Where is the empathy for innocent Israelis?

This open letter, signed by Simon Sebag Montefiore and others, was first published in the ‘Chronicle for Higher Education’. It has been reproduced in full below.

Every Tisha B’av, the national day of communal mourning, Jews read liturgy recounting the horrors of our slaughtered ancestors throughout history and around the world. Every year, our blood runs cold rereading accounts of those nightmares. This year those nightmares became real. Earlier this month, the slaughter in southern Israel has matched the brutality of that liturgy: 1,400 people murdered at a concert, in their cars, in their homes, and nearly 200 taken as hostages. These are scenes we never thought we would see.

We are heartbroken and disgusted by the shocking lack of empathy on much of the self-professed global left for the innocent Israelis who were murdered and kidnapped, and for the Jews in the diaspora who watched helplessly around the world as the most catastrophic slaughter in our history since the Holocaust was perpetrated.