JERUSALEM — Last Friday night was a good night. Josh had come home from a trip with some money in his pocket, and we decided to spend a little on a rare fancy date night at a nice restaurant. We cracked crabs legs and drank nice wine, we talked about our plans for the future with excitement. We came home a little tipsy, laughing, happy to be together at the end of what had been a long and stressful week for both of us.
We woke up on Saturday to the sound of sirens. It didn’t bother us. Iron Dome is outstanding at what it does, which is take down rockets before they can be a threat. Significantly more people are injured by panicking and running to shelters than they are by rockets. We stood in the garden drinking coffee and looking for the bursts of white in the blue sky, chatting and laughing and filming it for friends and family back home. It’s a novelty.
And then the reports started coming out. Hamas fighters had broken through the security fence. They were in Israel, in the streets, in people’s homes. They were taking people hostage. Footage of a girl, naked, dead, limbs bent and broken, emerged on Twitter. A pregnant woman, sheltering with her small children in the family’s safe room, told Army Radio that her husband was one of only four men in her village fighting off the attackers. She begged for help. She asked: where is the army?!
“Why aren’t there more men on the street?” Josh asked, aghast. “Why aren’t people protecting themselves and fighting back?”
“Maybe they have no guns,” I replied. “We don’t have guns. And we’re also out of food…”
We are not naive people. We know that not everyone around here is friendly. We know we live just a few miles from Islamist factions who have repeatedly stated their intentions to ‘drive the Jews into the sea’.
Last year, following a particularly hair-raising camping trip, we had a sincere discussion about the prudence of owning a gun and joining a local club to train regularly. But then we went to work, and cooked dinner, and did the washing, and worried about finances, and life went on and other things seemed more important. Those things seem less important now.
Have you ever wondered what happened to all the Islamic jihadists in Europe?
Islamic terrorism has been a feature of life in Europe for a few decades; notably the Madrid train bombing, which claimed the lives of 193 people, and the London ‘7/7’ coordinated attack on the bus and underground system, which saw 54 people killed. But in 2015, things took a turn for the worse.
That was the year in which the staff of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical French magazine, were massacred in their offices, shocking the world. Facebook profile pictures turned black. People tweeted #JeSuisCharlie. The Eiffel Tower was lit up in the colours of the French flag. Eleven months later, a series of six coordinated attacks broke out all across Paris, including at the Bataclan theatre and outside the Stade de France where events were taking place. By the end of the night, 130 innocent people had been killed.
Whereas 2014 saw four jihadist attacks within the EU, resulting in the deaths of four people; 2015 was witness to 17 shocking attacks which claimed 150 lives. And things didn’t let up in 2016 — a further ten attacks claimed 135 lives within EU borders, with more taking place in Russia and Turkey; Brussels airport was bombed, a Roman Catholic priest was beheaded, a Tunisian man ploughed a truck all along the promenade in Nice, killing 86 people and injuring hundreds more.
2017 was the year that 22 children and young adults were ripped apart by a suicide bomb at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, just a few months after another five had been killed on London Bridge. By now the public was weary of the carnage, profile pictures were no longer changed, buildings no longer lit up — although we were all encouraged to hold candle vigils and sing Imagine. But the attackers too seemed to be growing fatigued. There were ten attacks within the EU that year; 62 people killed; 2018 saw fewer still: seven attacks killing 13 people; for 2019 the figures were three attacks, ten killed.
You’re probably unaware, but in 2020, twelve people were killed by jihadists within EU borders, and a further three in an attack in Reading. And in 2021 of course, the MP David Amess was murdered during his constituency surgery at a Methodist church by a murderer who claimed to have been ispired by ISIS and the events in Syria. But by then, we’d all moved on to Covid and the murders barely made headlines.
Yet in those three years between 2015 and 2017, in which it seemed the whole of Europe was about to ignite as migrants poured across the Mediterranean and up through Europe, stabbing, raping and beheading as they went, no one ever discussed what had sparked the wave of violence. And when it subsided, no one ever discussed why it had died down. It was there, suddenly, and then just as suddenly it wasn’t.
