Why did some people refuse to mourn with the Jews after 7 October?

A year has passed since the terrible events of 7 October 2023, but for Jews the pain of that day – when 1,200 were killed and 250 hostages snatched across Israel’s border into Gaza – remains vivid. Every call and every text on that dreadful Saturday morning brought awful news. Many of those murdered were friends and relatives. My cousin, who was at the Nova music festival, survived the massacre, but she was injured and remains traumatised by what she saw; she will never forget the rapes and shootings for as long as she lives. Another cousin’s son was murdered by Hamas. Sons, daughters and grandchildren were lost.

British Jews, of whom there are 300,000 or so, were safe from the grasp of Hamas, but it was clear that this was an attack on Jews everywhere – and it has had a devastating effect on our community. Centuries of persecution – the Holocaust, pogroms in eastern Europe, and the Farhud (persecutions of Jews in Iraq by violent mobs) – taught Jews that they will always be a target wherever they might live. But in spite of that knowledge, the terrible scale of this atrocity was hard to fathom. Hamas’s attack was the biggest and most brutal massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Panic attacks became a fact of life. So, too, did violent nightmares about terrorists attacking our home. In one, my six-year-son was shot and killed in front of me. I woke up shaking and crying. There were so many triggers around; the sound of children crying, hostage situations in movies. Even now, seeing someone with red hair brings tears to my eyes, because they remind me of the Bibas brothers – a toddler and a baby – both abducted by Hamas.

My experience isn’t unusual. For British Jews, many of whom have loved ones in Israel and an emotional connection to the country, the grief and trauma were immense. Hamas’s terrorists wanted only one thing when they crossed the border from Gaza that fateful morning; they sought to kill Jews. Children, mothers and fathers were murdered for no other reason than that they were Jewish and in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Our hope, if it can be called that, was that the massacre of 7 October might show at last those outside Israel what Hamas is: a murderous antisemitic organisation. Surely, people could see clearly now the sort of enemy Israel and Jews everywhere face. Hamas terrorists are not ‘freedom fighters’ wanting to establish a Palestinian State alongside Israel, living in peaceful coexistence. This is a radical Islamist organisation that conducted a brutal, sadistic massacre.

Yet Jews were naive to think that everyone would wake up to what was plain to see. As we mourned, antisemitism spread. Within hours of Hamas’s assault ending, before Israel had even reacted and the scale and cruelty of the attacks was only beginning to emerge, some chose, not to mourn with the dead and injured, but to celebrate the massacre, rape, torture and abduction of Jews.

On our streets and online, in what felt like a twisting of the knife, British Jews were faced with those who justified the attack, or minimised and denied it. The streets of London soon filled with protesters, some of whom expressed support for the terrorists and for violence. Many crossed the line between valid criticism of Israel and objection to the war, into outright antisemitism. Calls for an intifada (violent uprising that has included terrorism against civilians), for the annihilation of Israel ‘from the river to the sea,’ swastikas, and chants that dehumanise Jews and delegitimise our right to self-determination became all too common.

British Jews have, over the last 12 months, encountered antisemitism in all walks of life; on our streets, on public transport, at schools and universities, theatres, in the NHS, at work. The cities in which we live, our neighbourhoods, all feel less safe for us now. The Community Security Trust recorded 1,978 incidents in the first half of 2024 – a 109 per cent increase from the same period in the previous year.

As an historically persecuted minority group, this level of hatred has made many of us wonder if there’s anywhere that’s safe for Jews. The experience of the Jewish community in the UK isn’t unique. Antisemitism rose sharply worldwide since 7 October, from Canada to Australia, South Africa to western and northern Europe.

But it’s the normalisation of antisemitism and its move to the mainstream that has affected Jews on a personal level even more than the actions of a loud, radical fringe. Every one of my Jewish friends and acquaintances has had a similar experience. Since the war started, they have faced hostility from colleagues, friends, and neighbours. People with little knowledge and understanding of the conflict have started parroting anti-Israel propaganda, most of it consumed online. Some of it pushed by Iran, Russia and China.

We’ve all heard it. ‘The conflict is complicated,’ we’re told. This is the phrase used by those who don’t want to admit their ignorance or admit that they might be justifying terrorism (at least not to their Jewish friends). Can’t these critics of Israel see that the massacre of 7 October wasn’t complicated? It was pure evil. Israel, some seem to think, should turn the other cheek rather than fight to defend itself from another atrocity. For Jews, this feels like being asked to die quietly. ‘Don’t cause trouble,’ is the message.

Close friends started to disappear. Some found that their social circles pushed them away and ignored them. Many Jews have experienced hostility from once friendly colleagues in workplaces.

Zionism – simply meaning Isreal’s right to exist and Jews’ right to self-determination, and something most Jews believe in – has become a slur. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators sometimes use it as a synonym for evil colonialism; in doing so they are blind to Jews’ long history in their ancestral homeland. In the weeks and months since 7 October, the distortion of our history and the demonisation of our beliefs has become troublingly common.

There’s no doubt that the war has caused tragedy on both sides, but many of us have noticed the staggering double standards and hypocrisy. Those who express outrage at Israel’s actions in a war it didn’t start, are all too often silent about atrocities committed by the Syrian government against its own civilians, the Islamic Republic of Iran against Iranian women, the Houthis in Yemen in a war that has caused widespread starvation and death, the mass-casualties and hideous gender-based violence in the war in Sudan, Russia’s attack on Ukraine that included targeting civilians and the abduction of roughly 20,000 Ukrainian children, and many other examples of wars and terrorism. To them, Israel is uniquely – and inexplicably – evil.

Age-old blood-libels and other conspiracies about Jews have become mainstream and are casually repeated by those around us. They are a kind of ‘acceptable’ racism that would cause a much greater backlash if employed against other minority groups. But Jews are expected to just grin and bear it.

A traumatised community feels abandoned by its wider community just when it needs compassion. The lack of solidarity in the face of a tsunami of antisemitism has made healing from the trauma all the more difficult. Many Jews have turned inward since 7 October, into the safe space of the community, but we don’t want to live our lives separated from the broader communities in which we live.

There’s hope still; the vast majority of British people are appalled by racism, but anti-Jewish racism has been trivialised to such a degree that some either have a blind spot for it, or – more commonly – don’t always recognise it when they see it. Their silence is deafening. It’s time for this silent majority to recognise that there’s a problem and speak up against it. To stand up for colleagues, friends and classmates who are being bullied or shunned.

Jews’ lives are now divided between before, and after, 7 October. That massacre affected all Jews profoundly. But where we hoped that the world would mourn with us, all too often Jews met with condemnation and antisemitism. As we mark a year since that terrible day, the shock, pain and grief still run deep, but we are learning to live with them and look to the future. We must, otherwise it’s a win for the terrorists who try to annihilate us, and that’s never an option.