Vandals have turned an electric bike-sharing program in the Australian city of Sydney into a platform to target the local Jewish community with anti-Israel and antisemitic graffiti, with complaints that the bike operators are not doing anything to counter the problem for over a year, a report said Tuesday.

Bikes are being defaced and then driven around or left in neighborhoods with large Jewish populations, the Australian Telegraph newspaper reported.

The bikes are daubed with swastikas or slogans such as “Israel is hell,” “Zionists are Nazis” and “Israel is a terrorist state.”

They have been seen in Bondi, Rose Bay Coogee, Kensington, Maroubra, and Randwick.

Attacks on Australia’s Jewish community have proliferated since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel, which killed 1,200 people, saw 251 abducted, and started the war in Gaza. Cars and buildings have been vandalized and torched around Australia during protests against Israel that have often targeted the Jewish community, and in December a synagogue was set on fire in Melbourne in what authorities described as a terrorist act.

The Australian Jewish Association told the paper it had received hundreds of complaints about the bikes since the start of the Gaza war.

It claimed that the private company operating the bikes, Lime, has ignored requests to remove the graffiti.

The hate continues to infest in our country.

Posted by Christine Surbeck on Monday, January 6, 2025

“They are placed in areas where Jewish families live or near synagogues to intimidate the Jewish community,” AJA CEO Robert Gregory said.

“If the graffiti was on a public building, it would be removed but Lime bikes and others have created a loophole that vandals are exploiting,” he charged. “The share bike companies are effectively providing permanent billboards to spread hate and division and target the Jewish community.”

Sam Gulz, a Jewish resident of the eastern Sydney neighborhood of Randwick, told the Telegraph that he found bikes outside his apartment building in December. The bikes carried slogans such as “Zionists are Nazis” or stickers calling to “Boycott Israel apartheid.”

“This type of graffiti incites racism and makes Jewish people feel even more unsafe at a time when anti-Semitism is rising in Australia,” Gulz said.

The Executive Council of Australian Jewry condemned the phenomenon, with co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin calling the perpetrators “childish, obnoxious activists seeking to impose their prejudice on the rest of us.”

Dvir Abramovich, chair of the Anti-Defamation Commission watchdog and a prominent voice against antisemitism, said in a statement that it is “hatred on two wheels, a grotesque assault on decency turning Lime bikes into roving tools of terror.”

He called the use of swastikas and references to Nazis “a calculated campaign to instill fear and intimidate.”

Because a private company is operating the bikes, the council and police are not able to clean up the vandalism, according to the report.

However, a spokeswoman for Lime said the company is taking the matter seriously.

“We are horrified at the anti-Semitic vandalism occurring on buildings, vehicles, and signage across the City and thank every community member for alerting our local teams to vandalism on our e-bikes,” she said.

A car graffitied in a prominently Jewish neighborhood in Sydney the day before drew condemnation from Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

Less than a month before that, a car was set on fire and two homes were graffitied in Woollahra on December 11. That occurred weeks after a vehicle in the area was torched and graffitied with “Fuck Israel.”

On December 20, a group of men held a neo-Nazi demonstration on the front steps of Victoria’s Parliament House in Melbourne.

Some Jewish organizations have said the government has not taken sufficient action in response.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a leading Jewish human rights group, has accused the Australian government of failing to do enough to stamp out antisemitism.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused the Australian government of harboring “anti-Israel sentiment,” over what is seen as a pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel stance taken by the Albanese government.