What the West could learn from Israel

Hostages Square in Tel Aviv is quiet now. The paraphernalia of hope remains. Yellow ribbons dance in the breeze. The flap of a hundred Israel flags breaks the silence. There’s still the burnt-out car that was recovered from the ‘road of death’ in the south, where Hamas slaughtered fleeing families on 7 October 2023. I look inside at its blackened remains, the squelched leather, the warped metal, and wince at the thought of what suffering must have unfolded in this suffocating space. In one corner of the square is an unsteady pile of placards featuring the faces of the 251 Israelis seized two years ago: the retired equipment of a moral movement no longer needed.

For the hostages are home now. The living ones at least – Israel still awaits the return of the remains of some of the stolen. It was in this urban throughway outside the Tel Aviv Museum of Art that Israelis gathered these past two years to pray for the abducted. It was christened Hostages Square, and I expect that’s how it will always be known. Even Google Maps calls it that now. Its most striking feature is a mock Hamas tunnel, a 30-metre concrete bunker designed to simulate the experience of being a hostage in Gaza. I crouch and enter. After two minutes, claustrophobia kicks in. There are men who spent two years like this, and Israel wants to make sure the world never forgets.

Much of it already has, though. As I peruse a vast wall of stickers showing the smiling faces of the men and women who were stolen – some of whom made it home, some of whom did not – I feel a sudden flush of anger. Anger that Israel was left almost entirely alone to agitate for the precious lives and liberty of these abducted Jews. Anger that there were not similar Hostages Squares in London, New York, Berlin. Anger that the same yellow ribbons that flutter so lovingly here were violently torn down on the streets where I live by medieval mobs eaten up by a demented hatred for the Jewish State.

And anger that hardly anyone in Europe knows the name Alon Ohel. A gleaming piano has pride of place in Hostages Square. It has Alon’s photo on it alongside huge yellow lettering that says: ‘You are not alone.’ Alon, 24, is an accomplished pianist who was taken from the Nova music festival and held for 738 days with shrapnel in his right eye. He’s free now, and his sight is slowly improving. We all went to see the Roman Polanski film about a Jewish pianist ghettosied by the fascists of the 1940s – who will tell the story of this Jewish pianist held underground by the fascists of the 2020s? The hope is that when he recovers from his long, black captivity, he will come to Hostages Square and play this piano. The sweet music of defiance.

A short walk and I am in Dizengoff Square. It could not be more different. This old square has become a makeshift monument to the Israelis who have died in this infernal war Hamas started and yet it pulsates with life. It throbs with noise and bustle. Armies of people sup espressos in the al fresco cafés that encircle it. People lounge on the green. And every day, at every hour, they come to see an extraordinary spectacle: the hundreds of lovingly framed photos of the dead that have been perched on the perimeter wall of the square’s fountain. Untold numbers of joyful, youthful faces. Photos, it strikes me, of men and women who will have been born well into the 2000s, and yet whose lives have already been given for their country on the scorched, unforgiving battlefield of Gaza.

I see the framed likeness of Natan Rosenfeld. He’s the British-born Israeli who died in Gaza on 29 June, aged just 20. That’s the weekend that the silver-spoon wimps and bohemians of Glastonbury joined in with Bob Vylan’s sick chant of ‘Death, death to the IDF’. I feel that flush of anger again, at the thought of the vegan creeps of the English middle class hollering for the death of Jewish soldiers at the very moment that this Jewish soldier was dying. Thousands of Brits essentially siding with the fascists of Hamas, as one brave Brit waged war on Hamas. His wide grin lights up Dizengoff Square – a comfort to the Israelis who visit this site, and a rebuke, I think to myself, to his fellow young Britons who think nothing on Earth is worth a war, certainly not this Jewish nation that they hate.

When in Israel, no matter how much you try to resist it, you find yourself drawing comparisons between our young and theirs. It’s an inexorable sensation, a thought you’d be a fool to try to escape. You see photo after photo of Israelis, some barely out of their teens, who have made the ultimate sacrifice for their country, and you think of Britons of the same age who need a self-care day if someone ‘misgenders’ them.

You see young IDF soldiers everywhere, their skin bronzed from the baking hell of Hamas-ruled Gaza, their rifles worn nonchalantly over their shoulders, and you think of those painfully privileged Oxbridge students who scurry for the womb-like embrace of the ‘Safe Space’ when a gender-critical feminist visits campus. You see Natan Rosenfeld and you think of his moral opposite: those 20-year-olds at Glasto who clamour for the death of Jews one minute and then sob into their dairy-free ice-cream the next because they overheard someone say ‘I might vote Reform’.

