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A defaced hostage poster in London (Leon Neal/Getty Images)
Of the images I have not been able to clear from my mind over these past 12 terrible months the most tenacious is that of two young women: one in an elegant hijab, one not, laughing for the camera as they deface a poster of a hostage.
LaughingĀ forĀ the camera.Ā An unintentionally pointed preposition.Ā I think I meant only to sayĀ at,Ā but what if it was performative, either in response to a cameraman urging the women to vandalise a photograph of an unknown and possibly already slaughtered Jew, or an act of bravado on the womenās own parts? You never know for sure what you are looking at on film or how it came to be there. But the brief scene was unforgettably hateful in its callous insolence, however one interprets it.Ā Scrawling with a marker ā a marker bought for the occasion? ā over the face of someone you donāt know. Someone in desperate trouble. A small act of terror in itself, I thought. And then, in tearing it off the wall, as though to say āmay you never be foundā, a smiling act of collusion in the abduction, the disappearance and, perhaps ultimately, the murder. A message to the family who invested hope in that poster: may you be eternally disappointed!
I have wondered ā sitting this past year in the cowardly sanctuary of my London apartment, listening to the warlike whirr of the helicopters and the scarcely less warlike yells of the weekly peace protest ā whether the women have ever seen that footage of themselves. And, whether they have or they havenāt, if theyāve regretted it. They did what they did very soon after the massacre, while the smell of blood and rumour lingered still in the air, when every charge was met by denial, and it was all too easy to read events according to the rigidities of oneās politics. Even the evidence of our eyes became handmaidens to falsehood. Rape? What rape? Rape didnāt suit the prepossessions of the hour. But is it not possible, now that time has passed and certainties have been shaken, that the women recall what they did with shame and maybe even reproach each other with it? āIt was your idea.ā āNo it was yours.ā
What if ā while we are wondering āĀ theyĀ wondered, when they saw pictures of released hostages, whether one of them wasĀ theirĀ hostage? Would that have made them feel better? Or what if, when they saw pictures of murdered hostages, they wondered if one ofĀ thoseĀ was theirs? Would that have pierced their carapace of mirth? Or was the original defacement an expression of inexpugnable loathing?
Which brings us back to what is for me the greatest mystery of all: how the slaughter and, in some cases, dismemberment of innocent Israelis, men, women and children can have delighted educated people around the world to the point where there was no further violence against them ā not even genocide “in context” if we read Harvardās President correctly ā that they couldnāt countenance with joy?
Yes, it was hysteria and many of the more publicly hysterical have since rowed back a little on their frenzy. But why, at any stage of the massacre, was there irrationality on this scale? We were back in the Middle Ages, some said, when the Jew was in league with the devil and hatred of him was unquestioned and contagious. But wasnāt that hatred begat from ignorance? Can we regress half a millennium just like that? And if we can, what value the education we prize so highly?
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SubscribeBoring boring. Taking once incident as an amalgam to paint a very one sided picture. Lazy journalism.
From memory it was not one incident.
And you post a boring, lazy reply in criticism, complete with spelling errors…eat your own words…
For a’ ye ken he might be dyslexic.
The accounts I’ve read of the Holocaust are pretty one-sided too.
It isn’t journalism, nor meant to be. It is a meditation on the nature of evil.
as is his even more blistering article in the Jewish Chronicle on Oct 7th Remembered.
Mr. Jacobson has written a piece which is: erudite, interesting, generous and peaceable. I suspect though, that the young women and their allies would see it as: flabby, wishy-washy and lacking in conviction and self-confidence.
I agree with the author– It’s difficult to accept that they really mean what they are saying and it’s easier for us to make excuses. But we have to accept that folks calling for total war -ie A war in which, as Hitler and Goebbels said, there is no such thing as an innocent civilian- is exactly what they’re calling for. From the charter of the Palestinians elected government calling for it, to the late Hezbullah leader calling for it, to the “from the river to the sea” westerners who were screaming it in the streets in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, when do we believe them? Hamas is carrying out what they want.
Israel seems to understand at this point. And thankfully, they seem to have abandoned the strategy of losing adopted by western armies in Afghanistan or Iraq and instead embraced the tactics of General Zhukov.
Indeed.
