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Maddison Connaughton

How did a wounded Bondi survivor become the face of a global deepfake conspiracy in less than 24 hours?

Arsen Ostrovsky was celebrating Chanukah at Bondi Beach when the first shots rang out. A bullet grazed his head, and as he lay bleeding on the ground, his first thought was his wife and children. Not knowing whether the danger had passed, he took selfies to show them he was alive. Within hours, one of the images was circulating across social media.

Arsen was then swept up in a wave of disinformation that recast him not as a victim, but as a performer: a “crisis actor” faking his wounds to manufacture sympathy for Israel. The deepfake conspiracy spread with startling speed. In less than 24 hours, Arsen had gone from shooting survivor to accused hoaxer.

In this episode, reporter Josh Robertson trace how that happened. They follow the lie from its point of origin through the networks that amplified it: far-right Telegram channels, fringe conspiracy theorists on Reddit and Instagram, Russian propaganda outlets, and beyond. It is a story about surviving something catastrophic, then being told by strangers that it never happened.

Credits

Maddison Connaughton, Presenter

Joshua Robertson, Reporter

Madison Connaughton: For those of us who weren’t at Bondi on December 14 last year, the horror of that attack was mostly experienced online, in the endless videos that flooded social media and news sites. Shaky phone footage of people sprinting from that iconic beach, sheltering under picnic tables, surreal glimpses of shooters on the bridge. But in some corners of the internet, those images were twisted, manipulated, and weaponised. And it’s in those corners, after the last shot rang out at Bondi, that one survivor was targeted again in a way that he didn’t expect. I’m Madison Connaughton, and this is the final episode of The Road to Bondi, a series by Background Briefing. And just to let you know, this episode includes descriptions of violence. The reporter on this series is Josh Robertson. Hi, Josh.

Josh Robertson: Hi, Madison.

Madison Connaughton: Josh, tell me, how did you meet this survivor?

Josh Robertson: So, this man, he wanted to meet me face-to-face at Bondi, where this all began.

Arsen Ostrovsky: How are you, mate? Thanks for meeting.

Josh Robertson: Good to meet you.

Arsen Ostrovsky: Yes, phenomenal to be back.

Josh Robertson: Oh my god. We get to Bondi, and I’ve just flown in from Queensland and, of course, I’m mesmerised by this Sydney beach.

Madison Connaughton: Of course.

Josh Robertson: This is Arsen’s home turf, but right now it’s hard for him to be here.

Arsen Ostrovsky: Still… still raw. It’s a raw feeling. You can’t come here and sort of those scars not really open.

Josh Robertson: But Arsen is willing to walk me through Archer Park near the beach.

Madison Connaughton: This is where the Hanukkah event was taking place, is that right?

Josh Robertson: Yeah, it’s a Jewish festival called Hanukkah by the Sea. And on the evening of December 14, that’s where he and his family head.

Arsen Ostrovsky: And we’re going to have… I came here with my wife and our two children, our two daughters, they were almost nine and almost five. We came here to celebrate the first night of Hanukkah. There was face painting, there was a petting zoo, there were kids’ activities. It was beautiful. It was a festival atmosphere.

Josh Robertson: He shows me the spot where he’s standing in line to get food while his wife and kids go and grab a seat. And that’s when it begins.

Arsen Ostrovsky: All of a sudden, you hear “bang.” And my first thought was: it must be a balloon. But then it was bang, bang, bang, non-stop. So I knew straight away then, this was a terror attack.

Josh Robertson: It’s instant chaos.

Arsen Ostrovsky: I saw people pick up their children, put them to their chest and run with them. Saw people falling. When bullets start firing, you run.

Josh Robertson: Instinctively, he dashes for cover behind this picnic table.

Arsen Ostrovsky: My first initial thought was my wife, my children. I’ve got to get to them. So I stood up to make a move towards them, and the instance I stood up and must have taken a few steps… I got hit. And the blood just starts gushing out.

Josh Robertson: He realises he’s been shot in the head.

Madison Connaughton: Oh my god, like it’s hit him in the skull?

