GENOCIDE eventually emerged as a broadly acceptable descriptor of Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip after more than two years of relentless violence entailing tens of thousands of fatalities. It’s harder to find a single word to describe what happened on Australia’s Bondi Beach last Sunday evening.
A crime against humanity? Antisemitic terrorism? A pogrom? Tick, tick, tick. It is not, however, “reasonable to surmise”, as New York Times columnist Bret Stephens claims, that the father-and-son team of killers thought they were “globalising the intifada” – unless they were as ignorant as Stephens about what the phrase implies.
