RUTHFULLY YOURS

The ability to shine a light on issues and causes that matter is a perk of fame. For John Ondrasik, right now, that’s Israel. The Grammy-nominated American singer and musician, who goes by the nom de chanson Five for Fighting, has been steadfast and outspoken about the Jewish state’s security needs since the Oct. 7 attacks. This has made him a unicorn among his music-industry peers. Most prefer simply to keep their heads down.

Artists such as Ani DiFranco, Billy Bragg, Drake, Dua Lipa, Patti Smith and Peter Gabriel have called for a cease-fire, the only currently acceptable way to express support for Hamas. Music publisher BMG reportedly dropped its contract with Roger Waters after the Pink Floyd founder suggested in a January interview that Oct. 7 might have been a “false-flag operation.”

Mr. Ondrasik, 59, isn’t keeping his head down. He appears on Fox News and on Mark Levin’s radio show. He’s aggressive on Twitter in support of Israel. He is, as his stage name suggests, something of a brawler. On April 13, the night before Iran launched a barrage of missiles and drones at Israel, he performed at an outdoor concert in Tel Aviv and condemned “the evil that is Hamas.” He sang his Oct. 7-themed song, “OK”—the refrain is “We are not OK”—for the families of hostages still in Gaza.

“Why are you doing this?” Mr. Ondrasik says people always want to know. He isn’t Jewish. He doesn’t have relatives in Israel. He’s from Southern California and his heritage is Slovak. But, he says, “I’m human.” In Tel Aviv he told the crowd, “One doesn’t have to be Jewish to support Israel in their fight—sorry, our fight—for freedom, democracy, life, civilization, against those who want to tear it down.”

The first line of “OK” makes his view plain: “This is a time for choosing.” He says he can’t stay silent while Jews are being slaughtered in Israel and pushed around elsewhere. It feels to him like “Germany in 1938. People didn’t stand up and you saw what happened.” That comparison is a recurring theme of our conversation.

The other thing people always want to know, he says, is, “ ‘Where’s everybody else?’ That one I don’t have a good answer for.”

I meet Mr. Ondrasik at his hotel during a day off on the West Coast leg of his current tour. It isn’t a rock show. He’s playing smaller venues backed by a string quartet. He seems relaxed and upbeat, despite having just returned from a war zone. He has some experience with air-raids and bomb shelters. “I’ve been to Ukraine,” he says. “I’ve had that kind of stress. But the Iron Dome made me feel safer.”

He reminds me that music was a big part of the Oct. 7 attack. Among the 1,200 killed by Hamas that day were 364 revelers at the weekend-long Nova electronic-music festival. Hamas killers in motorized paragliders appeared on the horizon as a peaceful desert dawn broke. They descended on the panicking crowd and murdered music fans indiscriminately. It was as if Woodstock had been invaded by the Manson Family. Forty-four festival-goers were kidnapped back to Gaza.

Hamas’s savagery on Oct. 7 made an initial impression on a certain famous band known for its social conscience. The Irish megastars U2, who often use their platform for issue advocacy, offered prayers for the victims at an Oct. 9 concert at the Sphere in Las Vegas, although they promptly threw their lot in with the “cease-fire now” crowd. Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. paid tribute to the Nova festival dead during the Grammy Awards in February, saying, “Music must be our safe space.” But there has been no big benefit concert for Israel, or even a sustained sense of outrage among musicians and artists at Hamas’s brutality.

The reason is almost certainly political. The music industry, like the film and TV business, is a left-wing bastion. Open expression of heterodox political positions, even those considered broadly mainstream, can lead to the blacklist. In the perverse progressive taxonomy of the Middle East, Israel—a diverse, pluralistic and democratic welfare state granting full rights to women, gays and religious minorities—is the bad guy. Gaza’s Palestinians, who in 2006 elected to be ruled by the militant jihadists of Hamas, who are intolerant of homosexuality (to put it mildly) and used rape as a weapon on Oct. 7, are somehow the good guys.

The left-right dynamic infuriates Mr. Ondrasik: “It’s not political. It shouldn’t be.” He says his support for Israel derives from the same impulse that led him to champion Ukraine in its fight for survival against Russia. They are both free nations fighting to preserve the Western values of democracy and human rights against those who would replace them with tyranny. The video for his song about the war in Ukraine, “Can One Man Save the World,” premiered on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” His song about the U.S. abandonment of Afghanistan, “Blood on My Hands,” received a less fawning reception. YouTube took down the video, which featured Mr. Ondrasik singing in front of the White House. It was eventually restored, but with a warning that the clip contains “graphic content.”