Josh Robertson: Yeah, so basically, it’s gone across the top of his head. A few millimetres lower and he wouldn’t have been standing there telling me the story.

Arsen Ostrovsky: I fell to the ground, yelling “I’m hit, I’m hit, help.” No one can help you because everyone’s lying on the ground.

Josh Robertson: When he’s looking around, he can see a man on a bench shielding a woman with his body.

Arsen Ostrovsky: He wasn’t moving. He was dead. On the left of me, someone was shot right in front of my eyes.

Josh Robertson: Arsen’s pinned down amid the shooting. He can’t see where his family is.

Madison Connaughton: Oh gosh.

Josh Robertson: As bullets fly around him, he grabs his phone and he tries to call his wife, but he can’t get through. So he holds his phone in front of his face and he takes a photo.

Madison Connaughton: He takes a selfie?

Josh Robertson: Yeah, that’s right.

Madison Connaughton: Why does he do that?

Josh Robertson: Well…

Arsen Ostrovsky: I took it to see how bad and where exactly I was hurt, and I took the picture to send to my wife with the words “Love you,” not knowing if they’d be the last two words she was going to hear from me.

Josh Robertson: About five minutes later, he gets a text back from his wife. She’s escaped with the kids to the beach. They’re all okay. Not long after that, the shooting stops. It’s over. And as Arsen’s waiting for treatment, he’s approached by a TV crew.

Arsen Ostrovsky: I’ve lost a lot of blood. There are people around me that are far worse.

Josh Robertson: Eventually, he gets put in an ambulance, and he’s on the way to hospital when he gets a text message from a friend of his in Israel.

Arsen Ostrovsky: A friend of mine who happens to be a journalist just messaged me: “Are you okay?” And Arsen has these selfies on his phone—the one he sent to his wife and another one that’s a bit less graphic. The photo that showed me on the ground, bloodied, hit… and I just replied to him with that photo.

Josh Robertson: And Madison, you might have seen this photo before.

Madison Connaughton: Let me take a look.

Josh Robertson: This friend of Arsen’s posted it online and it quickly went viral.

Madison Connaughton: Oh, this one. Yeah, you and countless other people around the world saw this image. In this photo, let me just describe it quickly: so Arsen is lying on the grass on his front, and he’s I guess holding the camera out in front of his face, and his head is just covered in blood.

Josh Robertson: Yeah, it’s a picture of a very real near-death experience for him. But something happens to this photo once it’s shared online. Somehow Arsen becomes the face of this wild conspiracy, portraying his injuries as fake and even the Bondi terrorist attack as some kind of staged event that he’s secretly in on.

Madison Connaughton: Wow, so it really takes this like very malignant turn from something he just sent to his wife to let her know that he was alive.

Josh Robertson: And we’re not talking about a couple of people. There are thousands of posts talking about this image and targeting Arsen. And I mean, you’ve got to wonder, out of all the victims at Bondi, why him? When I start looking into it, there’s a possible explanation that looms straight away. Arsen is a public figure and also he’s no stranger to controversy.

Madison Connaughton: How so?

Josh Robertson: He’s a really strong and public defender of Israel at a time when that country’s actions are a great matter of contention. As a lawyer with an NGO, he’s made submissions in the International Criminal Court in support of Israel, which is facing allegations of war crimes in Palestine.

Madison Connaughton: Oh wow.

Josh Robertson: Arsen says he’s also done work in support of Israel in the International Court of Justice, where the country’s accused of genocide in Gaza. So he’s really at the pointy end of Israel’s diplomatic, political arguments.

Madison Connaughton: But Josh, I remember you said that Arsen grew up in Bondi, right? So how did he go from this kid growing up in Australia to being this really prominent advocate for Israel?

Josh Robertson: It’s a good question and it’s an interesting path that he’s taken. So, you know, he spent most of his childhood at Bondi and, you know, he describes a pretty idyllic upbringing.

Arsen Ostrovsky: My first swim in Australia… my learning roller skate… coming here for walks with my parents after school. For a large part of my life, I grew up in Bondi. This is my home, this is my beach.

