The appalling video of two Sydney nurses from Muslim backgrounds threatening to kill Israeli patients marks a new and disturbing low in antisemitic attacks in Australia, which have escalated following Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

The disgraced pair will rightly lose their jobs and are likely to have their nurses’ licences stripped. This is the obvious sanction for totally unacceptable behaviour that breaches a health professional’s sacred obligation to care for all patients regardless of race or creed. Yet, their conduct exposes the extent to which racial hatred has infected our multicultural community. Political and community leaders must grapple with the root causes of one of the biggest threats to Australia’s social cohesion in recent decades, and how to fix it.