On the first night of Chanukah, the Jewish artist Zoe Buckman shared a picture of her menorah on Instagram, along with a selection of other slides featuring recent headlines of violence against Jews. “I want to say something about light leading the way & the resilience of the Maccabees & about empathy & love & all those truths & ideals I hold dear… but I can’t right now,” she wrote. And I thought: same.
The news, as ever, is bleak. At the time of writing, more than 100 hostages remain in Gaza. The need to bring them home feels more urgent than ever, following the publication of a report by the Israeli health ministry detailing the torture endured by those who have returned.
Rocket attacks by the Houthis have had Israelis scrambling into bomb shelters in the early hours of the morning for over a week and Israel’s retaliatory action has, of course, been met with scorn and hysteria by the usual suspects. Eighty-three-year-old Holocaust survivor Ludmila Lipovsky was stabbed to death by a Palestinian terrorist in Herzliya and no one outside of the Jewish world seemed to notice.
Still, the hope of Chanukah is hard to resist. By the fourth night – with the last of the turkey and Christmas pudding finally behind me, freeing up space for latkes and doughnuts – I found myself feeling humming the 1979 classic Reasons To Be Cheerful, Pt. 3 by Ian Drury and the Blockheads, and decided that even I can think of one, two or even three points of positivity from the past year to carry into 2025. So, here we go…
Our amazing allies
Like all of the things in life worth having, when it comes to allies it’s about quality, not quantity. At least that’s what I’m telling myself. Because while the number of people sticking their non-Jewish necks on the line in our defence may be small, they are mighty. I’m thinking of people like former British paratrooper and defence expert Andrew Fox; US congressman Ritchie Torres; British journalist Douglas Murray. Then we have our burgeoning community of Iranian allies, such as the attorney and social media activist Elica Le Bon, who is a shining light of truth in a sea of online misinformation. And who can forget our Arab allies, both Christian and Muslim, who risk so much to speak the truth? Legends such as Mosab Hassan Yousef and Yoseph Haddad, who recently defended Israel at the Oxford Union; my fellow JC contributor Loay Alshareef; Yemeni-born journalist Luai Ahmed and former Iraqi Miss Universe contestant Sarah Idan, to name a few. Yes, our enemies may have recruited throngs of students (who couldn’t name The River or The Sea if their lives depended on it) and “life-long antiracists” with curiously Jewish-shaped blindspots, but our allies are smart, diverse, and have integrity in spades.
The renaissance of Jewish communal life
l I think Eylon Levy captured the mood perfectly when he wrote on X: “Antisemites think all the Jews share a secret WhatsApp group. What they don’t know is we’re all in the same 50 WhatsApp groups, and they’re all muted/archived.” Is it ideal that the majority of Jews in the diaspora feel so abandoned by their non-Jewish friends and colleagues that they’ve sought solace in each other? No. But the resulting rejuvenation of Jewish communal life is still a beautiful thing to behold (even if we all find at least half of the people in our new Jewish WhatsApp groups completely unbearable). Family, eh!
Israel is not only surviving but thriving
l I’m conscious as I write this that I have my rose-tinted, diaspora-dwelling Zionist glasses on and that, speaking to sabras, I usually get quite a different perspective. But I’m grasping for straws here, so indulge me. From my safe distance in London, it’s hard to think of another country that, while fighting a war of survival on seven fronts, would still be so full of love and life. Two positive headlines in particular stood out recently and seem to capture Israel’s resilience and hope for the future. The first, that Israeli tech firms have raised about $7.22 billion from investors, an increase of 32 per cent compared with the same period last year. Eat that, BDS!
The second, a poll by the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, found that just over half of Arab Israelis (51.6 per cent) feel that the prolonged war against Hamas in Gaza has given rise to a sense of “shared destiny” between Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel. Apartheid, who?
So that’s it. I’ve plumbed the depths of my soul for some shards of light. I do hope you appreciate them.
Now, exhausted from my efforts, I’m going to take the Blockheads up on their suggestion and “get back into bed”.
