The pro-Palestine contingent chanted “Israel is a terror state” as they left the beach, and despite the attempts by police to keep the two groups separate, some lingered at the beach as tempers began to flare.
Michael Gencher, executive director of StandWithUs Australia, a pro-Zionist group, helped set up the counterprotest at short notice. He said it was “targeted provocation” to hold a pro-Palestine demonstration at Bondi in the face of the area’s large Jewish population.
“I think that we’ve ignored enough as a community. We have been intimidated and, you know, we’ve had vandalism, graffiti, and now this is in broad daylight. We saw this as a huge crossing of a red line. We don’t want to pick a fight [but] why should we feel intimidated?” he said.
But Michelle Berkon, from the group Jews Against the Occupation, who helped organise the protest, said she was a Bondi local, and she laughed off the counterprotest.
“If Jews choose to support a genocidal, colonial regime, that’s their problem,” she said.
“They do not have any right to exclude people from their own public spaces. We’re Jewish too. I was born and grew up in Bondi, and even if I didn’t, I have every right to come here.”
The Australian Jewish Association helped to co-ordinate a counter-protest to the event, saying it was “provocative” to hold the paddle-out in Bondi because of the eastern suburb’s Jewish population.
“Bondi is on edge, everyone is nervous,” AJA chief executive Robert Gregory told Seven News in the lead-up to the event, claiming the pro-Palestinian protesters were “troublemakers coming from outside the area”.
The paddle-out was also opposed by Waverley mayor Will Nemesh, who tried to have it blocked by writing to the NSW Police Minister Yasmin Catley.