The author seems to think that “the education” which we receive, whose twofold general aim is to prepare the young for their lives as adults whilst transmitting the cultural norms and values of their particular society is sufficient to overcome the very basic elements which exist within all of us when backed against a wall or part of a mob. Our prehistoric striving to simply survive has been superseded only in relatively recent millennia; formal and universal education only for a matter of about 150 years (in the UK) which is nowhere near enough to change the basic instincts of human nature, even if education as such could do so in the first place.
In the context of this article, i think it’s possible to understand what he’s getting at but choosing the particular example of one instance of inhumane behaviour doesn’t really cut through the vehemence of the antisemitic protests over the past 12 months. His previous articles have similarly lacked the cut-throughs and insights that would further understanding of the predicament of Israel. His reputation as a novelist and writer isn’t being enhanced via Unherd.
Apart from it not being one instance the amount of anti-Semitic behaviour weāve seen in the last year, a very short twelve months, is enough to wonder at how quickly weāve slid backwards into darker views.
I had the same thought, āEducationā is no protection against all the basic instincts and irrationality within human nature: Heroism and love sadly are as much part of us as is hate and depravity. We have no idea what triggered those girls, that the flood gates of such hate poured out of them. I often find, that very educated people, who think they have all their emotions under control, can be especially cruel, lacking insight and empathy.
Of course they may be many things, but the most obvious thing is that theyāre a very small minority.
Hmm. They probably didn’t think much about the deep meanings then or now.
It would not be until either of them physically face the horror, that they no longer find funny such savage potential within humanity.
Bravo, Howard. Brilliant, as always.
Yes very cleverly using the novelist’s art of focussing on the particular to draw attention to the wider situation. I despair of this country, I do not want to live in a place that I must share with such hateful people.
I do not want to live in a place that I must share with such hateful people.
That’s what the Israelis keep saying.
No, this is the same idiot that wrote (on July 13 this year, no less):
But there is another way of looking at this. The reasons Biden should not go on are, if we choose to take the world ironically, the very reasons he should stick it out. Even slurring his words at 81 he makes more sense than Trump ever did at 40. Despite his lapses and confusions, with Biden you feel his words had meaning once upon a time. They reach back to a world of intelligibility he once moved in. They are whatās left after a catastrophe. They are the noble ruins of an edifice that once stood proudly.
The current piece is fine; Jacobson is not.
You are right the author there sounds pretty stupid:..āthe noble ruins of an edifice that once stood proudlyā. Well that āruinā is now in charge of the US as the Middle East is about to blow up. Give me Trump any time, at least he tried with his Abraham Accord to bring some piece to the region.
From what I remember of those clips of people removing or defacing posters of kidnapped hostages most of them were girls, and I say girls and not women. Girls around that age down through school are capable of attacking anothers self esteem or weakness with real cruelty, without seemingly been aware of the pure destruction involved. Most women will confirm seeing this in their school years. Itās a viciousness without real purpose, like someone pulling of the legs of an insect. Of course theyāre useful idiots for the radicals and theyāre large in numbers at protests, but theyāre there for reasons nothing to do with Palestine and when interviewed have nothing to say, knowing nothing about the whole business. How to define this behaviour? I donāt know except to say itās blind, unadulterated viciousness. I imagine those girls will just bury any guilt they feel and move on, unconcerned about what they did.
I witnessed three girls in hijabs on Kingsway last October defacing Israeli hostage posters while laughing. Almost certainly students of KCL or LSE, so in the age range of 18-21. Girls?
Yes, girls.
…by that standard, so were the youngest of the female guards at Auschwitz…but we hanged them anyway, and rightly so…
Not so sure about that. Hanging 18 – 21 year olds who were under the influence of a great majority of the responsible adults in the country…
It should be remembered that Israel has literally thousands of Palestinians – many of them children – held in prisons without charge, routinely tortured or raped or killed (according to various Israeli and International human rights organisations).
The whole reason Hamas wanted hostages was to use them as bargaining chips to get their own hostages released from Israeli prisons.
I have no idea why the two women in the clip the author writes about here were smiling. Perhaps they were delighted that now the Israelis have some idea how Palestinians feel about their loved ones being taken as hostages. Perhaps they’re enraged at the double standards of Western Zionists – who only seem to care about lives when they’re Jewish – and took delight in being able to rip down these tokens of one-sided concern.
