The Genocidal Israeli President Is Officially Visiting Australia to Promote Social Cohesion

Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese announced on 23 December 2025 that governor general Sam Mostyn would be extending an invitation to Israeli president Isaac Herzog to visit this country in the wake of the Bondi Beach massacre. However, the fact that Herzog has overseen his nation’s 26-month-long genocide in Gaza, is leaving a lot of constituents uneasy about this prospect.

The invite was officially extended after it was known that Zionist Federation of Australia president Jeremy Liebler had already invited Herzog in the aftermath of the 14 December 2025 Bondi Beach mass shooting, so that the Israeli president can meet with the grieving families of the victims of the massacre. Liebler too welcomed the invitation being turned into a state visit.

The Bondi massacre was perpetrated by an ISIS-inspired father and son, who targeted a Jewish religious festival taking place in a park, killing 15 people and injuring 40-odd more, which has since been deemed a terror-related incident. And the NSW premier has too suggested the 2-year-old local secular pro-Palestine/antigenocide movement somehow influenced the killers, with no proof of this.

Killers Sajid and Naveed Akram stated in footage that they were acting out of a rejection of Zionist actions. ISIS, however, has no real link to Palestinian militant groups or the secular nonviolent global solidarity movement for Palestine. And many consider Australian Jews were targeted in relation to Israeli atrocities, even though many local Jewish Australians don’t even support Israel.

Politicians of the right attacked Albanese, blaming him for the Bondi massacre, as he didn’t do enough to crack down on antisemitism prior. So, the PM’s invite to Herzog is likely in response to this onslaught. However, to host a politician, who is presiding over a large-scale genocide, in order to bring about social cohesion after the Bondi incident, appears to rather threaten further division.

Killing in the name of

“This decision represents a grave moral failure and a direct insult to the hundreds of thousands of Australians who have spent more than two years protesting Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians and demanding accountability under international law,” said the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN) in a 24 December press release.

“President Herzog is not a symbolic or ceremonial figure. As Israel’s head of state throughout its genocidal assault on Gaza, he has made public statements widely condemned as genocidal intent, including asserting that an ‘entire nation’ bears responsibility and that ‘there are no innocent civilians in Gaza’,” the advocacy network added.

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel said on 25 September, that Israel has been committing genocide on the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip. The commission further called upon Israel and other nations to fulfil their legal obligations to end genocide, under the 1948 Genocide Convention.

The assessment found that Israel was perpetrating four of the five forms of genocide in the Gaza Strip, in terms of committing genocide by killing, “causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the Palestinians, in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent births”.

The commission further determined that Israeli president Isaac Herzog, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant “have incited the commission of genocide and that Israeli authorities have failed to take action against them to punish this incitement”.

A recipe for more social division

Israel has been committing a “plausible genocide” in Gaza, since early October 2023. The mass slaughter has taken the lives of thousands upon thousands of Palestinian children, women and men. Yet, local attempts to downplay or hide Israel’s mass atrocities, especially under the guise of it merely acting in self-defence, has created grievances and tensions amongst the broader constiuency.

The slaughter in Gaza has further seen the formation of a large local Palestine solidarity movement. Its peak moment was a 3 August 2025 march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge that saw at least 100,000 demonstrate to call for an end to the genocide. And this was the event that NSW premier Chris Minns homed in on, when insisting the nonviolent movement influenced the Bondi killings.

Yet, ISIS has nothing to do with secular civil society movements for Palestine. Rather the scenario that multiple commentators considered was behind the Bondi Beach massacre was that extremists targeted Australian Jewish people precisely because of Israel’s policies in the Middle East, and in particular, it’s large-scale genocide that marks the worst atrocity since the World War II Holocaust.

The reason this conflation of Jews globally with Israel is common is that since 1948, Israel has presented itself as the Jewish state and the key representative of Judaism. Since the late 1960s, Israel advocates have too been forging a conflation between antisemitism and criticism of Israel, in order to deflect critics of Israeli human rights abuses, as it’s being construed as hatred towards Jews.

So, given the circumstances that Jewish people globally are at times targeted or harmed because of the crimes of Israel, and even though many Australian Jews don’t support Israel or its political doctrine of Zionism, the issue with having president Herzog over is that it would suggest that this country supports the Gaza genocide, and that its Jewish population are aligned with that state.

I told you so

In keeping with Israel presenting itself as the chief authority on Judaism, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu held a press conference straight after the Bondi Beach massacre and called out Albanese as to blame for the murders. The Israeli PM added that he’d sent a letter warning Albanese four months ago that if he did not crack down on antisemitism in this country then a tragedy could occur.

“Prime minister you replaced weakness with weakness and appeasement with more appeasement,” Netanyahu continued, “Your government did nothing to stop the spread of antisemitism in Australia. You did nothing to curb the cancer cells that were growing inside your country. You took no action. You let the disease spread.”

Netanyahu further inferred that a key reason for the antisemitic mass shooting at Bondi occurring, was that Australia recognised the state of Palestine in September 2025. However, the fact that ISIS affiliated individuals perpetrated the mass shooting in Sydney’s east again reveals that Albanese’s recognition of Palestine had nothing to do with the Bondi massacre.

But if Herzog’s visit does go ahead, the message sent to any potential terrorist types, like the Akrams, is that despite the massacre and starvation program in Gaza over the last 26 months, Australia is aligned with Israel and its foreign policy, and further, as the recognized genocidal Israeli official does visit, his presence may lead to further negative sentiments about the local Jewish population.