Dvir Abramovich: Time to ask hard questions as Royal commission brings no triumph, but there is relief

The strangest moment came after the announcement. Not the cameras. Not the statements. The quiet. I was alone, watching the Prime Minister confirm a federal royal commission into antisemitism. When it ended, the room didn’t fill with relief. It emptied. The adrenaline drained. What was left was a stillness I hadn’t felt since December. This is what people don’t tell you: a month later is when it really hits. The first days after mass murder are crowded. There are flowers. Crowds. Messages. Politicians. Sympathy that pours in from every direction. Then, slowly, the world resumes. And the people who were hit hardest are left alone with what remains. That’s when the real work begins. For weeks, Jewish Australians have been living inside that silence. Trying to explain a fear that didn’t arrive overnight and didn’t come from nowhere. Trying to describe a pressure that built, layer by layer, until something finally broke on a stretch of sand at Bondi. So when the royal commission was announced, I didn’t feel triumph. I felt something closer to release. The kind that comes when you’ve been holding your breath without realising it. But release doesn’t erase the question that sits underneath it. What still unsettles me is not that this inquiry was announced, but how much human effort it took to get there. Grief had to turn into organisation. Mourning had to become mobilisation. Private loss had to be carried into public view again and again before it was acknowledged as urgent. That should never be the price of being taken seriously. When those already shattered are forced to campaign for attention, something has already failed long before any commission is called. This inquiry matters because it recognises something many Australians struggled to name: what Jewish people have been experiencing was not a series of unrelated moments, but a steady tightening. A pressure that turned deadly. An accumulation that felt manageable until it wasn’t. Anti-Semitism didn’t crash into Australia like a storm. It seeped in like damp. Much of this harm was not shouted. It was cleaned up. Sanitised. Given language that made it sound thoughtful instead of threatening. Words that once frightened people were repackaged to sound principled. Sentiments that should have raised alarms were defended as nuance. What would have been unacceptable anywhere else was allowed to pass because it arrived wearing the right vocabulary. Too often, Jewish concerns were met with impatience. With eye-rolling. With explanations about context, human rights, freedom of expression that missed the point entirely. The message received was not reassurance. It was dismissal. Speak less. React better. Don’t be so sensitive. And when people hear that long enough, they stop reporting danger and start bracing for it instead. That silence carries its own consequences. This is the terrain the royal commission now enters. Not a clean slate, but a landscape shaped by delay, deflection, and missed chances. It will require more than careful wording. It will require resolve. It must examine why institutions that pride themselves on protecting minorities went missing when Jews were isolated. Why anti-Semitism was tolerated under banners of activism. Why was intimidation allowed to harden into normality. This inquiry must also examine the ideological currents that feed violence long before it reaches the street. Not as slogans, but as systems. How Islamic extremist thinking is taught, repeated, and normalised. How resentment is sharpened into identity. How belief hardens into permission. Ignoring those pathways does not make communities safer. It leaves the work to be done later, when the cost is far higher. There is another reckoning that cannot be avoided. When risk signals were accumulating, when threats were no longer abstract, when fear was being reported with consistency and detail, did the institutions responsible for protection respond at the speed reality required? This is not a hunt for villains. It is an examination of readiness. Of judgement. Of whether systems designed to prevent harm were listening clearly enough to act in time. Every major inquiry into abuse, neglect, or injustice follows the same emotional arc. Survivors say the same words: about time. They welcome the investigation, even as they mourn those who didn’t live to see it. They hope truth will finally do what silence never did. This royal commission sits in that lineage. It carries the weight of people who no longer trust that speaking up is enough. Of families who now know how thin the line is between being ignored and being buried. Of a community that has spent months recalculating where it is safe to stand, what it is safe to say, and whether anyone is listening. For the families of those killed at Bondi, this inquiry is not closure. It is an opening, the first moment when the country has said, clearly, we are willing to look at ourselves. That willingness is fragile. It can still be squandered. Because royal commissions are not therapy sessions. They are commitments. And commitments, if broken, leave marks that last far longer than headlines. This one must be relentless. It must resist comfort. It must refuse to tidy up what should disturb us. And when its findings land, they must not be filed away as yesterday’s problem. Bondi was the end of a chain of choices. Australia has finally agreed to examine that chain. Now we will learn whether we are serious about breaking it or whether we will wait, once again, until silence is shattered by something even worse. Dr Dvir Abraomovich is Chair of the Anti-Defamation Commission