Awoken by sirens wailing over large parts of central Israel last weekend, I pulled on whatever clothes I could find beside my bed and shuffled down to the bomb shelter in the basement. The missiles, launched from Yemen by the Iranian-backed Houthis, didn’t distinguish between ideologies or identities. More or less every Israeli in the strike zone – left-wing or right-wing, religious or secular, Jew, Arab, Christian, Muslim, or other – did the same.
Those without safe-rooms of their own rely on communal shelters, often meeting their neighbours dressed in pyjamas or wrapped in bath towels. Those who get caught away from home rush into the nearest building to be ushered into someone else’s shelter. For those ten or so minutes, until the all-clear was given, I found myself united with Israelis by something primal and deeply human: the instinct to survive, and the equally profound need to protect one another.
The silence, the absence, the cheering crowd – it echoes
It strikes me that the rest of the world could learn something from that. Not merely about the fragility of peace, but about the strength of solidarity. About the moral imperative, too often neglected, to stand up for one another – not only when our own lives are under threat, but especially when others are being persecuted.
Since 7 October 2023, when Hamas unleashed the most barbaric massacre of Jews in most of our lifetimes, this basic principle has been, for many, conspicuously absent. In place of the global outpouring of solidarity that one might expect after such atrocities – babies kidnapped and slaughtered, women raped, civilians burned alive, entire families mercilessly exterminated – we have witnessed an eruption of equivocation, denial, and, in many cases, outright hostility toward the victims. Anti-Semitism has surged not in spite of the massacre, but more distressingly in response to it.
A Rabbi assaulted last week in Orleans, France. A Jewish man abducted and brutalised in Wales. A British sewage worker fired for daring to call Hamas terrorists on his work Intranet. Jewish patients in hospitals, Jewish medical staff, and Jewish children in schools – all navigating an environment laced with suspicion, exclusion, and thinly veiled hatred and threats. The BBC, our supposed national broadcaster, regularly feeding this climate of contempt by framing Israel as the bloodthirsty aggressor whilst stripping context from its coverage, presenting a sanitised portrait of Palestinian victimhood, and whitewashing the significant foundational and ongoing nature of Jew-hatred in extremist Arab political movements.
Against this bleak backdrop, the few who have stood up shine brightly – but, heartbreakingly, as rare exceptions. Men and women like Simon Aban Deng, a South Sudanese Christian and former slave, who walked from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to show solidarity with Israel. His voice, grounded in searing personal trauma, drew a direct line from the jihadi atrocities visited upon his people to those inflicted on Israeli civilians.
Or here in the UK, the authors of the October Declaration who rallied British academics and citizens against anti-Semitic violence. Or Mark Birbeck, whose ‘Our Fight’ campaign has sought to create a platform of real solidarity with Jews facing persecution. Or Niyak Ghorbani, the too frequently arrested Iranian dissident and campaigner who fled a theocratic regime only to witness Western societies sleepwalk toward the same oppressive ideologies.
They are heroes – but they shouldn’t have to be. Their voices should not be remarkable. They should be the norm. Because standing up for those being brutalised should be the moral baseline of any decent society.
This is not about political alignment. It’s about moral reflex. In the face of public kidnappings, lynchings, and torture, the question is not ‘what is your position on the conflict’, but ‘what is your position on humanity?’
I think often of Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, and of the title ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ – its designation given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. My own father survived thanks to people who bore that courage. I grew up with that legacy not as abstract history, but as a personal responsibility. Their example was a lodestar. I’ve always tried to ask myself, would I do the same? Would I stand up, even when I am not the one being targeted? That question is no longer hypothetical. None of this is.
And yet, what is perhaps most painful for so many of us is the absence of even a single known example of such moral resistance within Gaza. No account – at least not yet – of a Palestinian civilian who helped rescue or protect one of the Israeli hostages. Eli Sharabi, who endured 491 days of brutal captivity after Palestinians murdered his wife and daughters, testified recently before the UN Security Council. ‘In all that time,’ he said, ‘no one in Gaza helped me. The civilians in Gaza saw us suffering. They cheered our kidnappers. They were definitely involved.’
The silence, the absence, the cheering crowd – it echoes. And it reverberates far beyond Gaza. It stretches into the streets of London, across campuses in the United States, through television studios and editorial rooms, where too many prefer comfort over courage, and moral ambiguity over clarity. It is not just our enemies who make us feel abandoned – it is the thunderous quiet of those who should have stood beside us and did not.
This compels me, and indeed should compel us all, to look inward. Am I doing enough? Do I stand tall enough for others in their time of need? The legacy of those who saved my father beckons me to perpetually question myself, and prompts me always to try harder. For if we relinquish our duty to stand up for each other, then what kind of world are we really building? One where the persecuted are left alone. One where silence is safer than truth. One where the righteous are few – and that, more than anything, is what must change.
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