Australia needs to look closely at what happened leading up to and during the attack against Jews at a Chanukah event on Bondi Beach in Sydney on Dec. 14, 2025, when gunmen killed 15 people and hurt more than 40, according to Yehuda Kaploun, a rabbi and U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism at the State Department.
“In many of the countries that have Holocaust envoys or antisemitism envoys, you have to empower them to be able to do something to be effective,” Kaploun told reporters in Washington on Monday. “You can’t neuter them.”
For years before the attack, Jillian Segal, Australia’s Jew-hatred envoy, made “numerous” recommendations “about how to protect students on campus, how to educate people against hate,” Kaploun told reporters. “They fell on deaf ears.”
A royal commission report on Jew-hatred is slated to be released after the first anniversary of the attack.
“It’s very important that people who allowed that behavior to happen and occur be held accountable,” Kaploun said. “There is a question as to how they allow someone that’s on a watch list to acquire weapons.”
He said that Australia has “taken a blanket role in accepting all of her recommendations now.”
“Imagine if they would have done that two years before,” he told reporters.
Kaploun said that things look better elsewhere in the world.
“Latin America is transforming in front of our eyes in many aspects,” he said.
Jews can walk streets safely in Argentina today, according to Kaploun. In 1994, Iran-linked terrorists bombed a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. The Argentinian government was accused of covering up the origins of the attack at the time.
The Colombian government has improved both its relations with local Jews and with Israel, according to the special envoy.
“You see how a country with the right leadership is able to stand up and confront hatred,” he told reporters. “They’ve made it very, very clear that Colombian Jewish community members are welcome, which wasn’t always the case in the previous administration.”
Kaploun said that the State Department has worked quietly on these issues and on educating children to prevent the spread of Jew-hatred.
“If I can teach a 7-year-old child to not hate, so when he’s 18 or 19, he’s not influenced to go take a gun and go shoot up something, because he’s now informed, he’s not an ignorant person—that’s our success,” Kaploun told reporters. “That’s the goal that we have every single day in our office.”
JNS asked Kaploun about Belgium and France summoning the U.S. envoys stationed there—Bill White and Charles Kushner, respectively—for publicly decrying what they said was Jew-hatred in the countries.
“Each case is looked at by the State Department and how we want to pursue it, what levels we want to talk about it,” Kaploun told JNS. “Bill White has taken a stand not just on antisemitism but also on the infringement of religious rights for circumcision and also slaughtering of animals, which also affects the Muslim community.”
Kaploun said that on his first diplomatic visit to Belgium, he visited a synagogue in Liege that had been firebombed in March and met with Belgian Jews, who were shaken by rising antisemitism.
Meetings with Belgian officials led to military protection of communities in Brussels, Antwerp and Liege, he said.
“Three days later, they caught three teenagers, who were being hired by the Iranian government to firebomb a synagogue, and as a result, they designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization,” Kaploun told JNS.
“Little things matter in this job,” he said. “The ability to talk to leaders, the ability to challenge people, the ability to ask them to do better. That can’t be measured.”