Josh Robertson: He was actually born in what we now know as Ukraine, but which was then part of the Soviet Union. And he was a refugee to Australia. His family escaped the Iron Curtain and he came here at about the age of seven.

Madison Connaughton: And when was this, in the 80s?

Josh Robertson: Yeah, this is 1987. What was striking about what he told me about his upbringing is that he says he didn’t experience one single example of antisemitism growing up in Australia.

Arsen Ostrovsky: Not one. And I went to the most public of high schools, and I went to university in the Southern New South Wales, and most of my friends growing up were not Jewish.

Josh Robertson: So growing up Jewish for him wasn’t really a big deal.

Madison Connaughton: So what changed?

Josh Robertson: Well, there’s this turning point when Arsen’s in his early 20s finishing off university. He sees a video that affects him really deeply, and that’s the killing of American journalist Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped by jihadist militants in Pakistan in 2002.

News Reporter: Today the US embassy in Pakistan reportedly received a videotape which provides irrefutable evidence that the reporter is dead. His killers in Pakistan claimed he was an agent of the CIA and the Israeli spy agency Mossad.

Arsen Ostrovsky: They paraded him live on TV and his last famous, now timeless words were: “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.” And then they executed him live on camera.

Josh Robertson: So for Arsen, seeing this was a catalyst.

Arsen Ostrovsky: It woke me up in many ways. It forced me to contemplate what does it mean being a Jew… what is Zionism. Ultimately, it led me on the path to Israel.

Josh Robertson: And this path took him from insurance lawyer in Sydney to migrating to Israel in 2012 when he was in his early 30s.

Arsen Ostrovsky: I put my skills as a lawyer to speaking out for what’s happening, to speaking out for the truth. And over the years I’ve been lucky, or some might say perhaps unlucky, to go to the UN, especially the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, a body that has seemingly thought fit to condemn Israel more than the rest of the world put together.

Josh Robertson: With this advocacy, he’s built up a pretty big following. Like, about a decade ago, Jewish media listed him among the 25 most influential Jewish people in the world on Twitter.

Madison Connaughton: Okay, how many followers does he have?

Josh Robertson: He has almost 400,000 followers.

Arsen Ostrovsky: You know, sometimes I get stopped by people in the street and they say, “Oh hey, I follow you on Twitter,” or whatever it might be, and my first thought is, “Oh jeez, I hope they’re… no one too troublesome.” For better or worse, I have a voice, I have a platform.

Madison Connaughton: So that’s a pretty big… that’s a pretty big platform. What kind of stuff is he tweeting?

Josh Robertson: He tweets a lot about Israel and Palestine. Like, he’s been involved in Israel’s battle for hearts and minds for some years now. You know, he’s a polemicist in what you might call the information wars around this. I asked him specifically about a tweet he made last year when the war on Gaza was raging. And it read: “There are no civilians, only accomplices. Gaza equals Hamas and Hamas equals Gaza.” And as you can imagine, a lot of people who saw that post were pretty upset and angry about it. Looking back on that tweet, do you regret it?

Arsen Ostrovsky: No, I don’t regret it. But what I would say is that that tweet was taken completely out of context.

Josh Robertson: Arsen says he posted it after seeing a video showing what he describes as Palestinian civilians appearing to celebrate the release of dead Israeli hostages by Hamas.

Arsen Ostrovsky: It is those civilians who are complicit in these acts, are the ones that I was calling out.

Josh Robertson: If a lot of people read it as saying that it was more sweeping than that, would you regret it?

Arsen Ostrovsky: Look, that’s their problem. I can say 2+2=4 and they’ll say “you’re a Zionist.” That’s not true.

Josh Robertson: He’s one of the most public and one of the most unapologetic advocates of Zionism.

Arsen Ostrovsky: Look, the online arena, it is not for the faint-hearted. You know, I get endless amount of hate, but you know, I block it out.

Josh Robertson: A few weeks before Bondi, Arsen returned with his young family to Sydney to take up a job lobbying and publicly advocating with a group called AIJAC, the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council. And to give you an idea of the kinds of Israeli state connections that Arsen has, while he was recovering from getting shot at Bondi, he told me he was called by the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Madison Connaughton: Oh wow. Okay, so he’s seriously connected.