But like most Zionists, Mr Jacobson seems only to care about Jewish suffering.
… not a good look.
You clearly haven’t bothered to read the article. Or you weren’t capable of understanding it. Either way, “not a good look” as you put it.
I suspect a lot of people here donāt actually read articles. They just skim, looking for words that anger them. Somewhere in that thereās an odd satisfaction.
I think we all do to different degrees. If we actually read and fully thought about all the articles on here and then add in some time for a bit of research before commenting, that’s at least an hour a day.
Your comment is rife with falsehoods and data pulled from the air. Perhaps you can either provide backing for what you say, or at least more detail? Who, what, when, why, where?
“
A very thoughtful piece of writing. Jacobson’s willingness to look for contrition by the vandals and his willingness to forgive their despicable act is a mark of great humanity.
While nowhere near an understandable act, the women are acting at least against their “enemies,” that is, Israelis. They had skin in the game and I wonder if similar petty and cruel acts were committed by British people against German symbols during WW2? This does not make them acceptable. I ask this because the Telegraph carries an article about an apparently white British man vandalising a Jewish memorial to the wicked pogrom in Brighton. No obvious skin in the game, just self-righteous bigotry apparently.
A symbol is not the face of a hostage victim kidnapped and abused by a terrorist gang,
A white man who appears to be in his 60s. I only mention it because we tend to assume this malice comes from younger people.
Howard Jacobson’s writing is always humane as far as I can remember and I’m grateful for that. However, and I do not mean this as a criticism only as an observation, such humanity can, perhaps, only be afforded by those of us at a distance from the most dangerous events.
In the distance, at the centre of the conflagration, there is extreme danger, violence, fear and, sadly, the only way forward at present seems to be war, which is never humane though it is thoroughly human.
What we in the UK have allowed to happen in the last year shames our nation.
and now read the article, also written by this highly intelligent man who takes nothing for granted including his own Jewishness, in the JC.
https://t.co/1oET6BMDXS
You will find fewer more thoughtful and factual and explicit remembrances of Oct 7th than this.
…that the Police did not hunt these Women down and prosecute them for inciting murder shames us more…I only wish I had the personal resources to find them, and lock them in a TV Studio to explain themselves to Mr Jacobson…
…and if either of you are reading this…why do you lack the courage to own up and answer for conduct? You are a disgrace to humanity…
Atrocities rarely happen without significant groundwork to dehumanise the victim/enemy. Anti-semitism has always had this foundation.
This is why we should always have the self awareness when we might be drifting into a dehumanising meme too.
The hostages are clearly suffering terribly. So are their families. That defacing of the posters was worse than thoughtless. How much worse are the videos which were taken by soldiers of the US-backed IDF showing them gleefully committing actual war crimes? Al Jazeera has just released a compilation of them “Investigating war crimes in Gaza”.
[I didn’t put a link so as not to provoke immediate algorithmic censorship. Let’s see how long the herd of UnHerd censors takes to shut this thread down. One day? ]
Oh go on, live dangerously.
On edge, on the edge
This documentary should be required viewing by Mr Jacobsen.
Given the unspeakable horrors perpetrated by the terrorists of Hamas on October 7th. I am amazed by the IDFās restraint in consequence. If my family had been raped and slaughtered that day Iād show zero restraint in hitting back.
āNot one girl could be shown to her parentsā: The horrors of Oct 7 ā as told by the survivors
In a heartbreaking dispatch to mark the anniversary, witnesses recall the heroism of victims and the true depravity of the attack
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/10/05/oct-7-israel-survivors-stories-state-of-the-nation
Will this be a video of Israeli planes dropping flyers advising Gazans to move out of the way of theIsraeli tanks and troops that are coming? Or of the Israeli doctors working to save a Palestinian?
You mean the leaflets shuffling people to concentrate in areas where they can be more effectively bombed? Are these Israeli doctors working in one of the bombed out hospitals where that Palistinian doctor wrote “remember us” as his last words? Or was this perhaps the Israeli doctor trying to make a torture victim a bit more presentable upon release?
That what you mean?
You mean the leaflets shuffling people to concentrate in areas where they can be more effectively bombed?
Care to cite your source.
Ha, I see my reply to you was censored. At least the rest of the thread is still up. Love those echoes.
