Friends, Distance and the Things They’ll Never Feel

There’s a particular kind of loneliness that only arrives in conversation with a friend.

Not an enemy. Not a stranger on the internet with a cartoon avatar and a burning desire to explain Jews to themselves. A friend. Someone who has sat in your home, watched your children grow, shared years of life with you and still, somehow, can look you straight in the face and say something so casually loaded it lands like a slap.

I met up with an old friend last week for a play date. We’ve been friends for more than thirty years. We’ve watched each other’s children grow up. She is bright, accomplished, highly educated and more than familiar with prejudice herself. She knows what it is to be othered. She knows what it is to be insulted for the way she looks. She knows the sting of bigotry.

And yet, in the middle of an otherwise normal conversation about life, children, challenges and victories, she tossed in a line about Israel: “when you stop bombing everyone.”

Everyone.

Just like that. A full conflict, a region, decades of terror, proxy warfare, missiles, tunnels, human shields, Iranian funding, jihadist ideology, October 7, the daily threat hanging over Israeli civilians, all flattened into one lazy little moral slogan.

And then, almost as quickly, came the retreat.

“I don’t like talking about this stuff. It all gets too much. I don’t really understand it.”

And there it is. The entire problem, gift-wrapped in one neat little contradiction. The accusation is easy. The explanation is unbearable. The slogan is socially acceptable. The context is exhausting. The libel can be spoken in a breath, but the defence is somehow too stressful to hear.

So yes, Israel bombs. It bombs terrorist infrastructure. Weapons depots. Launch sites. Tunnels. Command centres. Operatives embedded where no decent army would ever choose to fight, but where terrorist groups deliberately choose to hide.

But let’s say this plainly, because apparently it still needs saying: we do not bomb Iran out of boredom. We are not bombing Lebanon for fun. We are not blowing up tunnels and rocket launchers in Gaza because we have run out of things to watch on Netflix.

We do it because there are genocidal regimes, armies and terror groups whose stated aim is not coexistence, not compromise, not peace, but our eradication. Their goal is not to pressure us, embarrass us or contain us. Their goal is to erase us. To wipe out Jews in our homeland and, if history is any guide, far beyond it too.

We act both defensively and pre-emptively because we have learned, at a cost written in Jewish blood, that threats against us are rarely theoretical. When people say they want us dead, we believe them. Because they usually mean it.

And that is the part so many comfortable Western observers never seem to grasp. We would vastly prefer not to do any of this. We would rather live. Build. Work. Raise our children. Celebrate birthdays. Eat good food. Laugh too loudly. Binge rubbish television. Argue over nothing. Enjoy the ordinary miracle of being left alone.

We would much rather enjoy life than send our own sons and daughters into danger to stop other people carrying out the threats they have been making for decades.

But that choice is so often denied to us. And then, when we make the unbearable choice to stop those threats before they become funerals, we are painted not as people trying to survive, but as people who somehow enjoy the necessity.

That is one of the great moral obscenities of this era.

And then came October 8. Not grief, for many of us, but lectures. Not comfort, but “context.” Not support, but “nuance.”

Some people could barely wait for the bodies to cool before reaching for their favourite salon words, those lovely polished little terms used to launder barbarity into sophistication. Context. Nuance. As if the murder of 1,200 innocent people, not all Jews, not all Israelis, demanded an instant seminar. As if people burned, raped, butchered and destroyed in a frenzy of sadism were merely the opening slide in somebody else’s geopolitical presentation.

The irony is savage. Many of those people were exactly the sort I would have defended without hesitation had racism been directed at them. I would have stood beside them, spoken up for them, protected them where I could, because that is what decent people are supposed to do.

But when I was shattered, grieving, disoriented in the days immediately following October 7, many of those same “friends” offered no comfort at all. No human warmth. No instinctive decency. Only accusation. Only condemnation. Some even implied, in words or tone, that it was somehow our fault. As if those murdered civilians had brought it upon themselves. As if slaughter can become understandable, even excusable, so long as the victims are Israeli enough, Jewish enough or inconvenient enough to the politics of the moment.

That is not nuance. That is moral collapse wearing reading glasses.

