Israel’s president visits Bondi Beach massacre site, meets victims families
Israeli President Isaac Herzog started a state visit on Monday aimed at consoling grieving Australian Jews and improving bilateral relations by laying a wreath and stones at the site of an antisemitic attack in Sydney that left 15 dead. Herzog met victims’ families and survivors of the Dec. 14 attack on a Jewish festival at Bondi Beach. Only one of the two alleged gunmen survived following a gunbattle with police.
Naveed Akram has been charged with committing a terrorist act, murdering 15 people and wounding another 40 in what was Australia’s worst mass shooting in 29 years. Herzog laid the wreath and two stones he had brought from Jerusalem at the rain-swept Bondi Pavilion near the site of the massacre. The pavilion became an impromptu memorial in the days after the tragedy as flowers and cards were placed there.
The Israeli president said the stones would remain at Bondi in memory of the victims and as a reminder that good people of all faiths and nations “will continue to hold strong in the face of terror, violence and hatred, and that we shall overcome this evil together.” “We were shaken to our core when we first heard about the Bondi Beach attack. Our hearts missed a beat, like all Israelis and all Jews.
And I’m here to express solidarity, friendship, and love,” Herzog told reporters. “And I also believe that this is an opportunity to upgrade the relations between Israel and Australia because we are two democracies that share values together, and we are confronting the roots of evil from all over the world. And we should do so together,” he added. The visit to Bondi within hours of the president landing in Sydney with his wife, Michal Herzog, came with tight security.
Police snipers were posted on Bondi rooftops. Herzog will also visit Melbourne and the national capital, Canberra, before he returns to Israel on Thursday. Sydney and Melbourne are Australia’s largest cities and home to 85 per cent of the nation’s Jewish population.Protests were held in Sydney and Melbourne on Monday over how Israel has waged the war against the militant Hamas group in Gaza and treated Gaza’s civilian.
Hamas attacked southern Israel on October 7, 2023, triggering the war. Mainstream Jewish groups have welcomed the visit of Herzog, a former leader of the centrist Labour Party who now plays a largely ceremonial role. The smaller Jewish Council of Australia community group ran full-page ads in Sydney and Melbourne newspapers on Monday, endorsed with the names of 687 Australian Jews, that said: “Herzog does not speak for us and is NOT WELCOME HERE.”
“We refuse to let our collective grief be used to legitimise a leader whose rhetoric has been part of inciting a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and has contributed to the illegal annexation of the West Bank,” the council’s executive officer, Sarah Schwartz, said. Israel's President Isaac Herzog and his wife Michal Herzog arriving at Bondi Beach for a memorial.
