https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/10/26/what-the-west-could-learn-from-israel/
Hostages Square in Tel Aviv is quiet now. The paraphernalia of hope remains. Yellow ribbons dance in the breeze. The flap of a hundred Israel flags breaks the silence. There’s still the burnt-out car that was recovered from the ‘road of death’ in the south, where Hamas slaughtered fleeing families on 7 October 2023. I look inside at its blackened remains, the squelched leather, the warped metal, and wince at the thought of what suffering must have unfolded in this suffocating space. In one corner of the square is an unsteady pile of placards featuring the faces of the 251 Israelis seized two years ago: the retired equipment of a moral movement no longer needed.
For the hostages are home now. The living ones at least – Israel still awaits the return of the remains of some of the stolen. It was in this urban throughway outside the Tel Aviv Museum of Art that Israelis gathered these past two years to pray for the abducted. It was christened Hostages Square, and I expect that’s how it will always be known. Even Google Maps calls it that now. Its most striking feature is a mock Hamas tunnel, a 30-metre concrete bunker designed to simulate the experience of being a hostage in Gaza. I crouch and enter. After two minutes, claustrophobia kicks in. There are men who spent two years like this, and Israel wants to make sure the world never forgets.
Much of it already has, though. As I peruse a vast wall of stickers showing the smiling faces of the men and women who were stolen – some of whom made it home, some of whom did not – I feel a sudden flush of anger. Anger that Israel was left almost entirely alone to agitate for the precious lives and liberty of these abducted Jews. Anger that there were not similar Hostages Squares in London, New York, Berlin. Anger that the same yellow ribbons that flutter so lovingly here were violently torn down on the streets where I live by medieval mobs eaten up by a demented hatred for the Jewish State.
And anger that hardly anyone in Europe knows the name Alon Ohel. A gleaming piano has pride of place in Hostages Square. It has Alon’s photo on it alongside huge yellow lettering that says: ‘You are not alone.’ Alon, 24, is an accomplished pianist who was taken from the Nova music festival and held for 738 days with shrapnel in his right eye. He’s free now, and his sight is slowly improving. We all went to see the Roman Polanski film about a Jewish pianist ghettoised by the fascists of the 1940s – who will tell the story of this Jewish pianist held underground by the fascists of the 2020s? The hope is that when he recovers from his long, black captivity, he will come to Hostages Square and play this piano. The sweet music of defiance.
A short walk and I am in Dizengoff Square. It could not be more different. This old square has become a makeshift monument to the Israelis who have died in this infernal war Hamas started and yet it pulsates with life. It throbs with noise and bustle. Armies of people sup espressos in the al fresco cafés that encircle it. People lounge on the green. And every day, at every hour, they come to see an extraordinary spectacle: the hundreds of lovingly framed photos of the dead that have been perched on the perimeter wall of the square’s fountain. Untold numbers of joyful, youthful faces. Photos, it strikes me, of men and women who will have been born well into the 2000s, and yet whose lives have already been given for their country on the scorched, unforgiving battlefield of Gaza.
