From Ashes To Defiance

Why I love Israel

This week, I stood before living history.

More accurately, men and women whose very existence defies history. Holocaust survivors, some over a century old, who had endured the worst of what humanity can inflict. Ghettos, gas chambers, forced marches; the industrial murder of their people. I was honoured to speak to individuals who rebuilt their lives from ash and silence.

I am not Jewish (I am Roman Catholic). Still, as the grandson of a Second World War 8^th US Army veteran, I carry a deep sense of reverence and responsibility toward that history. This week, as I stood before those survivors to speak about Gaza, about the disinformation war, and Israel, I was not offering sympathy. In some ways, I felt as if I was bearing witness, but most importantly, I was pledging solidarity.

Their questions were sharp, dignified, and profoundly unsettling. More than one survivor remarked, with clarity and calm, almost in passing, that the atmosphere in Britain today reminds them of Germany in the 1930s. They did not mean the gas chambers, of course; but the permissiveness, the slander, and the strange quiet of broader society. The sudden social permission to despise Jews once more. In that moment, I understood more clearly than ever why I love Israel as a country.

I have visited Israel numerous times. I have walked the streets of Jerusalem, explored the borders of the Golan, and met soldiers, teachers, Israeli Arabs, and Druze. However, nothing could prepare me for what I witnessed visiting the sites of 7^th October.

I walked through the ruins of Be’eri and Kfar Aza. I stood in safe rooms blackened by fire, rooms that had become tombs. I saw bloodied mattresses, burnt toys, and walls riddled with bullets. I listened to survivors recount what was done to women, to children and the elderly for the crime of being Jewish. It was not war. It was slaughter. It was an act of ethnic hatred so deliberate, so barbaric, that one cannot look at it and walk away unchanged.

Now, just twenty months later and every month since that horror, activists, academics, influencers, and politicians accuse Israel of committing a “holocaust” in Gaza. They call it a genocide and equate the defensive war of a sovereign state with the systematic extermination of six million Jews. There is a word for this: obscenity.

The war in Gaza is brutal and tragic. It has been poorly managed in parts, undermined by internal Israeli politics and fluctuating pressure from the Biden administration. Civilian suffering is undeniable. However, the war was initiated by Hamas. It was Hamas that shattered a ceasefire and unleashed carnage on 7th October. It is Hamas that embeds itself among civilians. It is Hamas that evades all responsibility for the catastrophe it has created—yet it is Israel and Jews more broadly who are held entirely to account.

This is not just morally wrong. It is morally depraved. The word “genocide” has been weaponised not to protect life, but to smear the one country in the world that exists to prevent another genocide of the Jewish people.

If Israel’s military campaign in Gaza were a genocide, Gaza would no longer exist. Israel has the power to flatten it entirely. It has not. It has taken costly, often dangerous steps to mitigate civilian harm, even as Hamas exploits that caution. Thanks to a stunningly successful information warfare campaign by Hamas and their Qatari allies, the chants grow louder, the lies grow bolder, and the mobs grow angrier.

Now, in almost parodic apotheosis of this moral vacuity, we see Iranian flags being waved in the heart of London. Just today, demonstrators in Parliament Square carried the banner of the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. A regime that funds Hamas, armed Hezbollah, trained the Houthis, and openly vows to wipe Israel off the map. They carried that flag through the streets of Britain, possibly from ignorance (if we are being generous), but mostly in defiance due to their hatred of Israel for daring to defend itself. In their twisted minds, this outweighs any concern for the fact that they are cheering on a theocratic terror state and an enemy of this country. It is not activism; it is allegiance to evil.

Protesters in Parliament Square on 14 June called for the Israeli attack on Iran to stop (Credit: Guy Smallman/Getty)

This war, which has been fought on seven fronts, is not merely between Israel and Hamas. It is Iran’s war. Hamas pulled the trigger, but Iran constructed the weapon. Iran provided the ammunition, Iran gave the fire control order, and Iran hopes the world’s moral confusion will result in targets falling when hit.

Not today. Israel has finally, and rightly, stopped waiting for the West to catch up. It is taking the fight to Iran to ensure its survival. This is not an escalation. It is a necessary action to prevent a genuine second Holocaust.

This dynamism and action are what make Israel different. This is why I love the place. Not because it is perfect (because it is not—balagan!), but because it is necessary. It serves as the firewall between Jewish existence and annihilation. It does not wait for pity; it acts, endures, and fights back.

However, as those Holocaust survivors this week proved to me, British Jews, along with Jewish communities throughout the diaspora, do not have the same sense of security. They are few, and once again, they are made to feel like outsiders in the countries they consider home.

In Britain, synagogues and Jewish events require tight security. A Jewish business risks being vandalised for existing. A Jewish student on campus is shouted down, deplatformed, or worse, simply for expressing pride in the only Jewish state. Israel may not need our sympathy, but British Jews need our solidarity.

If the memory of the Holocaust means anything, it must mean this: that Jews should never have to walk alone, ever again. When Holocaust survivors, the last living witnesses to humanity’s darkest abyss, tell us that the atmosphere in Britain today reminds them of 1930s Germany, they are not speculating. They are remembering. That is not a warning to be debated; it is one to be heeded.

The only question remaining is whether their neighbours; you, me, all of us; will stand with them now, while it still matters. I implore you to do so.