PARTISAN!

Both left-wing and right-wing pundits have exploited the horrific events of the Bondi shooting in 2025 for their own means. Left-wing pundits in the “anti-colonial” camp, such as Matt Chun, argue that the shooting is settler colonialism’s comeuppance. Max J & Porco argue that Matt Chun’s contribution to the Bondi shooting discussion demonstrates a nihilistic worldview that spurns any possibility of human liberation.

In January, an article written by middle class artist and former cafe owner Matt Chun circulated amongst the online left, concerning the events that took place in Bondi last December, entitled We don’t mourn fascists [alt]. Chun’s thesis is that the Bondi shooting should not be considered a significant event, and that the Left’s focus on it highlights the “liberal capitulation” or “reflexive Zionist framing” of settler-Australians.

On display in Chun’s writing is a deeply nihilistic and paranoid form of “anti-colonial” politics which is more concerned with moralist justifications for mass shootings than putting forward a positive program for the liberation of Indigenous peoples. Chun’s worldview, in tandem with the mainstream ‘left’ style of decolonialism, is skeptical of any kind of universal human liberation. Since white people are irrevocably evil for being settlers, there’s no chance that a majority of people in Australia would ever willingly support Indigenous liberation. Therefore, Indigenous peoples can only liberate themselves through individual terrorism and other forms of direct action, all the while appealing to the guilty conscience of liberal Australia. Conveniently, none of the advocates for anti-colonial terrorism ever do any of it themselves, though some, like Keiran Stewart-Assheton of the Black People’s Union, try to goad their social media followers into doing it for them.

Chun’s article frontloads his soft defence of the Islamic State (IS) organisation by throwing out a smorgasbord of random facts about Chabad and the Bondi event. Chun complains that the Left (who?) has not mentioned the Chabad and Zionist affiliations of some of those who died that day, but remarkably, he is unable to tell you who exactly did the shooting. You would think that the fifteen victims collapsed and died for no reason. In reality, this shooting was carried out by two Pakistani-Australian men (Chun’s “settlers of colour”) who were sympathisers of the Islamic State – an organisation that hates Palestinian liberation almost as much as it hates Jews.

“The majority of these statements were made on the premise of Australian exceptionalism: This kind of thing shouldn’t happen here. Bondi Beach is a prized settler playground within the walled garden of the empire. While violence is cordoned off, amassed, and normalised in places like Palestine, violence simply does not belong on an iconic Aussie beach (bloody British colonial crime scene on stolen Bidiagal, Birrabirragal, and Gadigal land notwithstanding).”

While Chun is right to criticise the “this kind of thing doesn’t happen here” line, much of the rest of his article is indicative of the vague, incoherent politics of the “anti-colonial” activist left. His poor analysis fails to treat the tragic events with the nuance that it requires, instead weaving a simplistic narrative of settler-colonial fascists being gunned down by anonymous avengers, as opposed toJews being murdered and maimed by Salafi extremists. Chun tries to sledge Palestinian solidarity groups by declaring that they agree with the same framing on the attack as Benjamin Netanyahu: that the attack was an antisemitic hate crime. Far from the truth, Netanyahu actually loves the Bondi shooting, since it provides a justification for ramping up pressure on the Australian state to suppress the Palestinian solidarity movement. It also reinforces the foundational argument for Zionism, the narrative that Netanyahu and his ilk continue to push: that Jews are unsafe anywhere other than Israel. All the while, Chun agrees with Chris Minns’s framing of the shooting, that it was inexplicably connected to Palestine.

Chun’s article does a disservice to the international movement to support Palestine. He not only downplays the tragic events that took place, he ignores that it was an attack carried out by Salafi extremists who hate Palestinians as well as Jews. It is hard to imagine that the Islamic State organisation trained the Akrams to carry out a mass shooting to avenge the deaths of people the Islamic State also would’ve mass murdered if they had the chance. The Islamic State organisation is opposed to Palestinian liberation, and has murdered Palestinian resistance fighters in the past. They are guilty of heinous crimes against humanity, just like Israel. Chun disagrees, mentioning terrorism in quotation marks:

“In the scramble to distance themselves from ‘terrorism’, Australian progressives have also failed to engage meaningfully with Islam, or offer any coherent analysis of its varied and disparate political formations, allowing Zionist media to fill the gap with collapsed definitions and orientalist tropes.”

