Josh Burns recalls the stink of smoke, paint and kerosene in his office. Shattered glass all over the floor. Pockmarks in the windows from a hammer. Red horns, an antisemitic trope, scrawled on a photo of his head. “I remember walking through, and thinking – how did it get to this?” he says.

Burns is a Jewish, federal Labor MP. His grandmother fled Germany in 1938, the year of the Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass) when Nazis smashed the windows of Jewish-owned stores and synagogues. In 2024 in Melbourne, he picked through the glass shards in his own office.

He was struck by the pointlessness. “If you’re going after a Jewish MP’s office in Australia thinking it’s somehow going to influence the Israeli government, you’re on another planet,” he says. “If punching a hole in my office

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