The Day the World Looked Away

It’s a bright Saturday morning in the Oxfordshire countryside. At Wilderness Festival, music is playing, thousands of young people are dancing in the fields. Suddenly, the sky fills with parachutes. Armed men descend, others roar in on motorbikes and pickup trucks. They open fire into the crowd.

2,160 are dead. Another 252 festivalgoers are dragged away as hostages: some beaten, some burned, some begging for their lives. Survivors hide under piles of bodies, pretending to be dead. One young woman whispers goodbye to her mum over the phone while gunfire crackles around her.

By the time it’s over, more than 8,000 have been murdered and 1,700 taken as hostages.

And all this while, the rest of the UK is under a rain of fire. Over 20,000 rockets launched in hours. Sirens blaring from London to Manchester, from Brighton to Newcastle.

This isn’t a nightmare I’ve made up. This isn’t a horror film. This is October 7th, 2023.

Except it wasn’t here in Britain.

It was Israel.*

So when you hear people shrug and say, “Oh, it’s complicated”, remember: If this happened here, no one would dare call it anything but the largest massacre of civilians in modern British history.

And that’s exactly what it was for us. Antisemitism didn’t end with the Nazis in 1945. October 7th, and every day thereafter, has made that abundantly clear.

Do you remember where you were that day? I do. I’d just bought dog food and caught the tail end of a news segment on the radio. Rockets falling on Tel Aviv? Surely not… I must have heard wrong.

I was not wrong. And the devastation did not stop there. Glued to the tv, praying for friends and family. Knowing that we would be more in the know than some of them. It was Simchat Torah and Shabbos. Many wouldn’t be online or on phones.

I felt like a ghost for days… I still feel like a ghost.

Watching the news updates, endlessly refreshing my phone. How many dead now? How many more hostages? It was one never ending nightmare. And yet I kept this naivety, surely after this someone will speak up. The world can’t possibly stay silent on this. Not on a terror attack of this magnitude; our lives are worth more than this.

How wrong I was.

I shared posts to my social media stories: news reports, death tolls, hostage updates. Nothing ‘controversial’, just facts. But the controversy wasn’t the content; it was that the victims were Jewish. I lost a lot of “friends” that week. And I’ve continued to lose them every day since. I’d love to say it doesn’t hurt. But it does.

I’d like to say it doesn’t affect me, good riddance to them. But that would be a lie. Of course I don’t want to surround myself with those who wish me harm, but to know that is the case still hurts. It’s not about missing those who left, but what their actions represent on a far grander scale.

October 7th wasn’t complicated, it was a massacre. And the silence since has been a second violence.

Antisemitism didn’t end with the Holocaust. It just learned how to hide.