Josh Robertson: Yeah, yeah, he’s known. He’d met previously the President Isaac Herzog, and when Herzog came to Bondi, Arsen was there and Herzog recognised him and then he gave Arsen a hug.

Madison Connaughton: So Josh, this picture you’re painting of Arsen, to me it’s of this, you know, very prominent pro-Israel lobbyist. He’s this guy with this big online platform. Is that profile why these photos of him covered in blood at Bondi went viral? Is that why he became the target of these conspiracies?

Josh Robertson: Well, to try and answer that question, I asked someone for help.

Matteo Vergani: I am Matteo Vergani. My research focuses on online hate and extremism and its relations with offline violence.

Josh Robertson: Matteo and his team agreed to build us a database to track what people are saying about Arsen after the attack. And they focus on this one platform that’s easier to scrape data from: it’s Telegram.

Matteo Vergani: On Telegram we find stuff that major platforms would certainly delete. We can track the birth and spread of conspiracy theories uncensored.

Josh Robertson: And so they basically study the content of all public Telegram channels in the 72 hours following the attack. And all the posts that contained the name Ostrovsky. The first time the image of Arsen is shared on Telegram is about two hours after the attack started. From there, the chatter grows quickly.

Matteo Vergani: The posts in our dataset that draw the most attention, got the most views, was a post containing the image.

Josh Robertson: And this post is just talking about the fact that Arsen was injured and that he’s a human rights lawyer and a senior figure in Australia’s Jewish community. It’s a straightforward post, but the image is compelling. People are drawn to it and they share the picture and they talk about it. But within minutes, the tone changes. People start talking about, for example, the Mossad. Mossad is the Israeli intelligence agency. And without saying it explicitly, some posts start to hint that this event might have been staged.

Madison Connaughton: So it’s sort of a veiled conspiratorial, I mean, quite unempathetic reaction to the photo of Arsen covered in blood having just been shot.

Josh Robertson: Absolutely. And that gets worse.

Matteo Vergani: We saw initial mention of red paint.

Madison Connaughton: As though his blood is not real?

Josh Robertson: Yeah, that’s right. Or rhetorical questions like, “Who would take a selfie in such a situation?”

Madison Connaughton: Do we know anything about who’s spreading this conspiracy theory?

Josh Robertson: Actually, most of the posts with the furthest reach are this UK Telegram account of a known conspiracy theorist who became famous during COVID and still spreading conspiracy theories about COVID being staged and not a real pandemic. The posts about Arsen from this UK account reach over 100,000 people. And it doesn’t stop there. About 12 hours after the Bondi attack, posts about crisis actors are appearing on other Telegram channels.

Madison Connaughton: So crisis actors, that means like, this is not a real person, this is someone that’s acting as though they’ve been in a shooting or a terror attack. Is that what they’re saying about Arsen?

Josh Robertson: Well, they’re suggesting that he’s not what he appears to be. And then it spreads even further.

Matteo Vergani: The first mention of crisis actors in our dataset at least was from a Canadian account. So it wasn’t an Australian conversation, it was an international, global conversation with people from Canada, the US, the UK involved in it.

Josh Robertson: This is where things get really bizarre. About 21 hours after the Bondi attack, there’s this post on Telegram and it looks like it kicks off a new chapter in the spread of the misinformation around Arsen. It’s an AI-generated image. So it shows the guy who appears to be Arsen in a t-shirt with a smile on his face sitting on the grass being worked on by a makeup artist who’s applying makeup to make it look like he’s bleeding.

Madison Connaughton: And so this is a deepfake of him?

Josh Robertson: Yeah, yeah, this isn’t real.

Arsen Ostrovsky: Obviously it wasn’t me. It took an entire millisecond to figure that out.

Josh Robertson: And there’s a few obvious tells. Like, on the day of the attack, Arsen was wearing shorts. But in this deepfake, he’s wearing jeans. And if you check, there’s actually a hidden digital watermark which our ABC Verify colleagues showed us that says that it’s AI-generated.

