ANGELA EPSTEIN: When are we going to hear from Emma Thompson and Gary Lineker on the evils of Hamas?
On Saturday I was visiting family and friends outside Jerusalem for the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah and woke to the growl of what sounded like thunder. My neighbours explained that rockets were being fired from Gaza, about 50 miles away.
Half an hour later, the scream of an overhead siren warned of a missile attack. I’d been told by Israeli friends what to do in such situations – stay away from the windows, lie down with your hands protecting your head and wait at least ten minutes from the first warning before going outside.
In the intervening days, I’ve followed the coverage of Hamas’s invasion, the massacre of young people at a music festival and entire families on a kibbutz, with horror and fury.
And when another air raid siren wailed around us on Monday, as we sat following the news on phones in the garden of the small apartment we have rented here, we ran for our lives.
Scrambling inside, we crouched in a corner and prayed that the ‘Iron Dome’ – Israel’s air-defence system – would intercept this latest missile.
Israeli soldiers prepare to remove the bodies of their compatriots, killed during an attack by the Palestinian militants, in Kfar Aza
The feeling here in Israel is akin to Covid lockdown – but more terrifying. Shops closed, conversation muted, all non-essential travel avoided. The sky is a symphony of unfamiliar sounds.
When I asked locals in my pidgin Hebrew whether that noise above us was the sonic boom of a jet or the distant rumble of a rocket launch, the answer was a kindly but despairing shrug.
On a noticeboard near where I’m staying, pictures have been pinned with requests for information: smiling faces staring hauntingly from the fluttering pages.
Rumours are rife as to the terrible fate of those – including children – who were kidnapped from their homes by the Hamas terrorists. Yet despite the heinous events that have unfolded here, there has been a deafening silence from the habitual bleeding hearts of the celebrity world.
Usually these people are keen to burnish their liberal credentials by bringing to the world’s attention one crisis or another, from the plight of the world’s endangered species to illegal immigrants trying to cross the English Channel.
Gary Lineker was so vocal on the latter subject back in March that it provoked an internal BBC investigation.
Yet, for whatever reason, the patron saint of self-righteousness has refrained from tweeting about the 30-year-old German tattoo artist kidnapped by Hamas at the music festival who, comatose and semi-naked, was then paraded on a truck through Gaza.
ANGELA EPSTEIN: Gary Lineker was so vocal back in March that it provoked an internal BBC investigation
The closest Gary has come to this was a plug, on X/Twitter, directing his followers to The Rest Is Politics podcast, in which former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell and failed Tory leadership candidate Rory Stewart discuss Hamas and Israel.
Gary owns the company that produces the podcast.
He was not quite so reticent in December last year, when he described the death of a Palestinian footballer at the hands of Israeli soldiers as ‘awful’.
It later transpired that this individual had been a Hamas terrorist who was shot after opening fire on the troops.
The more woke A-listers like Dame Emma Thompson, meanwhile, may not yet have had the chance to read about 85-year-old Yaffa Adar, a wheelchair-bound Holocaust survivor, kidnapped from her home by Hamas militia and dragged into Gaza.
Dame Emma, of course, is not unaware of the politics of the region, having signed an open letter in 2012, alongside nearly 40 other high-profile luvvies, expressing their dismay at the invitation extended by Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre to an arts group that had performed in Israeli settlements on the West Bank.
She has yet to put her name, however, to an open letter denouncing Hamas’s atrocities. I hope that she does.
And it is utterly astonishing that Harry Potter star Emma Watson – usually such a noble advocate for women’s rights – has been silent about the women raped and murdered by Hamas’s terrorists.
ANGELA EPSTEIN: Dame Emma has yet to put her name, however, to an open letter denouncing Hamas’s atrocities
The former Hermione Granger in January posted an image on Instagram showing a photograph of a pro-Palestinian protest across which was a banner declaring ‘solidarity is a verb’. Watson shows less fondness for memes standing up for the victims of Hamas.
I am baffled that celebrities who rush to take the knee, wrap themselves in rainbow flags or embrace cancel culture find it so hard to offer words of sorrow for Israel during her darkest hour. You may insist that their views are irrelevant. Who cares what some empty-headed Hollywood star has to say?
But with their huge reach, stars are capable of informing and educating where dry politics or news coverage often fails. The world should know that this is a war waged by maniacal evil, perpetrated by men who risk the lives of their own people in order to fulfil their murderous agenda to obliterate Israel.
The balance of right versus wrong should be clear.
Or is it, to paraphrase George Orwell, that when it comes to celebrity causes, all innocent lives are equal, but some are more equal than others?
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