The Dark Deal That Enabled Bondi: A Bakery, a Warning, a Massacre

Ed Halmagyi’s bakery, Avner’s, became world-famous after the Bondi Beach attack. This story was widely reported: a day after, Halmagyi decided to close Avner’s. The message he left on the door was quoted everywhere:

“In the wake of the pogrom at Bondi one thing has become clear - it is no longer possible to make outwardly, publicly, proudly Jewish places and events safe in Australia.”

The bakery is in a fashionable Sydney suburb, and Halmagyi is a television personality and a well-known figure in Australia’s food scene. Avner’s was supposed to open in September 2023, but its opening was delayed until October. This week, I spoke with Halmagyi. Here are parts of our conversation (the rest was published on my Yediot Ahronot column*).

“For two years, we were dealing with vandalism, harassment, posters that were anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, or straight-up antisemitic. Graffiti on the windows or around the shop. Basically, that was our reality almost every week - five or six days out of seven - for two years.”

Think about that: five or six days a week. Every week. For two years.

“The bakery is in one of Sydney’s more progressive suburbs. That wasn’t by accident. I wanted to open a business that wasn’t in the shtetl. A place that was both Jewish and Australian. Something that celebrated that identity. But as time went on, more and more people just wouldn’t come on principle because it was a Jewish business. You can’t underestimate how deeply this idea has taken hold: that we, as Jews, as a collective, are responsible for every strategic decision made by the Israeli government and everything that happens in Gaza.”

A typical threat, he told me, would be someone stopping outside the shop and saying: “All Jews are the same. You should all be killed.”

On Sunday, police came to brief us that there was a real, immediate threat against us… A few hours later, the massacre happened at Bondi Beach.

“The threats against me and the business were serious. One person tried to set the place on fire, but used diesel - you need heat in order to ignite diesel, so I managed to stop him. On Sunday, police came to brief us that there was a real, immediate threat against us. After that, someone drove past with a Syrian flag, circling and shouting that he was going to come back and kill the Jews. A few hours later, the massacre happened at Bondi Beach.”

“After Bondi, everything changed forever. The question now isn’t whether someone will show up with six guns and his kid, like at Bondi- it’s whether someone comes with a single gun. Or a knife. Everyone knows something else will happen. The only question is how. There aren’t many high-profile Jewish businesses in Sydney. As one of them, I can’t guarantee anymore the safety of customers, my family, or myself anymore. The world changed.”

He spoke about the dream that ended.

“I wanted to show what it means to be Jewish and Australian. A place that was part of the local community. You wouldn’t find a better bagel anywhere in Australia - maybe only a handful better in the United States. Our challah was exceptional. Our babka was world-class. No one needs honey cake - it isn’t essential - but people buy it because it makes them happy. I wanted to make people happy. Parents came in the morning after dropping their kids at school. In the afternoons, we’d draw with chalk on the pavement with the kids.”

But everything changed on Sunday after Bondi. The range of what’s possible expanded—and it now includes the possibility of Jews being massacred simply because they can. Jewish schools and institutions have armed guards, fences, walls. You can’t do that for a bakery. It doesn’t make economic sense, and it destroys the openness, connection to the community, the family atmosphere.”

He is impatient with the wave of sympathy now being expressed towards the Jewish Community; it reminds him of Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews.

“Some of the people expressing solidarity now are the same ones who held racist views, or legitimized violence.”

It doesn’t sound like Halmagyi is leaving.

“I love being Jewish. I love being Australian. I love being part of Sydney. But Sydney is going to have to have a very uncomfortable conversation with itself. Certain attitudes spread through this society over two years and made this massacre possible. When you see a bunch of reckless fools wearing Chinese-made keffiyehs chanting ‘globalize the intifada’ - this is where it leads. Australia allowed it.”

A State-Led Campaign Fanning Jew Hatred

In one sense, the story Halmagyi tells is about antisemitism - pure and simple. There’s no way to deny that the war in Gaza itself enhanced and empowered hostility toward Israelis and toward Jews identifying with Israel. But there is a difference between criticism - even resentment - and placing collective blame on an entire people.

That angle has been widely discussed. To some extent, though, I think this story is no less about enforcement - or rather, the failure to enforce rules and the law in the face of antisemitism. This is not the same thing.

There is a dominant theme out there: the rising tide of anti-Israeli antisemitism following the war is serving as an ideal opportunity for age-old hatred. While there is no question animosity is growing, and the constant images coming from Gaza - together with biased interpretations - have fueled it. But the story is larger than that. This is not a flare-up, not (only) a bottom-up grassroots reaction.

As I wrote last week, Israeli security services believe there is a “power or state-led” campaign that goes beyond encouraging anti-Israeli sentiment. It is now pushing classic antisemitism—globally, and specifically in the West.

At another level - rooted in Australia, Bondi Beach, and a small bakery - this is a story about power structures with a legal and moral duty to stop racist lawlessness against Jews, and their abdication of that duty.

If people repeatedly make death threats outside a bakery in Sydney, day after day, one would expect local police to intervene. Australia demonstrated during COVID that it is fully capable of enforcing its rules - extremely heavy-handedly. Yet demonstrations with flags of terror groups were seen in Sydney again and again after October 7, 2023. Laws were simply not enforced. The pro-Hamas radical echo chamber received a waiver.

This did not happen only in Australia. Look at U.S. campuses. There are no universities or colleges whose rules allow harassment of students, or demonstrations that openly sabotage study – even for the most just cause. And yet, here too, radicals were given a pass. A specific pass to go after Israel, those who support it, and ultimately Jews who identify as Jewish.

The question, of course, is why.

Why would the Sydney police not treat the constant harassment and intimidation of Avner’s as what it was: a vile racist campaign, deserving resources and manpower to stop it? Why would they not see certain phenomena at demonstrations for what they were - clear and present incitement to violence, and promotion of terror groups?

The answer is that there was a deal here. A dark one.

The deal here is murky, but its logic is not. Different governments and power structures arrived at the same outcome from different motives.

Some genuinely despised Israel, or at least its current government, and saw leniency toward anti-Israeli—and anti-Jewish—hate as a way to signal that. Others understood, often quite well, the operational realities of fighting Hamas in Gaza, but were constrained by domestic political coalitions they felt compelled to appease. Think of the reflex, especially visible in parts of the Democratic Harris Campaign, to “hear out” every radical accusation directed at Israel, no matter how extreme or detached from reality.

This dynamic was fed by a media frenzy united less by concern for Palestinians than by fixation on Israel. A bargain emerged: no serious policy shift in the Middle East, no real break with Israel - but a permissive atmosphere at home. More demonstrations. More protests. More “expression.” Much of it aimed, directly or indirectly, at local Jewish communities identified with Israel.

And so, in practice, they struck a dark deal. Jews - most of whom were assumed to be pro-Israel anyway, therefore ‘guilty’ - were sacrificed.

That is what happened to a small bakery in Sydney.

And then, it enabled Bondi Beach.

Reprinted with permission from Nadav Eyal’s Substack Between Us. 

In remembrance of Sophia and Boris Gorman, may their memory be a blessing, who were murdered together on Bondi Beach while trying to disarm one of the terrorists.