At what point does allyship cease to be empathetic and instead become performative? In Australia, gun violence is not part of our daily life. Its sudden emergence has shocked us into searching for simple explanations for far more fractured tensions among friends and family since October 7.
Mourners have created a floral tribute to the victims at the Bondi Pavilion.Credit: Jessica Hromas
For many in the Jewish community, fear did not begin with this shooting. Since October 7, 2023, a persistent sense of vulnerability and anxiety has accompanied daily life. Sometimes this has been expressed quietly and met with dismissal. Others have described this fear as exaggerated, even hysterical. Without immediate and localised violence, it was treated as a global narrative rather than a reality faced by everyday Australian Jews. Then a shooting occurs on the first night of Hanukkah, a time meant to honour resilience and light, then suddenly that fear becomes undeniable.
It is a familiar pattern we have seen in which human societies struggle to take invisible or abstract threats seriously. History shows that belief is rarely extended pre-emptively but is granted retroactively and once the harm becomes visible enough to command attention. Until then, fear is negotiable and even weaponised, resulting in fractured friendship where trust dissolves.
We have seen this before, most recently during COVID. The pandemic did not only test public health systems. It tested relationships. Friendships, including mine, were fractured along ideological lines. Families stopped speaking. People were cut off not because of personal harm, but because of perceived moral or epistemic betrayal around where they positioned themselves when it came to vaccines. I lost friendships during that period, not through gradual drifting but through deliberate severing. Some people decided that anyone who did not align with their version of reality, their interpretation of data, or their chosen narrative, could not remain in their lives.
The same dynamic has continued to play out from the time of the first Trump presidency, as political identity has become a definitive statement of personal morality and disagreement experienced as an unforgivable breach. Research has since shown that political polarisation during that period tore at families and friendships, not because people lacked care but because belief systems hardened them. To disagree was to fundamentally threaten another’s sense of reality.
In each case, social media accelerated the process. Platforms became vindicating echo chambers, flattening complex realities into slogans and turning belief into performance. Nuance becomes suspicious and silence becomes complicity. Relationships are forced to carry the weight of ideological purity and a differing perception of threats.
The current moment carries echoes of those earlier fractures.
Since the shooting, I have experienced an outpouring of solidarity. Messages arrived rapidly and my WhatsApp groups were going crazy on Sunday night. My husband and I lit our Hanukkah candles, shaken, sombre, defiant. Public statements were made. Many were absolutely sincere and generous. But while they comfort, they can also ring hollow. For those who have lived with fear since October 7, this sudden overwhelming support can feel a bit performative. What does it mean to be believed only once violence makes the danger undeniable? How does one integrate care that arrives after a long period of dismissal?
Validation, when delayed, reshapes relationships, and social media intensifies this tension by demanding visible responses – in real time. Solidarity must be expressed publicly and fear must be articulated clearly and quickly. Grief must be legible to an audience, align with their political narratives and catch on to the algorithm to be valued.
This creates pressure not only to suffer publicly but to perform suffering correctly.
For those inside the community, this adds a secondary burden. They are expected to reassure others and to move toward unity without asking any questions about the ambivalence that they experienced prior to it becoming “real”. Ambivalence and empathy can’t coexist in a friendship, especially when dealing with a community you can’t relate to.
When asked what comes next for the community, the instinct is to look for plans or announcements. But communities are not systems that can be reset with statements. They are networks of relationships, trust and memory. What comes next cannot be imposed from outside; what comes next is quieter work of repairing trust where it has been strained by years of disbelief. It is the work of allowing fear to be acknowledged without being weaponised. It is the work of resisting the urge to rush toward resolution simply because public attention has peaked.
It is also the work of learning from recent history. COVID and the Trump era taught us how quickly belief systems can override relationships, and how easily moral certainty can justify a lack of empathy for situations not easily understood. If there is a lesson to carry forward, it is that fear should not have to prove itself through tragedy on a public stage.
Unity does not mean elimination of political nuance; it means staying in a relationship even when understanding arrives late and imperfectly. It means allowing people to hold complicated emotions and opinions without demanding that they collapse them into declarations or slogans.
The true test of solidarity is not how loudly it is expressed in moments of crisis, but whether it persists when the crisis is no longer visible in your friend’s story.
What comes next must not be more noise or performance but a willingness to believe people before history forces us to.
Alexandra Senter is the CEO of The Sentral Media Group and director of The Jewish Independent.
Most Viewed in National
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
