Amid Hate Silence, I Hear Clearly

Last week, hostage survivor Eli Shirabi testified before the United Nations about his harrowing imprisonment in Gaza, where he was starved, beaten and psychologically tortured for 491 days while the world’s institutions threw the rule book on war out the window.

“Where was the world?” he asked, imploring them to bring all the hostages home.

The day Eli and fellow hostage survivors Or Levy and Ohad Ben Ami returned home was a day many Jews around the world hoped might be a turning point for the international community to rally by our side. Emaciated, barely able to walk, the parallels between the visuals on screen and the photos from the liberation of Auschwitz were a painful reminder of how far we have not come in the fight against antisemitism.

“How I long I begged for humanity,” he testified. “And in all that time, no one came.”

Amid today’s loud, crowded clash of ideological fervor, we spend a lot of time dissecting what people are saying, to whom and how. But these days I’ve become obsessed with what people are not saying.

Beyond increasingly anxious Jews, few acknowledge that the world’s vast indifference to Hamas’ slaughtering, rape, abduction and in-captivity abuse and murder of Jews has been a tipping point that has made antisemitism acceptable in a way we have not seen since the Eastern European pogroms in 1918-1920, when the world tuned out the systemic hunting of Jewish communities in a way that signified acceptable behavior to those who would decades later ignite the Holocaust.

We know there is a vast acceptance of antisemitism not because of the things people are saying, but because of what is left unsaid, unrecognized and unamplified at a time when nearly every adult and most adolescents carry a publishing platform in their pockets.

Disinterest when presented with atrocities that should shake you to your core is not a micro aggression. It is hate silence.

It is a conscious withdrawal of one’s duty of care, and it cuts particularly deep to be confronted with indifference by those who have built platforms around advocacy against hate and marginalism. In absentia, words and actions are profound.

Last month, when Yarden Bibas buried his two sons and his wife, Shiri, he requested that IDF Spokesman Brig.-Gen. Daniel Hagari share his sons’ atrocious autopsy details with the world. “He looked me in the eye and asked that the world be shocked by the manner in which his children were murdered,” Hagari said. “It’s a horrific crime that cannot be reconciled with.”

And yet, beyond the orange-tinted tributes in Instagram feeds of Jews across the diaspora and a handful of buildings lit in memoriam, it seems too many believe that kidnapping two children under the age of five from their homes, smuggling them into captivity, strangling them with their bare hands and then pummeling the lifeless bodies with stones to cover up the crime is reconcilable with their values.

I know this not because of what was said, but because of the silence.

Even when witnessing these toddlers’ coffins paraded in public ceremony – with families cheering, kids propped up on their fathers’ shoulders, the military giving out guns to the next generation of terrorists, all in celebration of the murder of Jewish children – the world did not wail a collective cry or call out for an end to the madness. We, the Jewish people, cried, both for the senseless deaths of the Bibas family and for the stunning realization that if these two boys did not grab humanity’s heartstrings and spur outrage, perhaps nothing will.

We can hear the silence. We can see the gaps in recognition and validation of our pain when the headlines are buried underneath yet another story about petty political squabbles or the soaring price of eggs.

Rachel Goldberg-Polin, whose son Hersh was murdered by Hamas terrorists after they kidnapped him from a music festival and held him in the dark, damp tunnels of Gaza for nearly 11 months, wrote a poem in the early days of her son’s captivity that captured the hope that the shared experience of mothers would pierce the politics and hatred to bring pure humanity back into focus.

Goldberg-Polin wrote of the “million tears” she has cried. “We all have,” she wrote. “And I know that way over there there’s another woman who looks just like me because we are all so very similar and she has also been crying.”

Prolifically, Goldberg-Polin continues, wondering if the tears could be distilled to be a single, tiny seed, that could be planted to grow something new. “A seed wrapped in fear, trauma, pain, war and hope, and see what grows?”

I, too, wish we could together plant a seed of change – something, anything, that will shift the trend lines because the data could not be clearer. An Anti-Defamation League study released in January found that nearly half of adults worldwide held elevated antisemitic views, with 23 percent of respondents expressing favorable opinions toward the Palestinian terror group Hamas.

When the number of antisemitic hate crimes rises 140 percent year over year from Oct 7 2023 to Oct 7 2024, one must acknowledge that Pandora’s box has ripped open.

One does not need to brandish a swastika to be a card-carrying antisemite. They need only remain silent when presented with ongoing, mounting evidence that Jews around the world are being systematically hunted.

I am no longer waiting naively for the chorus of support. I am listening. And in the silence, I hear clearly.