They aren’t political songs, Mr. Ondrasik insists. “These are moral messages. When Israel is attacked by raging maniacs to slaughter people and take hostages . . .” He trails off, before exclaiming: “They still have five freaking American hostages!”

And yet, from the biggest names on the hit parade, near total silence. Israel is surrounded, perpetually fighting for survival against those who would annihilate every last Jew. But to the left it’s like Chinatown. Forget it.

“Something’s deeply wrong in the culture when people can’t come out and say that what happened on Oct. 7 was evil. No context. No buts. How did we get to a place where our music stars can’t condemn pure atrocities?” The Grammy gesture was “pathetic,” he fumes. “They couldn’t even say the word Hamas. They couldn’t say the word Israel.” The best Mr. Mason could do was say that if “you go to a concert like the Nova concert, you shouldn’t be afraid of being attacked.” The mellow Mr. Ondrasik grows suddenly indignant. “And if you’re in your house?” he asks. “Maybe you shouldn’t be attacked there either?”

Mr. Ondrasik says he’s tried to rally his peers to support Israel, to acknowledge the moral imbalance in the conflict between the Jewish state and the monsters of Hamas. So far he’s found no takers. “I talked to some of the managers and people and they’re like, yeah, the artists are scared.” Of what? “They’re scared for their families. They don’t want their concerts protested.”

To this fear, he says, he can relate. “I get it,” he says. Performers “aren’t wrong” to worry about the possibility of protests at their gigs or even violence directed at them or their associates. It’s an unsettled moment. The angry energy bubbling up on college campuses threatens to spill over into the wider world. “I feel some of that. I’m scared for my wife at home right now.” But that’s as far as his sympathy goes for artists who agree but can’t find the courage to stand alongside him. To those who support Israel and want to protect Jews but fear it will hurt their careers to say so, he asks: “Do you understand these are the same arguments people used in 1938? Do you understand that?”

He says he hopes someone will soon organize a concert on the site of the Nova festival. That would get people’s attention. “I did hear today that Barbra Streisand put out a song about antisemitism. So maybe that’s a good sign. Maybe things will start to tip.” I must say, he doesn’t look like he believes that.

Mr. Ondrasik professes to be a shy person, not naturally wired for tub-thumping. He has a secret life helping to run the family business, a 300-employee Southern California wire fabricator that supplies some of the nation’s largest retailers with shopping carts and other components. In this parallel world of welders and client calls, he says, no one has time for agitprop. They’re too busy living life. “When you work at the plant, the whole celebrity entertainment industry, it just seems stupid. I am standing with guys who work 10 hours a day. They’re on piecework. They sweat.” When they go home, “they’re happy. They go to church, they have a family, they play soccer.”

Mr. Ondrasik writes protest songs, performs in war zones and pokes other prominent artists on social media, he says, “to either shame or inspire some of these folks to come out of the sand.” There’s something touching in his belief that such big stars can be shamed into seeing and accepting the truth. It assumes that they haven’t deliberately chosen to believe a lie. It’s an assumption I’m unwilling to make.

I accept, however, that he knows this world better than I do, having lived in it for so long. “I played the Concert for New York City after 9/11,” he says. His song “Superman (It’s Not Easy),” with its haunting “I can’t stand to fly” lyric and its affecting message of everyday heroism, spent three weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Adult Top 40 in late 2001. As the world struggled to recover from the horror of the 9/11 attacks, Paul McCartney organized a benefit for the families of police and firefighters and for the rescue workers who were still combing through the wreckage. The concert went off on Oct. 20, 2001, six weeks after the Twin Towers came down. “I was just a young guy with a song, but every living icon was on that stage condemning Osama bin Laden, giving support to America, providing solace to families—everybody was there and it was great.”

That sense of togetherness is now more than two decades out of fashion, but the victims of 9/11 were no less innocent than the victims of Oct. 7. Israelis massacred in their homes and villages didn’t deserve what Hamas did to them. The young music lovers slaughtered at the Nova festival did nothing to earn their fates. But they don’t get a benefit concert or a tribute album. They barely even get a second thought.

“I know you feel abandoned,” Mr. Ondrasik told the hostage families in Tel Aviv on April 13. “That’s because you have been.”

Mr. Hennessey is the deputy editorial features editor at the Journal.