Matteo Vergani: Basically AI was used 15 hours later only to visualise what people were already suggesting and talking about.

Madison Connaughton: So let me get this straight. So this image has only emerged quite a while after the attack, but there’s sort of been this buildup of language that kind of echoes what’s in the photo. It’s actor, it’s fake, it’s fake blood. Is that kind of… has it gone in that direction, like language then photo?

Josh Robertson: Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Madison Connaughton: So where’s Arsen when this photo’s going viral?

Josh Robertson: Arsen’s in hospital.

Arsen Ostrovsky: Literally being wheeled into the operating theatre to have bullet fragments removed from my head. That’s when I found out, that’s when my phone started buzzing and I started getting all these messages and the photos which you alluded to and people in the press asking what’s going on.

Josh Robertson: He’s just been shot in the head and now he’s being victimised across the world on social media.

Arsen Ostrovsky: I raised this with the doctor and he said, “Do they need me to… do I have to make a… do you want me to make a statement or do they want me to maybe release your X-ray?” And I said, “No, no, that’s fine. I can speak for myself.”

Madison Connaughton: This is pretty crazy. I mean, this jump online from veiled doubts to conspiracy theories to a full-on deepfake of Arsen. It all happens before he can even get stitched up from his injuries. Do we have any sense of who’s behind this?

Josh Robertson: In Telegram, it’s first posted by this Australian channel that’s associated with the far-right. And in the wake of Bondi, that channel is pushing not just this deepfake of Arsen but all kinds of conspiracies. And they seem to appeal to a certain kind of bigotry. And this hateful kind of stuff is not just on Telegram, it’s happening on other major platforms like X, like Reddit, and Instagram.

Madison Connaughton: Who’s that aimed at?

Josh Robertson: Well, both Jewish people and Muslims. In fact, Muslims bear the brunt of it across these four platforms Matteo’s team analysed, especially on X where about one in five posts that we downloaded in our dataset contained one form or another of anti-Muslim hate. We also saw anti-Semitic content surging, particularly in the form of blaming all Jews for the actions of Israel. And that included the type of conspiracy theories now spreading about Arsen.

Matteo Vergani: Some people said it is completely staged and false, so it didn’t happen. Others wrote that it was staged by the Israeli state to silence pro-Palestinian protests taking place in Australia.

Josh Robertson: And there was a narrative specific to the far-right, and this was a broader anti-immigrant sentiment, blaming both Jews and Muslims and in general immigrants, even though of course we know that many Jewish people and Muslim people are not immigrant in Australia, but blaming immigrants and generally non-Christian and non-Anglo speaking people in Australia for bringing violence into Australia.

Madison Connaughton: So it seems like there’s a lot of opportunistic people on the internet who are seeing this tragedy as their chance to make viral content or to push their talking points.

Josh Robertson: Yeah, that’s right.

Madison Connaughton: Did people sharing around this deepfake of Arsen actually think it was real?

Josh Robertson: I believe in this case and in general for conspiracy theories, people many times don’t believe that that specific conspiracy or AI-generated image is true. But they share it because it makes a point, because it helps them to push and let’s say disseminate their ideas in a more powerful way. Do we know why they were targeting Arsen?

Matteo Vergani: I didn’t have a sense that people who were commenting on the image knew who Arsen Ostrovsky was. In that specific time window and in the specific dataset we analysed, I don’t think that this bunch of people were really aware of Arsen’s political activities. They’re not invested really much into Gaza specifically.

Madison Connaughton: So why did they target him?

Josh Robertson: Well, Matteo’s team found it was a few things. His graphic selfie went viral, and then on top of that, remember we mentioned he’d spoken to a TV crew right after the attack?

Madison Connaughton: Yeah, he did an interview, right?

Arsen Ostrovsky: I’ve lost a lot of blood. There are people around me that are far worse. I survived October 7. I lived in Israel the last 13 years. We came here only two weeks ago.

Josh Robertson: He used the word “survived.” He said it was because he was in Tel Aviv when Hamas fired rockets on the city and his family were among the many who heard sirens and rushed to the bomb shelter. And then he survives Bondi. On Telegram, that coincidence set people off.

