He’s home. The last one’s home. To people outside the Jewish world, it is difficult to describe how it feels to see the return of the body of Ran Gvili, who lost his life while fighting Hamas on October 7 and, in a characteristic act of depravity, was taken in death into Gaza.
So, 843 days after it began, the agony of the wait for the return of the hostages is over. How to explain the significance of this to mainstream Britons? Even those normally sympathetic to Jews often struggle to understand why we should care about people we have never met living 3,000 miles away.
This hell has been the most difficult period of our lives. But at the same time, it has revealed the true meaning – and joy – of being Jewish.
At heart, it is about family. We feel each other’s pain, grieve each other’s losses, do our best to support our people however we can, be they in Ethiopia, Yemen, behind the Iron Curtain or in the Jewish state.
That sense of peoplehood is something that the West has largely forgotten. What concern have we seen for the murder and persecution of Christians across Africa and the Middle East? Many of their co-religionists seem to care far more about the plight of the Palestinians than that far greater suffering taking place across so much of the world.
Of course, that is a deep cultural difference between Jews and the Christian, or post-Christian West. Christianity was established as a community of faith, not blood, with no soil that was theirs, under the auspices of the Roman Empire. As Christendom developed, however, followed by the nation-state, a sense of social identity grew in the West that has since receded under the weight of multiculturalism.
Deep down, however, I think people do have an understanding of Jewish peoplehood, and the antisemites among them resent it. Moreover, those in the Muslim tradition certainly understand it, due to their allegiance to the “ummah”.
That explains why the worst of society took such delight in tearing down the yellow ribbons that became a symbol of the plight of the hostages. They understood why they meant so much to us; they understood how deep our sense of family runs; and that was where they wanted their fist to land.
But now the hostages are home, both living and dead. It is hard to say whether this represents a defeat or a victory. Of course, the fact that they were taken in the first place was a historic defeat for Israel. In that light, can the retrieval of the final body really be seen as a triumph?
Surely not. Not after so much blood and tears. For the families of the hostages and those who survived, the trauma will be lifelong. The same can be said of Israeli society, and for the Jewish community as a whole.
The agonising wait might be over, but the longer journey of suffering is just beginning. Or rather, the latest chapter in our 3,000-year journey of pain and survival is opening; let us pray that it has the space to conclude, without being subsumed by a further disaster.
But there is a victory, too. That is the victory of Jewish peoplehood. They killed our children; they stole our brothers, our sisters, our grandparents; they murdered parents and raped women and committed every conceivable depravity.
Then their allies in the West attacked our spirit, beginning with the yellow ribbons. But we never stopped putting them back up. And now all of them have come home.
Never Again? How the West Betrayed the Jews and Itself, by Jake Wallis Simons, is out now
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