The British Broadcasting Corporation recently asked British Jews whether Israel’s actions in Gaza were responsible for the terrorist attack in Bondi, Australia. The watchdog organization CAMERA rightly criticized this absurd line of questioning. How could random Jews in London possibly bear responsibility for the tactical decisions of a government thousands of miles away, let alone for the heinous actions of a terrorist in yet another country?
Yet in our rush to defend ourselves against this inappropriate premise, the Jewish community often misses a deeper truth that lies at the heart of our identity: Jews around the world are responsible for one another.
This is the paradox that modern media discourse consistently fails to grasp, and one we as Jews sometimes struggle to articulate ourselves. The BBC’s question was wrong because it implicitly blamed Jews for terrorism. But the underlying assumption—that Jews in the United Kingdom are connected to Jews in Israel and Australia, or anywhere else, for that matter—is fundamentally correct, according to our own tradition.
The Talmud teaches us Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh, “All of Israel are responsible for one another.” Jews don’t have the luxury of claiming we can simply wash our hands of each other’s welfare, even if we live in separate communities.
This doesn’t mean that British Jews are responsible for terrorist attacks or Israeli military strategy; it means that we’re called to care deeply about our fellow Jews everywhere, to feel their pain and share their struggles. The distinction matters, though it’s routinely lost in shallow social-media debates and cable-news soundbites.
This confusion extends to another common refrain heard from Jewish communities worldwide—that we just want to be left alone to live in peace and quiet. It’s a reasonable desire, even an understandable one. Yet history keeps proving it’s not an option available to us.
The book of Judges offers a haunting pattern: Whenever the text speaks of Jews living peacefully, “each person sitting under their fig tree or vine,” without unified purpose or centralized leadership, enemies inevitably rise up against us. Amalek first demonstrated this in the desert, attacking the newly freed Israelites not because of anything they had done, but because of who they were called to be.
Without unity and purpose, Jews become vulnerable. Our enemies don’t attack us randomly. They do so to remind us that we have a collective mission—a path God laid out for us to make the world better, individually and as a people. Every generation since that at Sinai has learned this lesson, often painfully.
Which brings us to perhaps the most perplexing question in our endless cycle of self-defense: Why does the world apply impossible double standards to Israel? Why is a nation the size of New Jersey subject to more U.N. resolutions than the rest of the world combined?
We spend countless hours documenting hypocrisy, cataloging bias and fact-checking false claims—necessary work, to be sure. But we rarely pause to acknowledge what Jewish tradition teaches: The obsession is baked into our destiny. Deuteronomy explicitly states that the Land of Israel is where God’s “eyes will be on from the beginning of the year to the end of the year.” People will always scrutinize Israel with impossible intensity because that’s precisely what we were told would happen.
And this is where we get it wrong in our constant defensive posture on social media and mainstream media. We act surprised by hatred and double standards, as if better hasbara (public relations) or sharper talking points might finally convince the world to leave us alone. But the meditation we recite at the end of every Amidah, composed by the Talmudic sage Mar bar Ravina, offers a different framework entirely.
The prayer begins: “My God, please stop my tongue from evil and my lips from speaking deceitfully.” Before we ask God to protect us from external enemies, we’re called to guard our own speech, our own moral integrity. Only then do we pray: “And those that curse me, let my soul be silent ... and all that rise against me for bad, quickly nullify their counsel and ruin their plans.”
We ask for Divine protection from those who counsel together to do us harm. We must have faith that God will provide it. But like our forefather Jacob, who both prayed and prepared for confrontation with Esau, we cannot rely on prayer alone. We must also do the practical work of defending ourselves.
The wisdom isn’t choosing between spiritual faith and practical defense; it’s holding both simultaneously.
It’s acknowledging our interconnectedness as a people while refusing to accept blame for terrorism. It’s recognizing that the world’s obsession with Israel is both biblically predicted and morally wrong. And it’s understanding that we can’t simply wish to be left alone, while also accepting that we have a mission that prevents us from fading into quiet obscurity.
Until we articulate these nuances, in our own defense and in our understanding of ourselves, we’ll keep missing the point almost as badly as those who attack us.