Matteo Vergani: That was a detail that many people found unrealistic, that a person could be a survivor of both terrorist attacks. That was one of the details that started the conspiratorial narratives and the rhetorical questions that led to the idea of a false flag.

Madison Connaughton: And that term false flag, Josh, that’s basically people calling the Bondi attack an inside job, right?

Josh Robertson: That’s right. Yeah, and on Telegram, it was used specifically to suggest that the Israeli government orchestrated this terrorist attack. So it didn’t take much for this to escalate into a full anti-Semitic conspiracy.

Matteo Vergani: The idea that all Jewish people globally and Australian Jews specifically deserved to be targeted was absolutely intertwined with the false flag argument. The two narratives, they go in the same direction: if the attack was real, they deserved to be targeted, and if it is a false flag, they organised it.

Josh Robertson: I told Arsen about Matteo’s findings and he was surprised. He found it hard to believe someone like him could just be randomly swept up in a disinformation campaign.

Arsen Ostrovsky: I obviously already had a public profile before that, but this goes well above and beyond any kind of reasonable realm. I mean, this is a deepfake AI campaign.

Josh Robertson: In fact, he actually expected state actors to be involved.

Arsen Ostrovsky: It had the fingerprints of possibly state actors because it seemed quite intentional and malicious and well-crafted.

Madison Connaughton: So does he mean like some sort of organised campaign?

Josh Robertson: Yeah, yeah, which, you know, Matteo says he can’t rule out with this level of research. But his team found that on Telegram at least, these conspiracies swirling around Arsen didn’t seem particularly organised, including the deepfake, which appeared to spread organically. So look, I still wanted to speak to someone who was part of that. And so I logged into Telegram and I looked up that account that first posted the deepfake. And it didn’t take me long to work out who was behind it.

Madison Connaughton: Who is it?

Josh Robertson: Well, the account’s run by this guy, he goes by the name J Hernandez. And I should be clear, he’s not technically the first to post the deepfake. I found this earlier anonymous post on Reddit, it was a little bit earlier, but it’s J’s Telegram post that helps spread it.

Madison Connaughton: Right.

Josh Robertson: So I wanted to ask where he found the deepfake and why he posted it. OK, I’ve got all these names and I’ve gone to the electoral commission and I’ve pulled addresses and then I’ve checked those addresses for numbers. (phone ringing) “Your call could not be connected.” Pretty clear that’s not going to work. Let’s try another one. (phone ringing) “Yes, sorry, I was trying to reach J Hernandez.” “Gotcha. Um, but are you on Telegram?” “Yep.”

Josh Robertson: There were a few more calls like that but no cigar.

Madison Connaughton: Was it not possible to contact this guy directly on Telegram?

Josh Robertson: Well, about that… (phone clicking) “Oh what? So Telegram is telling me I need to pay $349 to send this guy a message. That is not something I’m going to do.”

Madison Connaughton: I wonder if anyone’s ever paid it.

Josh Robertson: Yeah, you’ve got to wonder.

Madison Connaughton: Okay, so you didn’t message him, but were you able to find anything out about this guy?

Josh Robertson: Yeah, well J Hernandez has made the news before. Check out this link.

Madison Connaughton: Okay, one sec… Okay, so this is a news.com.au article and oh wow… “Meet J Hernandez, anti-vax leader’s quest to find love.” That’s him. It says he’s a poster boy for the anti-vax movement in Australia who runs a popular Telegram channel. And he’s lamenting how hard it is to find a woman who is unvaccinated.

Josh Robertson: Yep. He’s a Footscray Footy Club fan and he loves spreading unhinged conspiracy theories to his 21,000 plus subscribers.

J Hernandez: I love the freedom movement, guys. Our community’s special, man. We are the awake ones.

Madison Connaughton: So Arsen said that he thought a state actor was behind his deepfake. This guy doesn’t seem like that.

