The public hearings of Australia’s Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion have opened with a cascade of harrowing testimony, laying bare a surge in hatred that many witnesses say has transformed the country’s social landscape. On the second day, paramedic Joshua Gomperts told the inquiry that a firefighter at a music festival in regional Victoria had pulled a hunting knife and threatened to “skin him”. Another witness, Natalie Levy, described how her daughter now sees swastikas daubed on buildings near her school and attends classes behind triple the usual security. These are not isolated incidents but symptoms of a broader pattern that the commission, led by retired judge Virginia Bell, is tasked with dissecting.

The immediate catalyst for the inquiry was the terror attack at a Jewish Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach in December 2025, which left 15 people dead and triggered demands for tougher gun controls. Yet the hearings have rapidly expanded beyond that single atrocity to examine a climate of intimidation that has worsened since the Hamas assault on Israel on October 7, 2023. From Washington, analysts note that Australia’s experience mirrors a wider Western surge in antisemitism, often linked to events in the Middle East. In London, observers point to the fragility of multicultural models when sectarian anger spills into everyday life. The German press, meanwhile, has framed the proceedings as a painful but necessary reckoning with a hatred that once seemed consigned to history.

The testimony has been relentlessly personal. SBS board member Vic Alhadeff, a former editor of Jewish community news, told the commission that antisemitism had “morphed from being at the edges to front and centre in our ecosystem”. Before October 7, such expressions were socially unacceptable; now, school muck-up days feature jokes about Hitler and costumes mimicking the Bondi shooter. A survivor of the massacre, writing in the Australian Financial Review, described the hearings as reopening still-raw wounds, noting that the hostility Jews face today is not abstract but a lived reality in classrooms, hospitals and sports fields.

The commission has received more than 7,400 submissions and will hold two further blocks of hearings in the coming months. Its challenge is not merely to catalogue grievance but to propose remedies that restore social cohesion without stifling legitimate debate. The evidence so far suggests that Australia is confronting a crisis as profound as it is urgent. Whether the commission can forge a path beyond condemnation will define its legacy.