Watching Arbel Yehud being freed in Gaza today, I thought to myself: this is what it must have been like at Salem. Here we had a diminutive woman being paraded through a baying mob of hollering men. They barked religious slogans at her. They shoved and jostled to get a better view of the marked woman. They thrust their mobile phones in her face to capture her terror for posterity. They’ll no doubt share the clips. ‘Look! See how scared she was!’
Mercifully, Ms Yehud was being marched, not to the gallows, but to liberty. She was kidnapped from her home in Kibbutz Nir Oz during the Hamas-led pogrom of 7 October 2023. She was held by Palestinian Islamic Jihad for 482 days. Her partner Ariel Cunio, seized alongside her, remains in captivity. Arbel, though, following tense talks between Israel and her jihadist captors, has at last been spirited back to her homeland.
Yet even as we celebrate the freeing of this 29-year-old woman, we cannot overlook today’s diabolical scenes. It was a positively medieval spectacle. Ms Yehud was displayed like a war trophy, forced to walk through a crowd of fuming men roaring ‘Allahu Akbar!’ at her. The Jew-hating militants of Hamas, in their green bandanas, towered over her. Her pale face was etched with fear.
It seems Hamas and its allies are hell-bent on taunting their hostages to the very last. This was not just a ‘handover’ of an Israeli captive. It was a kind of ritualistic humiliation. A Jew was hauled to a public square packed with men who hate her kind. She was made into a spectacle for the sport of radical Islamists. Not content with stealing her liberty for 16 months, they scorned her as she left. It was an outrage from another century.
This was not just a ‘handover’ of an Israeli captive. It was a kind of ritualistic humiliation
The feral mobbing of Ms Yehud has rocked Israel’s conscience. Benjamin Netanyahu slammed the ‘shocking scenes’. Israel’s prime minister has delayed the release of 100 Palestinian prisoners until ‘the safe exit of our hostages is guaranteed’. He is right to do this. Israel cannot allow the agreed exchange of hostages and prisoners to be used by Hamas as an opportunity to parade and mock Jews before the eyes of the world.
Here’s my question, though: why didn’t today’s events shake the Western conscience too? Where’s our wrath at the sight of a Jewish woman being mobbed by Jew-hating men just three days after Holocaust Memorial Day?
The left’s usual craven excuse-making for Hamas’s seizing of hostages – where they point out that some of the hostages are serving members of the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) – doesn’t work in this case. Ms Yehud is a civilian. She was kidnapped because she is a Jew. She was jeered at by a crush of irate men today because she is a Jew. And yet you will search in vain for condemnation of this modern-day Jew-shaming from the West’s so-called progressives.
Where are our anti-racists? Where are those people who will brand you an ‘Islamophobe’ if you so much as scuff a page of the Koran or a ‘fascist’ if you criticise mass immigration? We live in an era in which tabloid criticism of Meghan Markle is denounced as lunatic white supremacy while the mobbing of a Jew by members of a terror group founded to kill Jews is shrugged off as normal.
Where are our feminists? Where are those well-paid columnists who write pained screeds about how sexist it is for the waiter to give the bill to their boyfriend rather than to them, yet who seemingly have nothing to say about the public tormenting of a woman whose only ‘crime’ is her Jewishness? Where are those feminist crusaders who spent last year demanding access to the men-only Garrick Club so that they might quaff wine with princes, judges and thespians? They really have nothing to say about a member of their sex who was forced for 16 months to break bread with the men who slaughtered a thousand of her co-religionists?
It isn’t the behaviour of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad that is shocking. Of course these armies of anti-Semites and misogynists will gleefully persecute a Jewish woman. What’s shocking is the indifference of the West’s intellectuals. Too many of them failed to make a full-throated condemnation of the atrocities of 7 October, and now too many look the other way as a Jewish woman is made into a spectacle of hate and derision. This should worry us all, for if our cultural elites will turn a blind eye to this, they’ll turn a blind eye to anything.
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