And you read about the bravery of the youthful soldiers who ventured into the tangled urban web of booby-trapped Gaza and you think of all those polls of young Brits who say they would never fight for Britain. Like the survey for The Times earlier this year, which found that a measly one tenth of Gen Z Brits would risk their life to defend the nation. That’s not surprising given 48 per cent of them also think Britain is a racist country. Who’d put their neck on the line for a moral shithole? The survey exposed a ‘deep erosion of faith in Britain’, as one commentator put it. And then you see young Israelis with their fierce faith in their nation, with their guns, with their willingness to die for their people, and you find yourself thinking, once more, about the moral chasm that seems to separate modern Britain from modern Israel.

There must be something we can learn from Israel, no? About resilience? Confidence? How to infuse the young with the spirit of nationhood and the valiance of self-belief? That’s my takeaway from my visit to Israel after two awful years of war – that if the West would only stop falsely accusing this young country of genocide, it might see that there is much here that might inspire and enlighten and change us.

This is not to say Israel ‘bounced back’ from the horrors of 7 October. That racist calamity was far too serious, far too grave an assault on the Jews and on humanity, for any such trite, therapeutic blather about swift ‘healing’. The scars of 7 October run deep in Israel. The trauma is palpable. People’s voices still catch when they speak about it. Everyone knows someone who was impacted by this fascist-level atrocity. I share a beer with new friends on La Mer beach in Tel Aviv and am surprised to discover they knew Natan Rosenfeld. Israel is a small country.

The wounds of 7 October are most open and sore in the south. I visit Kibbutz Be’eri, three miles from Gaza. You can see the shells of Gaza’s buildings in the distance. No town in Israel suffered as much as Be’eri on 7 October. One hundred and two people were killed here. That is one in 10 of the population – a literal decimation of Jews, Biblical-style. Hamas slaughtered everyone it encountered. Elderly couples clinging to each other for dear life, teenage girls, fruit-pickers taking shelter under trees. Their victims lay ‘like rag dolls in a heap’. The oldest victim in Be’eri was 88, the youngest not even a year old.

Yarden, a fresh-faced young man who works in security at Be’eri, shows me around. It is only halfway through my visit that I discover his brother was one of the decimated. He shows me the skeleton of what was once a family home: a ruin pockmarked from the fascists’ bullets and still stained black from the fires they lit to smoke out the Jews. Be’eri is a leftish kibbutz. They were all about co-existence. They employed Gazans in their avocado farming and their printing press. That has all stopped now. One lady tells me of how her daughter’s heart has been hardened against the people of Gaza. She was a ‘live in harmony’ type, she says, but she changed utterly in the wake of the fascist rampage of two years ago.

The horrors of Be’eri capture how large, how historic, how cruel the October pogrom was. There is a tendency in the West to see the events of 7 October 2023 as an opportunistic push by an embittered people from the ‘concentration camp’ of Gaza. In truth, this racist onslaught against Israel was years in the planning and it involved a 6,000-strong army of Islamist militants who arrived by air, sea and land. Hundreds of armed men took over Be’eri. Some remained for two days and two nights. They fought fierce gun battles with Be’eri’s brave but outnumbered security guards. One resident tells me that even more horrifying than the sight of the Hamas gunmen was the sight of the Gazan civilians who came in their wake to loot homes. As the kibbutzniks hid, their property was plundered. This is a peaceful, socialist community of Jews who were shot, incinerated and stolen from, and still there are some who call it ‘resistance’.

I stop in at Kibbutz Alumim for lunch. They welcome me into the common eating area and feed me chicken schnitzel. This kibbutz suffered a unique atrocity on 7 October – the vast majority of the victims here were migrant workers. Young, hopeful men from Nepal and Thailand who were in Israel as part of its ‘Earn and Learn’ scheme – earning money while learning agricultural skills. Their living quarters were close to the entrance of the kibbutz, meaning that when the neo-fascist army arrived on 7 October they suffered unimaginable violence. They were butchered with extreme prejudice. One was beheaded. Their bodies were mutilated. It was a frenzy of racist violence of the like mankind had not seen in a long time.

Seventeen migrant workers were killed. Others were kidnapped and died in captivity, including Bipin Joshi, the heroic 23-year-old Nepalese man who deflected one of Hamas’s hand grenades during its orgy of murder at Alumim. His body was returned to Israel last week. In the common area of Alumim there is a monument to the migrant workers. It is lovingly tended every day. As I look at the faces and read the names, a young kibbutznik comes up to clean and dust it. People here share stories of the bright-eyed men from afar who made this kibbutz their home. Apparently Bipin Joshi was a star of the kibbutz’s basketball court. There is genuine pain over these visitors from overseas who were so savagely stolen by Hamas. It is a profoundly moving expression of the most human camaraderie.

It strikes me – I have not heard one ‘anti-racist’ in the West lament the destruction of the precious lives of these migrant workers. I have seen no ‘anti-fascist’ pay tribute to these ‘non-white’ men who were murdered by fascists. I have seen no ‘progressive’ tears shed for Bipin Joshi, murdered by Hamas for the crime of associating with Jews. And yet here in Kibbutz Alumim, in ‘white supremacist’ Israel, the men are memorialised. They are loved. They will not be forgotten. True kindness lies not in the Israelophobic fury of the West’s ‘Be Kind’ activist class but in this hurting kibbutz on the border with Gaza.

