday speech.
A Facebook comment circulating after the Bondi Beach attack transforms an unresolved incident into a blueprint for state discipline. The writer (David Langsam) begins with: “Ban guns… crack down on ALL civilian guns,” then moves immediately to “Ban all protests relating to foreign events,” and finally proposes a compulsory “Australian for Immigrants Course… an Israeli Ulpan-like immersion course” — Israel’s long-standing system for rapidly assimilating immigrants into Zionist national norms to ensure newcomers do not “bring foreign conflicts to our shores.” This is how elite narratives sediment into public common sense.
The Ulpan Analogy and Imported Models of Discipline
The Ulpan analogy is revelatory. Promoted as a neutral model for immigrant integration, the Israeli Ulpan’s historic purpose was to rapidly assimilate Jewish immigrants into a settler-nationalist project, teaching them Hebrew and Zionist ideology while actively erasing their diaspora cultures and languages (Yiddish, Ladino, Arabic). To propose its Australian adaptation is to unconsciously advocate for a model of citizenship built on the suppression of competing political identity. It solves the “problem” of “foreign conflicts” by demanding their abandonment, mirroring the foundational logic of Zionism in Palestine, which required the negation of Palestinian national identity as the price for Jewish sovereignty.
None of this engages what actually happened on Bondi Beach. It redirects the focus from the facts of the case to the communities already coded as threatening, converting a local act of violence into justification for regulating dissent, migration, and political expression. The precision of the shift — and the Israeli Ulpan invoked as a model — reveals how deeply hasbara’s vocabulary has penetrated public common sense.
This is hasbara’s afterlife. Once absorbed into the political bloodstream, it no longer needs Israeli spokespeople or media intermediaries; it circulates on its own. Ordinary reactions begin to treat political difference as disorder, solidarity as imported conflict, and protest as a threat to public safety. The Ulpan analogy makes the point clear: practices born in a settler-colonial context are recast as neutral civic solutions. What looks like spontaneous public common sense is, in fact, the sediment of years of ideological conditioning.
The shift happens fast because the groundwork was laid long before the Bondi Beach attack — through post-9/11 security culture, Islamophobic narratives, and the normalization of reading Muslim or immigrant presence through the lens of global terror. Uncertainty does not remain uncertainty. It becomes an opening for discipline.
Post-9/11 Infrastructure and the Ready-Made Meaning System
This reflex took shape in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when Islamophobia shifted from fringe sentiment to governing logic across the West. Israel did not originate this transformation, but it played a crucial role in giving it coherence and institutional form. In the days after 9/11, Israeli officials worked aggressively to fold their conflict with Palestinians into the emerging “War on Terror.” Ariel Sharon cast Palestinian resistance as an extension of Al-Qaeda; the language of occupation and apartheid disappeared, replaced by a narrative of civilizational struggle against “Islamic terror.”
This rhetorical move was not just an alignment of interests; it was an act of conceptual displacement. The specific, territorial dispute with Palestinians — a struggle between two national movements over the same land — was submerged beneath the abstract, global war against “terror.” The Palestinian quest for self-determination could thus be re-categorized not as a parallel national claim, but as a manifestation of irrational, Islamist extremism. Their political erasure was complete: they were no longer a people with rights, but a vector of terror.
Israel then positioned itself as the West’s frontline laboratory: exporting counterterror doctrine, surveillance tools, airport-profiling protocols, crowd-control tactics, and predictive policing software — marketed as neutral security solutions to a universal threat. The threat was not universal. It was explicitly coded as Muslim.
In this environment, Islamophobia hardened into infrastructure. Suspicion became embedded in policy, technology, training manuals, and professional judgment. Once these systems were in place, Israeli framing no longer required persuasion; it only required an event. A shock, a crime, or an ambiguous act was enough to activate the architecture already built.
Hasbara’s Evolution and Intensification
Hasbara — Israel’s long-standing project of “explaining” its actions to the world — thrives in this infrastructure. The term traces back to early Zionist advocacy, when Theodor Herzl openly called for organized propaganda to promote the Jewish state, and Nahum Sokolow refined it as “hasbara” during World War I. Post-1948, it became formalized state policy; by the digital era, it evolved into “Hasbara 2.0” — coordinated social media campaigns, student fellowships, and influencer networks.
After October 7, 2023, it reached new intensity: rapid amplification of unverified atrocity claims (later retracted or heavily qualified) that nonetheless cemented global outrage before independent verification could begin. Even as a genuine surge in antisemitic incidents followed — documented across the West — the speed and selectivity of framing often harnessed real fear to broader geopolitical ends.
