This is How It Starts

When news broke of the antisemitic attack at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia over the weekend, my first instinct was disbelief. Bondi is sunlight, surf, and happiness, the opposite of the dark, closed world we associate with ethnic hatred. And then came the second thought, the more unsettling one: of course it happened there. These days, hatred doesn’t require shadows. Increasingly, it reveals itself in broad daylight.

What the Bondi attack exposed was not a new virus but an old one that has learned how to survive in modern conditions. Antisemitism does not announce itself just with uniforms and torches. It reemerges through insinuation, through casual exclusion, through the quiet reclassification of people from neighbors into threats. History teaches that violence is rarely the beginning of this story. It is the punctuation mark at the end of a long paragraph that begins with normalization.

That paragraph was written with chilling clarity in 1930s Germany.

The Nazi persecution of Jews did not begin with death camps. It began with rhetoric and rules and with the steady narrowing of who counted as fully German. Jews were removed from professions, caricatured as corrosive to the national body, and gradually stripped of legal protections. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 formalized this exclusion by redefining citizenship itself, rendering Jews permanent outsiders in the country many had called home for centuries. Everything that followed was built on that legal and moral foundation.

https://saltypolitics.substack.com/p/this-is-how-it-starts