The great irony of this point of view from Chun is it relies on a fundamentally simplistic and orientalist perspective of Islam. He is implicitly equating Pakistani-Australians radicalised by IS with Palestinian resistance fighters, and he never elaborates on what “meaningfully engaging” with Islam would look like. He assumes that by saying “disparate political formations”, he can save himself the effort of actually engaging with the social scourge that violent Salafi extremism represents within the Islamic world. Radical Salafist Islam, especially of the IS variety, has reaped untold suffering all over the middle east: from weaponised rape, filmed beheadings of foreign journalists, the genocides of religious and ethnic minorities, the list goes on. This is not say that we can be silent about Israel’s eerily similar actions (radical religious extremism always ends up justifying genocide and mass suffering), but Matt Chun seems intent on downplaying any role IS might have in the vile massacre that occurred in Bondi. Would he defend IS massacring Palestinians in a refugee camp in Syria?

“This audacious display of Jewish Zionist colonisation — under the guise of Hannukah — illustrates the deep fascism of a community that, while enacting a genocide, insists upon perpetual Jewish victimhood, purity, and impunity… The shooting was immediately condemned as an antisemitic hate crime, a framing shared by major Australian Palestine solidarity groups, ‘antizionist’ collectives, and Benjamin Netanyahu… White, Jewish settler victimhood demands exceptional, heightened grief. While the colonised are bulldozed into mass graves, the death of a single coloniser must shake the earth.”

The main failing of “anti-colonialism” in Matt Chun’s conception, is that it theorises “the settler” as being a fundamental, inherent characteristic of individuals. This is contrasted with settler-colonialism as a relational dynamic, where people are settlers because of their relationship to indigenous people; if these relations can be changed, the dichotomy between settler and indigenous people ceases to exist.

In settler-colonial society, the settler is someone who invades a territory, previously inhabited, to displace its original inhabitants, and establish colonies. Generally, these colonies took the form of settlements for resource extraction or agricultural production. In Australia, settlers first came in droves after the so-called “First Fleet” of the 1780s, after which colonisation began. These settlers were empowered by the British state to occupy Indigenous lands which drove Indigenous peoples toward the periphery. Many occupied the land as ‘squatters’, and used the land as pasture for their herds. Others built mines or cattle stations. In Israel, the settlers came in droves after the so-called “Arab-Israeli” war in 1948. Just like in early Australia, Israeli settlers occupied the land and established colonies, notably, the kibbutz. Settler-colonialism is advanced through the military power of the settler state, backed by a foreign imperial power. Australia’s colonies were backed by the British, Israel was backed first by the British as well, before turning to the United States. There are still settler colonial dynamics in Australia that remain past the period of direct colonisation.

However, the use of the word settler to describe every non-indigenous person in Australia actually only provides cover for the violent, racist Australians, protected by the police (who have their own distinct colonial qualities) infringing on indigenous communities or traditional lands to this day. A white person born in Sydney, who walks through Bondi park and must work to pay rent, did not commit the massacres Matt Chun refers to, though they still exist in a hierarchical relationship with Indigenous peoples and black workers – a capitalist racial order that has similarities to both settler and non-settler capitalist states. The vast majority of Australian workers, white or otherwise, cannot be reasonably called “settlers” if the term is to have any explanatory meaning.

Matt Chun complains that people are mourning the Bondi shooting, and believes people shouldn’t be. It is, in the minds of Chun and others, an example of “Jewish self-victimization”. What makes murdered Palestinians any more (or less) deserving of sympathy than murdered Jewish people in Bondi? Is it “more moral” to carry out senseless acts of mass murder against settlers? If white Australian settlers (we might prefer to use the term workers) are essentially enemies to Indigenous people, the only option is either genocide or forced repatriation. Vulgar anti-colonial activists and influencers will often deny this fact, but it is implicit in all political claims about the essentially alien nature of “settler-descended” peoples.

The Palestinians in Gaza are a ghettoized people being industrially slaughtered by an incredibly powerful, well-funded state military. Meanwhile, the Jews at Bondi were murdered by poorly armed Salafi extremists. But for Matt Chun, strangely, a ten year old girl at a petting zoo is a fascist settler Zionist for being at a petting zoo that has a Chabadnik standing next to it. How, then, are ten year old girls in Gaza not Islamist extremists for living next to Hamas members? This is to say that Matt Chun’s false framing minimises the human suffering of ten year old girls being slaughtered anywhere, and is really just trying to find ‘loopholes’ for justifiable mass murder. This is a manipulative rhetorical trick which brings to question whether Chun is genuinely committed to liberatory politics, or whether he just wants to pontificate on which mass shootings are defensible.

By focusing on how “bad” some of the victims were, and bashing the Left for rightfully being dismayed by it, Matt Chun implicitly defends the shooting. He seems to imply that the shooting was a retaliatory attack against Chabad for its support of the genocide in Gaza. However, had a Palestinian from Gaza shot the Chabad Rabbi at the Bondi event, as opposed to a mass shooting targeting all attendees (and thus not the Chabad members in particular), the whole dynamic would be completely different. Instead, the attack was carried out by IS sympathisers targeting Jewish people at a Hanukkah event, which just so happened to have Chabad involved. It’s hard to read Chun’s article and not get a sense that Chun is simply trying to defend Salafis shooting Jews at Bondi, with intellectual-sounding verbiage.

Chun’s piece is a confusing mess. It is illustrative of the current state of the “anti-colonial” activist left: it is incoherent, with vague politics, using random factoids to justify bad political conclusions. These kinds of pieces do serious damage to the real movement for liberation. Already, the Jerusalem Post has written an article covering Chun’s piece. Chun’s article has no serious analysis, and he spends most of the article attacking the Left on very spurious grounds.

The Bondi shooting was a horrific massacre, and is already producing terrible consequences for the Left and the workers movement. This is in part because the rightwing media, the NSW Minns government and the Zionist lobby agree with Matt Chun that this shooting was about more than just nihilistic antisemitism, it was about Palestine specifically. This provides a justification to police peaceful protests in NSW and ramp up attacks on the Palestine movement nationally. The Left should be united in rejecting this slander, not trying to cannibalise itself because not enough people support IS terror attacks. A united socialist left would be far more effective at engaging in anti-colonial action than the currently disparate, artisanal sectarian marketplace we find ourselves in. But what would this unity look like?

Unity must be built around a common political program, or set of demands we can all agree on. It seems uncontroversial to say that we on the left all support the abolition of the monarchy, and the creation of some kind of democratic republic that involves a treaty, truth-telling and reparations for Indigenous Australians. This would be the first step to a truly decolonised society. If the radical left was united around this demand among many, we could probably win masses of Australian workers to our revolutionary program for decolonisation. More needs to be done, but destroying the colony must entail concrete actions, it cannot be left to haughty and hysterical social media posts. It won’t come from high-and-mighty sloganeering.

Decolonisation, which is undeniably necessary in a place like Australia, must include the destruction of capitalism, and the eventual transcending by the working class of national, racial, sexual, gendered and religious divisions. The working class is united in its struggle against capitalist social relations because workers do not need these regressive forms of domination to reproduce and organise themselves, or to eventually flourish. The communist movement of the future will shed the abstractions which uphold this domination. Matt Chun is living in the past; haunted by phantasms cooked up by his middle-class imagination. A liberated future requires mass working class struggle, where white Australians, Arabs, Indigenous peoples, refugees and migrants and anti-Zionist Jews find common cause in the struggle for communism. Because it is only communism that can stop the violence.