This Hanukkah, the lesson is clear: silence is not safety. The light we kindle must be the courage the world has abandoned.
There are years when Hanukkah feels symbolic and then there are years like 2025, when the metaphor becomes literal. Because this year, the festival of lights arrives not as a gentle reminder of resilience, but as a demand:
Remember who you are, remember what you’ve survived, and remember why you’re still here.
And in the last week alone, the world made that lesson painfully, brutally clear.
The Truth We Must Finally Speak in 2026
We need to find the courage, real courage, to name the threat that both the West and the Jewish people now face. That courage begins with stating a simple but deeply uncomfortable reality:
This form of violent Islamism that has infected the West did not emerge from nowhere. It did not materialise spontaneously, it was enabled.
Enabled by silence, enabled by cowardice, enabled by institutions that decided that truth was optional, that clarity was dangerous, and that antisemitism was the one form of racism still considered socially negotiable.
Because this is what happens when hate matures in the dark. This is what happens when hatred is indulged rather than confronted, when educators avoid the word antisemitism but obsess over “Islamophobia,” when politicians speak about “community tensions” rather than naming the ideology of those committing the violence, when journalists apologise for reporting facts that offend fashionable narratives.
And we have all seen, week after week, what happens when the state refuses to enforce its own red lines.
Not just in London, not just in the UK, but worldwide.
Hate marches filling the streets of London, New York, Melbourne, Sydney, Toronto, Paris, cities that once saw themselves as guardians of liberal democracy, now echo with calls for the eradication of the only Jewish state. Open chants of “from the river to the sea,” calls for intifada, banners celebrating terrorist organisations and Western governments, terrified of upsetting key voter blocs, respond with paralysis.
A global phenomenon, fuelled by a global cowardice.
We saw it when British authorities banned Jewish supporters from attending a football match at Aston Villa, the first time Jews were prohibited from a sporting event in Europe since the 1930s. The signal was unmistakable: your presence is the problem.
We saw it again in Parliament, where MPs have been elected on a single issue, the destruction of the only Jewish state and rewarded for it with national platforms. This week, Iqbal Mohamed, MP for Dewsbury & Batley, blamed Israel for the kidnapping and murder of the Bibas children.
Not Hamas, not the terrorists who filmed themselves carrying out their brutality. Israel.
When elected officials normalise blood libel, when football clubs exclude Jews for their own “safety,” and when world capitals host weekly hate marches calling for Jewish eradication, the consequences are not theoretical.
All of this empowers those who would commit acts of violence. It raises the tidemark of acceptable, hate-fuelled rhetoric. It teaches extremists that the line between speech and action has all but disappeared. It tells them that the West will tolerate anything, absolutely anything, as long as it is directed at Jews.
This is what happens when the Western world refuses to address the hatred now embedded in its own streets out of fear.
Nothing more. Nothing less.
Fear of upsetting the people it believes it must appease. Fear of riots. Fear of backlash. Fear of naming the ideology behind the violence.
And Qatar's money.
And so here we are.
Twenty-four hours ago, I planned to write this piece about the Yom Kippur murders in Manchester. Tonight I write it about the Bondi Beach massacre.
Two Muslim men, armed with high-powered rifles, positioned themselves above a Hanukkah candle-lighting ceremony and opened fire into a crowd of Jewish families, parents, children, grandparents, for the sole “crime” of being Jewish.
And once again, Western leaders reached for their familiar vocabulary of avoidance: tragic, isolated, unrepresentative, complicated, regrettable.
No, not anymore, not after this year, not after everything we have seen.
This same ideology, the same hatred, drove the gunmen who massacred 22 in Istanbul in 1986, the suicide bomber who murdered 84 in Buenos Aires in 1994, the shooter who executed 2 in Washington DC this year, Jihad Al-Shamie who stabbed and killed in Manchester on Yom Kippur and of course Hamas, who on October 7th 2023, raped, killed and tortured in a genocide of Jews not seen in terms of scale or evil since the Holocaust.
It is a single, coherent worldview. And the West’s refusal to recognise it has allowed it to grow, so much so that Jewish communities worldwide now bear the consequences of that moral negligence.
They Mistake Grief for Weakness
These killers always make the same miscalculation. They think our grief is weakness, our mourning is surrender. They think the pain of losing “one of our own” will finally dim the flame.
It never has and it never will.
We continue because of the pain. We channel it, convert it, use it as fuel to make the light burn brighter, not despite the darkness, but because of it.
The miracle of Hanukkah was never really about oil. It was the refusal to let the light go out.
The Lesson of Hanukkah 2025 - The Generational Vow
So on this first night of Hanukkah, when you light the candle for the first time this year, understand something: Our children are watching us. They are learning what it means to be a Jew from how we stand, not how we suffer.
If this year has taught us anything, it is that silence is not safety, appeasement is not peace and hiding is not survival.
In 2026, we must be the generation that refuses to hand our children a smaller identity than the one we inherited.
Light the candle, put the menorah in your window, attend a public lighting and make a vow.
We will speak the truth. We will stand tall. We will not apologise for existing, for surviving, or for shining.
Every act of Jewish courage is a blow against the darkness, every Jewish voice raised is a Maccabean victory, every Jew who stands tall pulls history forward one more inch.
And if the world finds that uncomfortable, let the world adjust. Because the Maccabees didn’t win by blending in. They won by holding the line and refusing to let the light go out.
Hanukkah sameach.
Leo Pearlman is a London based producer and a loud & proud Zionist. His most recent film about the Oct 7 Nova Music Festival massacre, ‘We Will Dance Again’ has won the 2025 Emmy of the 46th Annual News & Documentary Awards for most ‘Outstanding Current Affairs Documentary’.