Fatal indifference: Is this the world we want?

The silence of apathetic abandonment of Jews is not a new phenomenon, just as the extermination of Jews has plagued the civilized world for centuries.

By RABBI DR. DAVID FOX FEBRUARY 26, 2025 01:59

RELEASED HOSTAGE Agam Berger is seen back in the care of the IDF after the Red Cross transferred her from Hamas terrorists last month. The writer asks: For hundreds of days, where were the Red Cross or other agencies that purport to protect those who need medical care and humane treatment? (photo credit: IDF Spokesperson’s Office)

The prayers and pleas have been answered with a sardonic response. “You can have the bodies back.” All along, as Jewish people and their supportive friends waited with yearning and dread for the hostages to be released, a more cynical view was that the human beings abducted and held captive by Hamas in Gaza would likely not survive, would likely not be permitted to survive. The bodies are slowly being returned. 

Gone are the homes and the villages, gone and buried are the slaughtered corpses of children, women, and men who fell to a marauding force as much of the world yawned. But still-living infants and toddlers were taken by terrorists, as were adults and elderly persons. 

We called them hostages, but the media renamed them prisoners. Prisoners of what? Guilty of what crime? Sentenced by no court and hidden out of the reach or outside the agenda of organizations that pledge to monitor the welfare of captives.

For hundreds of days, where were the Red Cross or other agencies that purport to protect those who need medical care and humane treatment? Where were the humane objections and outcries as women were raped and butchered?

Each group had an excuse – there is no war, so those people are not prisoners of war and are out of our jurisdiction; they are being held for political reasons so we cannot get involved. Each excuse is a flimsy facade for what may be an equally heinous tragedy. This is the tragedy of indifference. 

Freed hostage Hisham al-Sayed is taken by the Red Cross in Gaza, February 22, 2025 (credit: SOCIAL MEDIA/VIA SECTION 27A OF THE COPYRIGHT ACT)

Whatever one’s rationale and political perspective on the rights of those who claim the Land of Israel as the Jewish homeland, or the rights of those who claim it as their own ancestral region, the rape of Jewish communities and the razing of those communities had nothing to do with human rights. It had to do with human wrongdoing, which in another location and other eras would be known as mass murder and unprovoked destruction.

The rounding up of helpless persons for torture, mutilation, defilement, gross indecencies, and ultimately murder while much of the world remained silent and apathetic, or cheered on those who celebrated these immoralities and crimes, or rapidly reconfigured the facts into a reversed agenda of rioting and mayhem to protest “Jewish inhumanity,” now has led to willful obliviousness as dead children are relinquished very slowly.

A tragedy, a statistic

AS A 20TH-century tyrant has said, the death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic. 

Five hundred days is also a statistic, and heaven knows that people are bored by statistics. Five hundred days – as the fate of 250 people was kept painfully unclear. Five-hundred days of praying, bargaining, demanding, and fighting back even as the desiccated bodies of 1,200 humans, or their body parts, were buried. 

The fate of many of those held hostage remains unknown, and the remains of two small children now let the world know the consequence of indifference. Or are these only inconvenient statistics?

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The Jewish people, not just those residing in Israel, became the popular target for hate following Hamas’s massacre of October 7. Overnight, university campuses became battlegrounds. Jewish neighborhoods became arenas for confrontation and violence.

As many championed the putative cause of those who initiated the terror and murder – and, by the way, can any “cause” justify mass murder? – Jews and those who stood by them were abandoned, and those who harmed them were condoned. This psychology of feigned ignorance and willful desertion of basic human values and traditional sublime morality takes a toll on the mind.

Closing the eyes or looking away from horror, denial of fact, reinterpreting unbridled violence as a tolerable objection to select religions and ethnicities, and failure to face the atrocity of actual genocide, as in unprovoked victimization of non-combatants when war has not been declared, all impact the psyche of those who remain passive. 

The toll of apathy, the consequence of tragic indifference, is the eroding of conscience and of compassion. With no conscience to restrain one, and no internal compass to deter violent hatred, society regresses into its darkest regions. 

Look into the eyes of the Bibas children. Stare at their photographs. They are dead. They were pure and innocent victims of terror, and the intentional targets of those who rejoice and delight in making the world into their audience and hold as helpless hostage those who wait with pain and agony as the bodies are released, a corpse at a time. 

The consequence of inaction is more violence. The consequence of no emotion is the numbing of all feelings and rational thought. Is this the world we want, and the direction that will lead civilization to better places? 

The silence of apathetic abandonment of Jews is not a new phenomenon, just as the extermination of Jews has plagued the civilized world for centuries. What marks the cruelty of October 7 as unique is that the killings have been celebrated in public, that cities across the globe became stages to further the violence, and that too many of us are applauding the killings of hostages by saying nothing at all.

The writer is the head of crisis and trauma at Chai Lifeline.