Australia wakes to more antisemitic graffiti after a discovery of explosives was revealed by police
MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Three more incidents of antisemitic graffiti were found across Sydney on Thursday morning, leading Australian political leaders to warn of an escalation in hatred and decry as terrorism explosives found earlier in a trailer on the city’s outskirts.
Law enforcement earlier this month found a list of Jewish targets together with a cache of Powergel — an explosive used in the mining industry — in Sydney's outer suburb of Dural, state police said Wednesday. The amount uncovered could create a bomb with a blast zone of around 40 meters (130 feet), officers said.
“This represents, undeniably, an escalation in race hatred, race-filled hatred and potential violence in New South Wales,” the state’s Premier Chris Minns told reporters on Thursday.
News of the discovery — which police chiefs said was leaked to a newspaper, compromising a clandestine investigation — followed months of antisemitic arson, window-smashing and graffiti in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia's most populous cities, concentrated in the areas where many Jewish people live. Thursday's target included a Jewish school.
“It is utterly appalling and shameful,” Minns said. A police investigation into months of such crimes has prompted 10 arrests and Minns expected more.
Since the Israel-Hamas war began in 2023, targeted arson — including at a child care center — and graffiti attacks have soared in Sydney and Melbourne, home to 85% of the country’s Jewish population. One person has been physically hurt — a worshipper who suffered burns in a fire that was set at a Melbourne synagogue in December.
A joint counterterrorism team involving federal and state law enforcement is investigating — and this month its leaders said they were investigating whether criminals for hire were being paid by foreign actors to carry out the attacks. Australia Federal Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw did not name what foreign interests the taskforce believed were responsible.
Those suggestions were renewed on Thursday when New South Wales Deputy Police Commissioner David Hudson said police believed some of the attacks “were being orchestrated by others,” rather than those arrested.
“We haven't identified any of the individuals of the 10 charged with any specific ideology that would cause them to to commit the acts that they've committed,” Hudson said. He added that officers had found links between certain occupations, but did not supply more details.
The owner of the trailer was one the 10 people arrested and was already in custody when the explosives were found on Jan. 19, Hudson said. Police were speaking to the makers of the explosives, which are exclusively used in mining, he added.
The contents of the trailer were "clearly designed to harm people, but it's also designed to create fear in the community,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. He affirmed Minns' characterization of the episode as a potential act of terrorism — although he also noted that state police have not formally classified it that way.
Police chiefs said a terrorism designation would not change what charges could be applied to those responsible. They did not believe there was more risk from explosives, they said.
Israel's Foreign Minister Gideon Saar called the potential trailer attack “intolerable” in a post on the social platform X.
“The epidemic of antisemitism is spreading in Australia almost unchecked,” he wrote. “We expect the Australian government to do more to stop this disease!”
Peter Wertheim from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry said many in his community were anxious.
“We are angry because we are seeing that the Australia that we have been fortunate enough to live in ourselves, a land of freedom, fair-mindedness, civilized norms of behavior and the rule of law, is starting to slip away from us,” he said.
Julian Leeser, the federal Liberal MP who represents Dural — and is Jewish — told the ABC that Sydney since the start of the year had “almost every night” experienced “increasing antisemitic attacks and terrorist attacks against one group of law abiding Australians.”
Ahead of a national election in the first half of this year, antisemitism has become a fraught political matter, with center-left Labor, the ruling party, frequently lambasted by the right-leaning opposition, as well as some Jewish leaders and news outlets, for insufficient action.
However, a spokesperson for another Jewish group — Sarah Schwartz of the Jewish Council of Australia, writing in the Guardian on Wednesday — accused the government's critics of politicizing the hateful crimes and employing “confected and self-serving” concern for Jews.
Leeser “entirely” rejected that charge. “This is not a government that has done everything that it can,” he told the ABC. He urged a judicial inquiry into antisemitism on college campuses, stiffer penalties and more agency collaboration.
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Graham-McLay reported from Wellington, New Zealand.
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