Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu wrote a heartfelt response to the murderous terrorist attack in Bondi Beach, Sydney, during a Hanukkah candle-lighting event, “The terrorists who murdered and injured Jews at a Hanukkah party in Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia remind us, painfully, that cruel and murderous antisemitism has never disappeared from the world.”
“It may wear different clothes,” he said, “but it is always the same - anti-Jewish, anti-Jews."
Rabbi Eliyahu continued, “It does not matter if the Jews are Chabad or settlers, religious or secular, left or right. The hatred remains. The terrorists in Australia and France are no different from those who attacked Jews in southern Israel on Simchat Torah (October 7, 2023). The same insane, pathological hatred drove them as it drove Hitler in the Holocaust. For thousands of years, it has caused the expulsion, dispossession, and suffering of Jews - from Spain to Portugal, from Italy to France, from England to everywhere.”
He added that, “Antisemites always invent a ‘good reason.’ During the Crusades, entire communities were slaughtered because Jews allegedly killed Jesus. During the Inquisition, families were burned at the stake for “corrupting” Christians. In Russia, pogroms erupted because Jews were wealthy. Even the Arab mobs in Damascus claimed Jews had killed a monk to mix his blood into Passover matzah.”
“Some hatred has no reason at all,” Rabbi Eliyahu lamented. “The Arabs who rioted against Jews in Safed in 1929 had no settlements, no occupation - yet blind hatred always invents a reason. This is how Iranians declare their desire to destroy Israel. This is how Hamas writes a charter calling for our annihilation. This is how Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) denies the Holocaust.”
“Their aim is clear: to erase every feeling of pity for the Jewish people, who have suffered under persecutors for millennia. Innocent Jews have always wanted to believe in the fabricated “reasons” of antisemites, rather than in the abyssal, unthinking hatred itself. Because of this innocence, we signed the Oslo Accords, gave away land from the Land of Israel, gave them weapons - not knowing those weapons would eventually be turned against us, killing Jews simply out of hatred.”
“Had we remembered this principle before the disengagement,” Rabbi Eliyahu says sadly, “we would have understood that every area evacuated in Gaza would become a breeding ground for terror - as indeed it did. We chose innocence, thinking we had a real solution - and the price was paid in thousands of deaths and captives.”
“The good and innocent people of the kibbutzim surrounding Gaza tried with all their hearts to do good for the Arabs, believing they would be loved in return. Had they understood the depth of this hatred, they would have known that one day these same Arabs would murder their children, commit atrocities, and destroy everything they could reach.”
“We must return to our sources and not follow foreign agendas promising a ‘new Middle East.’ These promises are illusions, disconnected from reality. We must return to the living waters of authentic Judaism, and not follow broken vessels that cannot contain them,” he stated.
“When we return to our biblical sources, we remember: “Jacob has long been hated.” Yet the day will come when our enemies will be divided. Some will vanish from the world in their wickedness and hatred. Others will change, realizing that God created the world and arranged it according to His will. He assigned Egypt to Egypt, and the Land of Israel to the people of Israel,” Rabbi Eliyahu adds with anticipation.
“He also decreed that the Jewish people must illuminate the world with justice and righteousness, as occurred after the victory of Hanukkah. And He has destined that we, too, will one day be a light to the nations - and so it shall be, with God’s help. Amen,” Rabbi Eliyahu concluded.