Josh Robertson: Yeah, no. No, it doesn’t seem like it. He’s a suburban conspiracy theorist in Melbourne. But he can post a deepfake and a few days later you see that deepfake run on Pravda, the Russian propaganda outlet. So it’s not as if you can rule out state actors playing a role in amplifying this, but, you know, the internet’s a weird disinformation superhighway and sometimes the drivers can be random suburban conspiracy theorists chasing clicks online.

Arsen Ostrovsky: The intensity of it, the way it developed… I wouldn’t have expected this to be, you know, someone sitting in their grandmother’s garage.

Josh Robertson: That’s a pretty good line from Arsen.

Madison Connaughton: Yeah, yeah. That’s the thing. In person, Arsen’s a funny guy. He had a very almost dark but self-deprecating humour. And when he heard he was going to be on radio, he was like, “Ah, my wife always says I have a face for radio.”

Madison Connaughton: A classic.

Josh Robertson: So yeah, he was disarming and funny, but look, he’s very practiced at rhetoric and argument. So, you know, the arguments flow very quickly with Arsen.

Madison Connaughton: Did you get the sense from him that going viral in this, you know, really horrific way where people tried to undermine this intensely traumatic experience he’s had, did that change anything about the way he sees this online world he’s spent so much time in?

Josh Robertson: No, I don’t think it changed him in that sense. If anything, I think it reinforced for Arsen the idea that if you’re going to defend Israel, you’re going to be attacked.

Arsen Ostrovsky: In this day and age, to just say Israel or Jewish or anti-Semitism, you are flooded, absolutely flooded with hate, with vitriol, with just sickening abuse.

Josh Robertson: In a sense, after all this, he gets back on the horse.

Arsen Ostrovsky: My survival is a miracle and survival comes with a sense of responsibility to reaffirm our fight against this scourge of anti-Semitism and Jew-hate. As a proud Australian, I’m also a proud Israeli as well.

Josh Robertson: And I also think it just sort of renewed his sense of mission about defending Israel very publicly. But there was this one moment with Arsen that stayed with me when the politics of Bondi gave way to a more personal reflection. It was when he was walking me through Archer Park retracing his steps from the day.

Arsen Ostrovsky: Bullets are firing, the bullets are hitting. So people falling. So I immediately ran over here, right by this sort of picnic area.

Josh Robertson: And while he’s telling me this, we’re surrounded not by gunfire but by people who’ve returned to enjoy the park and the beach. Dance music. Young travellers on holiday.

Arsen Ostrovsky: And it’s almost surreal to see people here now picnicking as if it’s… as if nothing happened here.

Josh Robertson: Maybe it was just an offhand comment. But to me, it was kind of poignant. This seemed like someone sensing that their memory, their experience of something even like the Bondi tragedy can be somehow impermanent. And it’s striking to hear this from a guy who because of what he does is fighting very hard over how Bondi should be remembered.

Madison Connaughton: It seems like there are a lot of people that are trying to reduce this terrible, complicated event into something neat. You know, like what it tells you about Israel-Palestine, about migration, what it tells you about Australia. I mean, you’ve spent a lot of time looking into this, Josh, tracing all these intertwined lines. What do you think about it?

Josh Robertson: Well, it’s not neat to me. The roads these four people took to Bondi were long and the further you trace them back, the more complicated it gets. You have Arsen, a seasoned digital warrior who finds his own story of surviving Bondi swept up in this wave of online disinformation. You have Sajjid Akram, a father who thinks it’s right for his own son to join him in a deadly terrorist plot. And you have AB, an Iranian refugee, a Muslim who runs towards danger to help stop an attack on Jewish Australia. This guy did time for domestic violence but does something brave at Bondi. These stories don’t fit neatly into narratives because when you try, you miss the messy human parts of these stories. You lose what makes them real.

Madison Connaughton: Background Briefing’s sound producers are Leila Shunnar and Ingrid Wagner. Sound engineering by Anne-Marie de Bettencourt. Music composition by Tegan Nicholls. Fact-checking by Justine Landis-Hanley. Our roll-out producer is Ben Sveen. The supervising producer is Max Chalmers and the executive producer is Fanou Filali. Josh Robertson is the reporter on this story and I’m Madison Connaughton.