The last year has shown us how easy it must have been for the Nazis to carry out the Holocaust, and how easily it could happen again.
And it’s started now,the wheels are rolling. Once state Execution gets passed and we implement the lessons from Texas that a deputation have been sent to learn. No holds barred.
And we know how all the nice,respectable people like to always be on the side of law and order. And comply.
While the children are blameless. Remind me didnt the folk of Gaza choose and vote for Hamas to run Gaza>
Did you choose Liz Truss?
Many people today will do anything that may result in a āviralā video. They have no real convictions or sense of morality. They know little if anything of the facts of a particular case. They are simply posing for the camera.
āI post therefore I am.ā
“I am going to assume you will say that towards Jews, as Jews, you entertain no animosity.”
Why would you assume that? Much of the hate we have seen over the past year is directed precisely at Jews as Jews. There is Koranic sanction for it, as I am sure you know.
ļ»æ
It’s just a device, he’s giving them benefit of every possible doubt, so to ‘pour burning coals on their heads’. (Romans 12:20 If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him a drink. For by doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.)
Very well put, you expose the ignorance that has gripped our societies so well.
There is no shame.
Islamic terrorist organisations purposely place women and children in harms way. This is their strategy. They themselves live in bomb shelter tunnels. It amazes me that people rail against the obvious consequences when hostilities break out. Are these people that stupid?
Are which people that stupid?
When civilians are killed violently it is natural to feel appalled. When people blame those who dropped the bombs, they might be missing a complex truth, but it seems crass to label them as stupid.
We can consistently support Israelās right to defend itself and also feel pain about the loss of innocent lives in Gaza.
Let us follow the author’s example of seeking to understand each other.
What astounds me is that IDF intel was incapable of penetrating the tunnels and flushing out all those command posts. One would think that a military reputed to possess the best intelligence operation in the world, able to explode all of Hamas’s pagers instantaneously, would be able to pinpoint the locations of the enemy rather than blanket bombing the civilian population. Unless perhaps they weren’t interested in doing so ?
Were these women arrested/prosecuted for hate crime ? Wondering because I heard in the UK you could be prosecuted for hate crime for saying asylum seekers should be deported. It seems like wishing death on a Jew when your are muslim is less hateful than speaking against immigration or misgendering someone… Crazy.
Significant difference between saying someone should be deported/repatriated and killed MF. Nobody went to prison for the former, but they did for stating and encouraging the latter – quite rightly.
If you are as dim as your comment you won’t understand the difference, but I’ve given you benefit of the doubt.
Who has been arrested for saying asylum seekers should be deported? Posting calls to burn them in their accommodation, yes.
Happy to be corrected if you can provide examples with links.
This is a very confused, mixed up comment. The whole thing is supposition based on something that didnāt happen. Very crazy.
I remember reading a few years ago about the European penchant for hating Jews without any thought. It asserted that if you look at those parts of Germany (it was quite specific) that were experiencing a recent rise in neo-nazism they were always the same areas that had produced pogroms several hundred years previously. Blood and soil indeed.
When I was a schoolboy our national prejudices were deep and held in common without thought. Jews were mean with money, as were scots. Irishmen were gabby but stupid. Yanks were loud and pushy. Italians were cowards. The French were devious, and unfaithful. Blacks were athletic, musical, and sexually incontinent. The Chinese were inscrutable, the Japanese so brutal as to be virtually inhuman. The English were gentlemen, born to show the rest of the world how to behave themselves. Decent, fairminded, wise, self deprecatingly funny, politically mature, always won wars and were generous to our fallen enemies, !966 and all that. (The Beatles, James Bond films, World Cup, there was no real competition if you were thirteen like me).
So what’s new? The internet can spread this stuff faster than a bullet, and is permanently imbedding it in international culture for all to enjoy, with preference algorithms reinforcing every blind prejudice and never letting a contrary opinion inform any googler’s world view.
I’m quite old now. I don’t think there’s much hope for us – and yes, I wish it was 1966 again.
The parts of Germany where you have horrible anti semitism is where you find clusters of Muslim immigrants, especially in Berlin.
and so in the UK.
Don’t forget the police in Camden and Manchester taking down hostage posters. What was their motivation? In one case, we were told by the Met that it was to reduce ‘community’ tensions. We now understand that to mean appeasement of Islamism. It’s not just ignorant protesters and activists we need to regard with shame and anger but our politicians, institutions and media, too.
