What If Fear Has Been Driving Us?

What if we have misread our own response to the hatred gathering around us?

Since 7 October, fear has been driving the proverbial bus. It had every reason to seize the wheel. Jewish names have been circulated online. Homes and businesses have been targeted. People have been filmed, followed, threatened and assaulted. Children have faced antisemitic abuse from classmates and, in some cases, violence on their way to school.

In Britain, the Community Security Trust recorded 204 antisemitic incidents involving schools, pupils or staff during 2025. In the United States, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 825 incidents in non-Jewish primary and secondary schools.

The figures vary from year to year. The direction does not.

Under pressure from the hard Left and the growing confidence of Islamist radicalism, Jews have been told that our history is suspect, our grief excessive and our connection to Israel morally disqualifying. The language of minority rights suddenly becomes elastic when the minority is Jewish. People unable to identify the river or the sea demand our removal from the land between them, then expect to be congratulated for their concern for humanity.

We have fought back. We have marched, written, briefed politicians, strengthened security, challenged institutions and documented abuse. Much of that work has been necessary. Some of it has required genuine courage.

Still, an uncomfortable question remains.

Have we fought from fear, or from love?

Fear is an excellent alarm. It is a terrible commander.

It spots the danger, then starts bargaining with it. Remove the Star of David before entering the station. Do not complain too loudly to the school in case your child is singled out again. Perhaps postpone the event. Perhaps change the venue. Perhaps say nothing about Israel at the dinner table when guests are present.

Above all, do not be provocative.

That word has done a great deal of work.

The Jew who objects to intimidation is accused of inflaming tensions. The Jew who remains silent is praised for restraint. The aggressor is treated like a dangerous weather system. Nobody rebukes the hurricane. They advise the residents to stay indoors.

Each concession may look sensible when considered alone. Together, they teach our children something poisonous: that Jewish safety depends upon Jewish disappearance.

Children notice when a parent lowers their voice in public. They notice when a necklace is slipped beneath a shirt, when an incident is discussed with fury at the kitchen table but never raised with the headteacher, when an invitation is declined because the journey feels unsafe.

They study our evasions carefully.

Long before they understand antisemitism, they understand fear. They learn that being recognisably Jewish carries a cost, and that the safest identity is the one nobody can see.

That cannot be the inheritance we leave them.

The answer lies in love. Not the soft, ornamental love that issues statements and avoids unpleasantness. Not the sentimental affection that congratulates itself for remaining above the fight while others decide the terms of surrender.

Love worthy of the name has teeth.

A mother running towards danger to reach her child is not passive. A father placing himself between his family and an attacker has not abandoned compassion. Love can be tender without being weak. Something precious becomes worth defending precisely because it is precious.

Jewish life deserves more than survival behind reinforced doors. It deserves noise, confidence, learning, argument, laughter and continuity. It deserves children who know who they are before strangers begin instructing them in what they are permitted to be.

Our history offers little support for the fashionable idea that courage requires the absence of fear. Jews have rarely enjoyed that luxury.

In the ghettos of occupied Europe, fear was everywhere. Yet teachers organised clandestine classes in cellars and cramped apartments. Children carried books beneath their clothing. Families smuggled food, preserved religious practice, recorded testimony and built underground networks.

Some took up arms. Others resisted annihilation by teaching a child to read, keeping an archive or lighting a forbidden candle.

Parents made choices so painful that we struggle even to imagine them. They handed children to strangers, sent them through forests, hid them behind false names and unfamiliar prayers. They did so because love demanded that they seize even the smallest chance of a future.

They were afraid. Of course they were.

They simply refused to give fear the final vote.

Jewish history is often presented as a procession of catastrophes interrupted by improbable survival. It is better understood as a record of transmission.

Empires destroyed our institutions, so we rebuilt them. Rulers expelled us, so parents carried memory across borders. Books were burned, so passages were learned by heart. Languages were suppressed, so children were taught in secret. Families were shattered, so strangers became family.

Again and again, Jewish continuity depended upon ordinary people accepting an extraordinary burden.

We flatter ourselves when we imagine that such responsibility belongs only to the past.

Our duty remains where it has always been: with our children.

Governments, police forces, security organisations and diplomatic envoys all matter. Britain’s decision to launch an independent review of antisemitism in schools reflects the seriousness of what Jewish pupils and teachers are facing, as well as the failure of some institutions to recognise it.

Yet no official review can relieve parents or communities of their own obligations.

We cannot outsource courage.

Our children need more than adults who worry about them. They need adults who prepare them.

They must know their history without being imprisoned by its tragedies. They must learn to distinguish disagreement from intimidation, curiosity from collective blame, an insult from a credible threat.

They need the language to establish boundaries, the judgement to disengage and the confidence to report what happened without shame. They should understand digital safety because the mob now enters the home through a screen. They should know how to preserve evidence, protect their personal information and seek help before a threat becomes a crisis.

They should also learn practical self-protection built around awareness, distance and escape. Seeking help is not weakness. Leaving danger is not cowardice. Defending another child may sometimes require a raised voice.

Most of all, they must encounter Jewish identity as something larger than the hatred directed against it.

A child taught Jewishness chiefly through persecution may come to regard it as a burden. Jewish life must also mean family, music, argument, humour, food, language, memory, faith, scepticism and belonging.

Israel must be encountered as a living society and a civilisational home, rather than introduced only as the defendant in an endless ideological trial.

Love builds before the vandals arrive.

It trains parents before the school calls. It gives children words before they freeze. It helps teachers recognise what they are seeing. It turns communal protection into communal confidence. It understands that resilience cannot be improvised at the moment of impact.

Fear asks how little space we can occupy without attracting hostility.

Love asks what we must build so that our children can stand upright.

Some will call this provocative. For certain people, the existence of a confident Jew has always been provocation enough. Their discomfort cannot become our organising principle.

We should distinguish genuine criticism from prejudice. We should resist treating every unpleasant conversation as mortal danger. We should teach judgement rather than paranoia.

But we must stop mistaking timidity for wisdom.

A generation of Jewish adults has become fluent in the grammar of permission.

May we speak? May we gather? May we wear this? May we object? May we defend ourselves, provided we first assure everyone that our survival will cause no inconvenience?

Enough.

The answer required of us is older than the present crisis: Hineni. Here I am.

It is the answer of someone who understands that duty cannot always be delegated. History does not absolve those who recognised the danger, calculated the cost and left their children to pay it.

Our sons and daughters will inherit the world we defend. They will also inherit the world we were too frightened to defend.

They will remember whether we taught them to stand or merely instructed them to hide. They will carry either the confidence of belonging or the weight of our apologies.

Fear may warn us of what is coming.

Love decides what we do about it.

And love, when it is serious, fights.