The police had under­tak­en some gen­uine­ly remark­able detec­tive work. In a short time, they formed the view that 14 inci­dents of vio­lent anti­semitism that made fire­bomb­ings in the dead of night in res­i­den­tial areas a fact of life for Aus­tralians gen­er­al­ly, and the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty more specif­i­cal­ly, were all con­nect­ed to a trail­er packed with explo­sives and a mys­te­ri­ous crim­i­nal enter­prise.

It was a ter­ri­fy­ing devel­op­ment. Since Octo­ber 7, 2023, the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty has lived with pub­lic demon­stra­tions glo­ri­fy­ing ter­ror­ist lead­ers and laud­ing mass mur­der as a “day of courage and a day of pride”. It has endured the trag­ic cap­tiv­i­ty of hun­dreds of peo­ple, sadis­tic doxxing cam­paigns, street abuse, van­dal­ism, harass­ment in schools and uni­ver­si­ties, and the destruc­tion of a syn­a­gogue built by Holo­caust sur­vivors.

Now, in addi­tion to con­ven­tion­al anti­se­mit­ic forces, we had to come to terms with alle­ga­tions that hard­ened crim­i­nals were pay­ing low-lev­el hood­lums through a shad­owy mob struc­ture to take Aus­tralian anti­semitism to a whole new lev­el. We were now deal­ing with claims of indi­vid­u­als some­how get­ting their hands on enough explo­sives to cre­ate a 40-metre blast, and we learnt of alle­ga­tions that there were Aus­tralians who prob­a­bly didn’t know what a Jew was, but for a few bucks were hap­py to risk burn­ing them in their beds.

Yet some held the line that it was all a “hoax”, a “crim­i­nal con-job”, “fake”, “fab­ri­ca­tion”. We could rest easy because no one alleged­ly asso­ci­at­ed with it seemed to have any­thing against Jews. They alleged­ly only want­ed to strength­en their hand in a plea bar­gain in some macabre, inscrutable plot that would be the work of a Pro­fes­sor Mori­ar­ty-like crim­i­nal genius, if the whole thing weren’t so patent­ly stu­pid.

As soon as the announce­ment was made, we con­front­ed a surge of hate­ful mes­sages on social media – claims that anti­semitism itself is a hoax and a lie, and that every­thing that’s hap­pened either hasn’t, or that the Jews just did it to them­selves because that’s what they do.

The whole fight against anti­semitism seemed to evap­o­rate. New laws ban­ning protests near places of wor­ship are now the sub­ject of a Supreme Court chal­lenge, on the basis that they were enact­ed to pro­tect Jews from some­thing that didn’t real­ly hap­pen.

The oth­er les­son that was spelt out for us by com­men­ta­tors and politi­cians fol­low­ing the police announce­ment was that we mustn’t be too hasty in pass­ing judg­ment. If you see a trail­er packed with explo­sives and a note refer­ring to Jew­ish tar­gets, it could all be noth­ing. If syn­a­gogues, for­mer homes of com­mu­ni­ty lead­ers and child­care cen­tres are tar­get­ed in fire­bomb­ings, and phras­es like “f— the Jews” are daubed on cars, don’t rush to think the per­pe­tra­tors have a prob­lem with Jews.

The great irony, of course, is that those who took the oppor­tu­ni­ty to unleash on their polit­i­cal adver­saries the sec­ond the police announce­ment was made had them­selves com­mit­ted the same offence. In rul­ing out anti­semitism as a motive, even though it wasn’t ran­dom build­ings that were tar­get­ed or Hin­du tem­ples or (Sikh) gur­d­waras, they had inex­plic­a­bly jumped the gun.

When fine jour­nal­is­tic work uncov­ered that the sus­pect­ed mas­ter­mind was a rabid anti­semite of the “Hitler was only wash­ing the Earth” and 9/11 was an “inside job” vari­ety, no one was at all sur­prised. Yet anti­semitism had already been stripped out of the sto­ry and all that remained in the pub­lic con­scious­ness was the word “hoax”.

Per­haps the ulti­mate insult from all this was the head-pat­ting direct­ed at the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty. We were told that while none of this hap­pened or, if it did, it wasn’t real­ly about us any­way, we were still jus­ti­fied in being some­what alarmed when, for exam­ple, my fam­i­ly and I were osten­si­bly tar­get­ed, or a child­care cen­tre next to a syn­a­gogue was incin­er­at­ed. In essence, we were treat­ed like hys­ter­ics who need­ed a stiff drink and a lie-down.