Smartphone Caught a Nazi Salute. Police Suggested It Wasn’t Worth Pursuing.

Nir Golan walked through Bondi Junction last October wearing a kippah, pulled out his phone to record a man shouting antisemitic slurs, and ended up with more than a viral clip — he had a witness, video of a Nazi salute, and a story that landed at the antisemitism royal commission.

Golan told the commissioner that the attacker wore military-style clothing, got aggressively close, called him a “dirty Jew,” flashed a Nazi salute and made a gun motion at his head. When Golan took out his phone to document the abuse, the man grew physical. An American tourist who tried to help was reportedly badly bashed while no one else intervened.

So technology did its job: the phone recorded an incident that might otherwise have been only a shaken memory. But the other kinds of technology — CCTV and the criminal-justice kind — were less helpful. Golan says police told him the local CCTV had no audio and that, at the time, a Nazi salute wasn’t illegal. He was reportedly encouraged to drop the complaint because it would likely be “a lot of wasted effort.”

That shrug at the precinct desk was one thread among many laid out at the commission. Former Jewish Board of Deputies CEO Vic Alhadeff described antisemitism becoming normalized and emboldened, and warned that Jewish Australians are increasingly treated as proxies for actions taken by Israel — a lumping together that community leaders say is both unfair and dangerous.

Other witnesses underlined the consequences. Tali Pinsky, who moved from Israel to work in Australia, said she found Australians generally welcoming but noticed a steady conflation of Jewish people with the actions of the Israeli state. Several parents described children who arrive home from school seeing swastikas, hearing “Heil Hitler” chants, or watching classmates mimic Nazi salutes — scenes no child should have to normalize.

One mother, identified as Dina, told the commission that the Bondi massacre in December — when 15 people were killed at a Hanukkah event — made the threat painfully real for many families. Jewish parents described their children being taunted online and in person, with some youngsters even saying they didn’t want to be Jewish because of what they were facing.

The royal commission, set up after the Bondi attack, is spending its first hearings defining antisemitism and tracing how it appears today in Australia. The technology that lets an ordinary phone capture a Nazi salute is useful — but unless institutions stop treating evidence like an optional extra, a recording will be only half the remedy. A camera can document hate; what’s needed next is the will to stop it being routine.