Howard Jacobson asks those who defaced the poster of a hostage how their action could contribute to peace.
Reading this article and his recent one in the Guardian over the weekend I would ask the author the same question.
Howard, the motivation lies in the absolute certainty of a supremacist ideology, in this case a religious ideology, but it’s true of all fundamentalist ideologies, religious, political, racist, nationalist, whatever. It’s a certainty which overrides human reason, intelligence, conscience, pity, understanding, and doubt. Certainty which lay at the heart of the holocaust, the gulags, Mao’s Red Guards, the Khmer Rouge, the Inquisition, and many more. It’s the certainty which Islam now demands of its followers, evident in the IS, the Taliban, Boko Haram, and of course Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah. Not until Muslims can be somehow persuaded to entertain doubt about their beliefs can there be an end to the conflicts across the Islamic world. The last time that happened Islam enjoyed a ‘golden age’. It led the world in the pursuit of knowledge. It also weakened the grip of its clerics on their powerbases, so could not be allowed to continue. That’s behind the rise of fundamentalist Islamic movements today; the threat of information and education
Entertaining doubt, yet still being inquisitive, enquiring, and intelligently constructive, is very much why Europe excelled, and why Brussels isn’t.
At the same time as we read this UnHerd allows a commenter calling themselves ‘jane baker’ to repeatedly post hateful and antisemitic comments under Michael Tobin’s article. It is horrifying.
Oh, it’s been more than a year of hatred. Hatred is the region’s most plentiful natural resource. If only the Muslim states put as much effort into more productive activities, the region might have more than one normally functioning country.
When will we give up conflating “education” with morality? The idea that sitting in the right classroom and receiving the approval of a board of educators equals the aquiring of a humanitarian view of right and wrong?
If anything, as we saw during the Covid fiasco, holding the paper approval of a university is more likely to ensure unthinking acceptance of whatever the Establishment Party Line is this week, since thinking against it means cutting off the very branch one is sitting on. And in the Islamic world the Establishment view of history, what is taught and accepted, is not friendly to the West or to Jews.
The people who teach this woke worldview do not like even themselves; their unhappy existence colors their worldview.
I’ve recently seen huge posters of all the hostages on several public buildings in France. I have never seen that in Britain. It makes me rather ashamed.
Can we regress half a millennium just like that? And if we can, what value the education we prize so highly?
You are assuming a fact not in evidence. What makes you think we have actually progressed from that half millennium past?
Unpleasant as it may be, we must all grow up and understand that there is a mindset outside of the understanding of someone raised and educated in the protected environment of the post-war West. There are people imbued with the passion of hatred of the other. In the case of Islam, the Qur’an and Hadiths provide the pathway to hatred of non-Muslims. Make no mistake (to borrow a favoured phrase of Starmer), the hatred is not confined to Jews – though Mohamed reserved a special place in the pantheon of hatred for them – but is always ready to be enflamed against other non-believers. “Ask not for whom the bell tolls…)
What is about Zionism that makes it indefensible? It would be easier to ask what is not monstrous about it. Just read illan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. It’s free online. This is not an issue over which there is any ambiguity whatsoever. Out today: div > p > a”>Atrocity Inc
Yes. Its debatable who hates who the most. Pappe or Zionists.
It is incredible that the hand of Iran is overlooked by those protesting for the Palestinians and decrying Israel. The sheer naivety that overlooks the timing of the 7th October actions by Hamas in the wider context of geopolitics. The utter ignorance about Iran and its sponsorship of Hizbollah and Hamas.
Most things seem to make more sense when viewed through a lens of āus and themā rather than āright and wrongā. Thereās no point trying to be friends with the Palestinians and the wider Iran-plus-proxies coalition – weāll always be āthemā from their perspective.
There is no ultimate moral arbiter we can appeal to – everyone considers themselves to be in the right. When we in the west remember that, and stop providing our enemies with the weapons to destroy us (DEI, intersectionality, the ICJ etc), we might stand a fighting chance.
“And once ignorance rules, darkness descends on everybody.”
Well said, sir. May Ignorance never reign in this world, and may God be our guide.
Having read the comments, not quite all of them, my overall feeling is that nuance and reflection have become endangered skills, and compassion a lost art.