Jews in the diaspora can no longer rely on their governments

It is time Jewish communities create an international self-defense organization.

December 23, 2025

By: Joseph Puder

In the fall of 1993, I visited Sydney, Australia.  Invited to cover the recently built Holocaust Museum, I was struck by how friendly the Australians were.  In both the suburbs of Sydney and the city, it felt like much like what I’d heard the United States was like in the 1950s: safe, friendly, and culturally homogeneous.

In the last decade, a deluge of Muslims arrived in Australia, and today, their population exceeds one million and growing.  The Jewish community numbers around 120,000.  The disparity and relative political influence of the larger group seem to have led the Labor prime minister, Anthony Norman Albanese, to be unmoved by the flurry of antisemitic attacks on Jewish people and institutions.

Time Magazine quoted figures from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) showing that antisemitic incidents have reached historically high levels — almost “five times the average annual number before October 7, 2023.”  The group documented 1,654 anti‑Jewish incidents across Australia between Oct. 1, 2024 and Sept. 30, 2025, in addition to 2,062 incidents nationwide the year before.”  On December 14, 2025, as 2,000 people came to the Sydney suburb of Bondi Beach to celebrate the first night of Chanukah, two Islamist assassins (father and son) opened fire, killing 16 Jewish worshipers, including a beloved rabbi, a Holocaust survivor, and a 10-year-old girl and injuring as many as 42 others.  This was the highest death toll suffered by the Jewish community in recent memory.

Rabbi Eli Schlanger, the Chabad rabbi who was gunned down, had sent Prime Minister Albanese a letter on September 21 asking him to “stand with Israel” and he posted an open letter on Facebook urging him to support Israel, writing: “As a rabbi in Sydney, I beg you not to betray the Jewish people and not to betray G-d Himself.”  This past August, Israel’s prime minister warned Albanese that recognizing a Palestinian state would encourage terror.  Additionally, Israeli intelligence sources had warned the Australians of consequences.

In Manchester, England and now in Sydney, Australia, we see Labor governments that are far more concerned with alienating placating radical Islamists and their leftist fellow travelers than protecting their Jewish citizens.  Calls to “globalize the Intifada” and chants of “from the river to the sea” are not abstract or rhetorical slogans, but rather calls for violence that have deadly consequences.  Sustained radicalization that has been allowed to fester under the guise of “legitimate” protests has led to the death and destruction of innocent citizens.  Yet the governments of both the U.K. and Australia have taken half-hearted measures at best in response.  Complacency and the absence of consequences are a deadly combination and have cost Jewish people their lives.

While radicalized Muslims control the streets of London, Manchester, Melbourne, and Sydney with impunity, Jewish communities need to pay for security guards wherever they congregate — at their places of worship and schools.  This situation negates the guarantee given by democracies to ensure religious freedom.  Instead of applying real deterrence, including long prison sentences and deportation of many of these violent rioters, some of whom are not even full-fledged citizens, the U.K. and Australian governments handle such violence with kid gloves.  It’s no wonder, then, that the Islamists and their radical leftist fellow travelers derive encouragement to continue. 

A new paradigm is needed for the protection of Jews in the diaspora — an International Jewish Defense Organization that would enable rapid responses, provide orderly training for community response teams, and detect and respond to incitement before it becomes violent.  Israeli security and defense experts would serve in an advisory and training capacity to the international board.  While working in full coordination with local governments and law enforcement agencies, International Jewish Defense Organization personnel would carry licensed guns to be used only if attacked and before the police force is able to arrive.

In the 1960s, following attacks on Jews in Brooklyn’s Jewish neighborhoods, a defense group called the Maccabees was established.  Equipped with designated patrol cars and flashlights and armed with baseball bats, their mere presence deterred attacks on individual Jews.  At times, they would restrain an attacker and hold him until the police arrived.  These tough young Jews were able to fight when necessary.  This had a major impact on reducing crime in the Crown Heights neighborhoods and other Brooklyn Jewish communities.  The Maccabees terminated their activities in the early 1970s.

It is apparent that Jewish communities in the West cannot rely on police or other law enforcement agencies to protect them, especially where political correctness, diversity, and multiculturalism have become a religion of sorts.  Additionally, violent Islamists and radical leftists have gotten a slap on their wrist and dismissals by liberal judges, which only encourages more violence.

The last two years have brought unprecedented levels of antisemitism to U.S. and European elite campuses.  Jewish students have been and continue to be intimidated and, at times, physically attacked.  One suggestion is to teach Jewish students self-defense, including Israeli Krav Maga.  Ideally, Israeli elite combat soldiers could be given at least one full year of tuition with room and board to visit an American or European campus.  In return, these Israeli combat veterans would teach the Jewish students how to fight back and instill confidence in them when confronted by attackers, rather than cowering in a dark room with the doors locked while their antisemitic attackers taunt them.

My conclusion is pretty clear: Either Jews in the diaspora learn to defend themselves, and organize an international defense organization, or move to the Jewish state.  One thing is certain: As long as ignorance, scapegoating, sheer bigotry, and hatred persist, antisemitism will continue to exist.  Evil exists in the world, and the Bondi Beach massacre should serve as a much delayed wake-up call.