My final stop is Re’im in the south – the site of the Nova music festival. I meet Rita, a survivor of that slaughter. The first thing she does is offer me a shot of arak, a strong Israeli spirit. Perhaps she wants to fortify me against the horrors she is about to share. I soon find myself glad I downed it.

She takes me to the DJ stage. I get the view the DJ would have had when the alert came through to run for your life. On a portable speaker, she plays the very trance tune that was ringing out at the moment it became clear that Jew-killers were arriving by air and by land. It is extraordinarily evocative. She invites me to close my eyes and imagine I am zoning out to this song when that announcement comes: ‘Run.’ The human imagination is a wondrous thing but still I struggle to imagine how terrifying it must have been.

Rita survived by hiding in the ticket booth with her badly injured husband and her sister. She heard and smelt death all around. Numerous festivalgoers sought refuge in an ambulance right next to the ticket booth. Hamas fired a rocket into it and burnt them alive. She shows me the fridge freezers in the bar that people took refuge in, and which Hamas fired bullets into. And the dumpster people hid in, and which Hamas fired bullets into. I was under no illusions about the barbarism visited on the Nova music festival, yet even I feel sickened by what I hear. I am honestly not sure what I will do to the next person who tells me it was ‘resistance’.

There is a point at which Rita’s voice seems to break. She tells me that after she hid for hours, and survived the massacre, a man from Gaza knocked on the window of the ticket booth. ‘Phones, phones’, he said. He robbed them. Rita, too, has been hardened against Gaza. She tells me this with a palpable sense of regret. The Western activists who defame Israelis as a warped people in the grip of a ‘genocidal mania’ could not be more wrong. The people I meet in the south are heartbroken, genuinely heartbroken, that 7 October so violently ripped the civilians of Gaza from the civilians of Israel and made co-existence seem so, so hard. They grieve not only for the people they lost but also for the future of their region.

Rita is full of life. And she is pregnant. Listening to her, it strikes me that she is a living, breathing reproach to the neo-fascists who invaded this nation with the intention of destroying it. Her survival not only of 7 October, but also of the traumas that followed, is a stirring act of defiance against both Hamas and its simps in the West who dream of dismantling the Jewish nation and thus expelling this woman and her unborn child from their homeland. That’s Israel summed up. It lives. Am Yisrael Chai – ‘the people of Israel live’. In wilful rebellion against both the armies of anti-Semites that surround it and the legion Israelophobes of the West who loathe it, Israel pulls, slowly but surely, through the war of obliteration waged against it two years ago.

How? How does a nation do this? How does a country in the 21st century withstand the cult of fashionable frailty and self-hatred and do that thing you’re not supposed to do – fight? The secret ingredient is self-belief. The sense of nationhood in Israel, of peoplehood, is extraordinary. No, that doesn’t mean there aren’t divisions. There are millions. I meet people who love Benjamin Netanyahu and people who loathe him. I meet right-wingers who want him in The Hague and also ‘Leftists for Bibi’ who voted for him to piss off the weak, woke leftists of the Ha’aretz middle classes.

But everyone I meet – everyone – is a Zionist. The hippy chicks, the pacifist kibbutzniks, the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans in a rooftop bar, the old fellas drinking coffee in Dizengoff – all of them. Israelis are torn on moral questions, social questions, political questions, but they are bonded by something that rises above all of it: peoplehood; sovereign conviction; an attachment to nationhood so powerful that it can even withstand the ceaseless barbs and libels of virtually the entire intellectual elite of the Western world.

People say that Europe and the Jews took wholly different lessons from the Second World War. Europe’s rulers decided nationalism was bad, the Jews decided nationhood was essential, in order that they might protect themselves from the murderous urges of organised anti-Semitism. That was the great, historic fork in the road – we went down the path of dismantling sovereign ideals in the infantile belief that it would deliver us from war, while the Jewish people went down the path of restoring their ancient homeland so that they might live freely and securely in the land of the forebears. We jettisoned sovereignty and its attendant virtues of national confidence and territorial courage. The people of Israel did the opposite.

And who’s faring better? Despite the invasions it has suffered and the threats it faces, it’s Israel. Being there reminded me what a nation is: a place of belonging, of attachment, of sacrifice, of promise. A place where the young are brave and the old are safe. A place where soldiers are celebrated and enemies are defeated. A place where borders matter and courage counts. A place where no one is left behind: not Jew, not Muslim, not Thai, no one. Not a perfect place – far from it – but a place that at least aspires to live by high ideals. We could be that place too, if we stopped defaming the Jewish State and started examining our own state. Let Israel be – it’s fine.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy