It is not the silence itself that is earth-shattering. It is the discretion to be silent about this, but not of other’s suffering.
February 21, 2025 07:34
I thought I had felt all the disappointment there was to feel since October 7. That the indifference of strangers to Jewish lives could no longer surprise me. That well-meaning people choosing to highlight Palestinian suffering and ignore Israelis’ followed a predictable path that I had got used to.
But of course, I was wrong.
Yesterday, the image of Shiri Bibas clutching her two young children as terrorists tore them from their home was joined in our hearts by another horrifying sight.
Confronted with the sight of four coffins, two of which contained the bodies of Kfir and Ariel paraded on a Hamas stage in Gaza surrounded by masked terrorists, some of whom had even bought their children, I thought to myself, this has to be the moment where people wake up.
I watched in complete horror as this spectacle was being televised to the world, and the only people talking about it online were Jewish.
I don’t know any Jew since October 7, who has not felt paralysed with grief and rage about how little Jewish lives matter, particularly in the spaces of people who claim to care about injustice.
I looked online for the response from normally extremely vocal human rights charities. There was nothing from Save the Children UK about the boastful parading of dead Jewish babies, zero from UNICEF UK about the spectacle of evil.
Terrorists at the site of the handover of hostage bodies (Getty)Middle East Images/AFP via Getty
Amnesty International could not even trouble themselves to focus on the direct and deliberate targeting of Jewish children without invoking false equivalence and bothsidesing on a day that we mourned two babies whose only crime was being Jewish.
No one, bar us, marches for our right to life. No one chants for our freedom, not even when our children are forcibly removed from their homes by murderous rapists and held underground for over a year, no campuses are taken over by spoilt students refusing to study, so devoted to our lived experience that they can't bring themselves to eat, and no one takes part in collective mourning, not even for the murder of our babies.
I do not know if the silence from people who have shared information about the desperate plight of children in Gaza interspersed with holiday pictures is deliberate. I do not know what conversations happen internally if at all. I know most of them will have no idea what it feels like to see your community degraded and dehumanised online and in the streets every week by thousands of people across the globe who claim to be moral and decent.
It is not the silence itself that is earth-shattering. It is the discretion to be silent about this, but not of others suffering. It is deliberate, it is considered.
The same people who were convinced Elon Musk is a raving Nazi and were so keen to educate their 201 followers about why his salute was antisemitic, have nothing to say about Hamas kidnapping and murdering Jewish children in cold blood.
More silence when the depravity goes further and forensic testing on the corpses returned by Hamas revealed they were covered in propaganda material and that Shiri is not even the fourth body returned. And nothing when it was revealed that the boys were killed in captivity.
But then If the image of a mother and her children in coffins while the monsters responsible for their death towered over them is not enough to shake the souls of ordinary people into saying something, then what is?
And so here we are again. Another moment in this barbaric timeline of terror and psychological torture where Jews are screaming into a void with mostly each other for company.
Our agony is for the families who have become our own. Shiri was every Jewish mother, her babies were our own. Oded Lifschitz was our peace-loving grandpa. How are generations of Israelis watching this expected to cling on to his unwavering commitment to peace and coexistence.
Meanwhile we have lived, slept and breathed their stories. We have witnessed their families' tireless efforts to get the world to notice their humanity and we have watched ordinary people destroy their posters with a latte in hand.
I will never understand why the image of a terrified mother clutching her babies flanked by frenzied gunmen in plain clothes did not inspire global movements to demand their immediate release. Perhaps if they had we might not be here now.
You will hear Jewish people talk about how October 7 changed everything for them. I fight daily not to let a whirlwind of pain consume me.
I do not want my world to shrink but we are constantly confronting the reality that people are indifferent to our violent murder at best, or defensive of it at worst.
Of course there are friends and allies outside our community who do care, they acknowledge the pain we are feeling, and we cling to them with dear life but they are few.
It feels trite to talk about the people who have spoken out for us and how important they are, because well, only a psychopath doesn’t care about a 9-month-old baby ripped from their bed and murdered by terrorists.
“But Hamas said they were killed in Israeli air strikes” I can see the apologists typing now. And honestly, I pity them.
How devoid of human decency do you have to be to hold anyone other than the murderous terrorist who stole them responsible?