But while our attention shifted elsewhere, those jihadists and their sympathisers didn’t go away. We just didn’t notice them in our midst.
Until now.
In 2017, amid questions of how the Ariana Grande concert bombing could have been allowed to happen, British intelligence officers admitted that they were aware of some 23000 potential jihadists in our midst — 3,000 whom they were actively surveilling, while another 20,000 were categorised as posing a “residual risk”. Three years later it emerged that the true figure was closer to 40,000 potential jihadists, deemed by security personnel “to be some risk of re-engaging in terrorist activity.” People in that category — who are no longer surveilled due to lack of resources — included the perpetrators of the Manchester Arena bombing and the London Bridge attack.
Israelis, especially those living near Gaza, are always to some extent on alert. All the smaller towns and villages here, especially those near the borders, are encircled by a fence. The inhabitants have safe rooms in their homes, with heavy metal doors. Some of them (not nearly enough!) have both guns and firearms training.
Efforts were made by the civilians on some of the kibbutzim to repel the attackers. In at least one case, it appears they were wholly successful — a report on Facebook stated that at Kibbutz Nir they ignored the advice to stay in safe rooms and instead organised their own defence team, killing the 25 Hamas operatives who came to the kibbutz before they could infiltrate.
Yet despite these comparative advantages, some 1,300 Israelis were killed by around 1,500 Hamas operatives, and more than 100 were taken hostage and dragged back to Gaza. Given those numbers, imagine the scale of devastation that could be wrought within the UK, or France, or Germany, or Australia, if the jihadis in our midst were to stage a similarly coordinated attack. How many could be killed in one day? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Imagine the chaos that would ensue.
And it’s not just the immediate threat of being killed or injured, as horrific as that possibility is. My great grandmother was found as an orphan on the streets of Odessa during the Russian Revolution. Her parents had died of the flu, her brothers had been conscripted into the army. No one knows how old she was at the time she was found; she was believed to have been about 5 years old. She never knew her true birthday. Today in Israel there are children who are now orphaned, babies and toddlers who were found left behind after the enemy raged through. People in war zones often talk about how your whole life can just be swept away when an enemy rages through the region. I grew up knowing the stories told by my family. Even then, to me, as to most people in the West, it was still an abstract I just couldn’t grasp, until this week.
My fiance and I have both lost our incomes entirely this week, leaving us just the few shekels we have left in our pockets until we can figure out what to do about that. We still don’t have a gun.
Others are having to abandon homes full of a lifetime’s worth of belongings. Some are leaving pets behind. And it’s easy to think to yourself, while reading this in Oxford or Melbourne or Lyon, “but that’s Israel, that sort of thing goes on over there”. I assure you, people here eat McDonalds and watch Netflix and worry about their overdrafts just as you do.
The image that has most stayed with me this week was from the video released by Hamas terrorists of the family held hostage inside their own home, sitting just feet away from where the eldest daughter was executed in front of them. The mother says simply “No, it didn’t happen.”
But it did. And what has happened in Israel this week can happen just as easily on your road next week. We know that people who think the same way as the Hamas militants do are already in Europe, and Australia, and America. We know that, if given half a chance, they will also behead and rape and kidnap. They’ve done it before.
As I write this, news has come in that a teacher in France has already been killed today, in Hamas’ ‘Global Day of Rage,’ while attempting to protect the pupils at his school. I assure you, it can happen where you live, and sooner or later it will. Don’t let yourself be caught off-guard when it does.
As mentioned above, for the second time in three years my fiancé Josh has lost his income entirely — he is a tour guide, and when tourists don’t come, he doesn’t get paid. With that, our only current source of household income is now entirely gone. If you can help at all, please do by leaving a tip at Buy Me A Coffee.
Please also share this article far and wide, warning others of the need to be vigilant.
https://youtu.be/1e_dbsVQrk4?si=F7WV6EjqvqewZi9d
Thank you for the reminder. You are right that many have forgotten the jihadists in our midst. This is an important reminder. Seems like only a matter of time until this escalates.