And when I try, calmly, to explain any of that, I can almost feel the shutters come down.

Too much. Too complicated. Too upsetting.

Funny how that only seems to happen once a Jew starts answering back.

That pattern is not new. In fact, it has become one of the defining features of Jewish life in the diaspora. We are accused, but rarely heard. Judged, but never properly listened to. We are expected to absorb slogans, distortions and historical illiteracy in silence and then somehow defend ourselves in tones so soft and soothing that nobody feels uncomfortable. The moment we speak with force, we are “aggressive.” The moment we defend ourselves militarily, we are “disproportionate.” The moment we insist on history, context or reality, we are told it is all just too much.

Too much for whom? Too much to hear for an hour over coffee? Or too much to live with in your bones for generations?

Because that is the part so many non-Jewish friends, even decent and caring ones, simply do not understand. They may sympathise. They may even mean well. But they do not feel what we feel.

They do not feel the ancient alarm system humming beneath the skin. They do not know what it is to watch mobs chanting for your eradication and hear not metaphor, not rhetoric, but memory. They do not know what it is to live with the knowledge that there are states, militias, movements and millions of useful idiots across the West who would happily excuse, justify or relativise Jewish death as long as it can be dressed up as progressive politics. They do not know what it is to hear people talk about the destruction of the one Jewish state as though they are merely debating tax policy or recycling targets.

And no, this is not to dismiss anyone else’s experience of racism. Bigotry is ugly in every form. But not all prejudice is identical. Not all hatred behaves the same way. There is a difference between suffering ignorance and living under a perpetual, global, shape-shifting campaign of dehumanisation aimed at your people, your history, your homeland and your right to defend either.

That difference matters.

You can have experienced racism and still not understand Jewish fear. You can be highly educated and still know absolutely nothing about the region, the ideology driving these wars or the machinery of terror that has funded, armed and cultivated proxies on Israel’s borders and beyond. You can be a lovely person and still absorb a lie because it is fashionable, simple and emotionally convenient.

And that, perhaps, is the hardest part.

Not that strangers hate us. History long ago beat any naivety out of that one.

It is that friends can care about us personally while still swallowing narratives that would leave us dead politically, culturally or literally. They do not think of themselves as hostile. They think of themselves as humane. Balanced. Above it all. But somehow their balance always starts with Jewish guilt and ends with Jewish silence.

Some friends I have already lost. Not because I wanted to lose them, but because I grew tired of standing in the dock every time Jews came up in conversation. Tired of having to justify our existence, our history, our grief, our homeland, our trauma, our dead, our fear, our rage, our right to survive. Tired of the little disclaimers, the polite moral superiority, the enlightened smirks dressed up as concern.

Some were openly ignorant. Some were quietly racist. Some were just comfortable enough to believe that hating Jews had become impossible, so long as you did it in the approved modern dialect.

That is the trick of the age. Nobody hates Jews, apparently. They just hate Jewish power. Jewish self-defence. Jewish memory. Jewish sovereignty. Jewish refusal to die quietly.

But of course, that is all a complete coincidence.

I do not live in a Jewish area. Other than when I lived in Israel, I never really have. Not consciously. Not in any deep communal sense. So over time something in me has changed.

I trust very few people now.

I find myself telling people early that I am Israeli and Jewish. I wear my Magen David proudly outside my clothing. Partly because I am proud. Partly because I refuse to shrink. And partly, if I am honest, because it tells me something. It lets me see the flicker in people’s faces. The hesitation. The warmth. The discomfort. The calculation. The instinct.

It is a grim sort of social sonar, but these are grim times.

Because unless you are part of this story, unless this history lives in your nervous system, unless the threats against Jews land in your body as something immediate and familiar rather than abstract and geopolitical, you will never fully know what this feels like.

And maybe that is exactly the point.

We are not crazy. We are not overreacting. We are not imagining patterns that are not there. We are responding, as Jews always have had to respond, to a world that keeps demanding our explanations while denying our experience.

So yes, some friends will never understand. Some were never really friends at all. But we understand each other.

And after all these years, that may be the more important thing.