The question is not whether antisemitism exists. It is who gets to define it, deploy it, and benefit from its invocation.
Suspicion as a Political Reaction
The suspicion that surfaced for me while watching the BBC coverage of the Bondi Beach terror attack did not appear out of nowhere. It comes from long experience — years of witnessing how crises are maneuvered and meaning assembled before evidence is fully known. My reaction draws on a record that is fully documented, not imagined.
Israel’s Record: From False Flags to Narrative Laundering
Israel’s record deepens this reflex. The Lavon Affair (Operation Susannah)in 1954 remains the clearest admitted example of a false-flag operation: Israeli military intelligence recruited Egyptian Jews to bomb Western civilian sites in Cairo and Alexandria, intending to blame local nationalists and disrupt Egypt’s ties with Britain and the United States. The plot failed when uncovered, forcing resignations and exposing the tactic’s risks.
Beyond Lavon — a rare case of outright staging — later operations highlight a pattern of covert action paired with aggressive narrative management. The Lillehammer Affair (1973) saw Mossad agents assassinate an innocent Moroccan waiter in Norway, mistaking him for a Munich Olympics planner; initial denials crumbled under exposure. The Bus 300 Affair (1984) revealed Shin Bet executing captured Palestinian hijackers and staging evidence to claim they died in a struggle. More recent sabotage against Iran’s nuclear program — the Stuxnet cyberattack (with U.S. collaboration), assassinations of scientists like Mohsen Fakhrizadeh (2020, using remote AI weaponry) — often proceeds with ambiguity or silence, letting strategic outcomes speak while preserving deniability.
Doctrine supports this pattern. The Hannibal Directive, openly debated within Israel, authorized overwhelming force to prevent soldier captures even at the certainty of killing the captives themselves. The logic was explicit: strategic and narrative control outweigh individual life.
These examples clarify why distinguishing outright false-flag operations from narrative laundering matters. False flags require elaborate planning and execution; narrative laundering requires only speed, confidence, and conditioned media reflexes. Israel excels at the latter — front-loading moral claims, deploying symbols, and positioning witnesses as anchors before verification is possible. In the Bondi Beach attack, a verifiable antisemitic atrocity was swiftly woven into familiar geopolitical scripts, illustrating the machinery while underscoring the real human cost of the underlying hatred.
In this context, deceit is not incidental. It is structural. Hasbara front-loads moral claims, assigns blame early, and renders later corrections irrelevant. Western reporting has been conditioned to accept Israeli statements as authoritative and Palestinian accounts as suspect. Narrative discipline replaces verification, and meaning solidifies before the truth can surface.
Conclusion
The consequences of this system reach far beyond misinterpretation. Once a narrative locks into place, it opens a path for action: protest becomes suspect, surveillance appears prudent, and solidarity is recast as imported disorder. Policies harden around these assumptions. Abroad, collective punishment is reframed as preemptive defense. Gaza disappears beneath layers of manufactured inevitability long before the world is ready to absorb the scale of what is being done there.
There is a built-in hierarchy of credibility at work here — one that grants Israeli voices automatic authority while demanding Palestinian voices clear a higher bar just to be heard.
Suspicion, in this landscape, serves a purpose. It interrupts the rush to meaning when that meaning arrives too fully formed and too neatly aligned with the interests of power. Doubt becomes a form of political presence — a way of holding open the space that propaganda tries to seal shut.
The ultimate cost of this machinery is a double betrayal. It betrays Jews by weaponizing their real fear of antisemitism to legitimize a political project that many Jews themselves oppose, fusing Jewish identity with the Israeli state and making all Jews globally accountable for its actions. Simultaneously, it betrays Palestinians by rendering their century-long struggle for self-determination on their own land conceptually invisible, repackaging it as mere antisemitic terror or religious fanaticism. This conflation is the engine that powers the machinery. To interrupt it — to insist on that pause — is to demand the separate dignity of both peoples be seen: the right of Jews to live free from hatred, and the right of Palestinians to live free from occupation.
People like me are not grasping for conspiracies. We are living inside an information order built on speed, amplification, and selective credibility. When meaning arrives already assembled — especially when it predictably shores up the same geopolitical storylines — the responsible response is a pause, not a pledge of allegiance.
That pause is the beginning of literacy — political, historical, and moral. In the Bondi Beach shooting, a verifiable antisemitic atrocity was swiftly woven into geopolitical scripts — illustrating the machinery while underscoring the real human cost.
*Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher, and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank. Visit the author’s blog.
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