Kol Hakavod: To those who refuse to disappear

Leo Pearlman is a London based producer and a loud and 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’.

There are weeks when the stories almost write the column themselves. Weeks when four events, in four different places, involving completely different people, somehow say exactly the same thing. This is one of those weeks.

An Israeli football team travelled to Poland and was greeted with Nazi salutes. Six Israeli athletes competed in a British city where, less than a year ago, Jews, Zionists, Israelis, were told they were not welcome. A Jewish teenager won gold at one of the world’s most prestigious academic competitions but was forbidden from competing beneath the Israeli flag. Forty four years after an Israeli soldier disappeared in battle, the State of Israel finally brought him home.

Look at those stories, really look at them and understand the message that each contains, singularly and collectively. Don’t come.

If you come, don’t show your flag. If you show up anyway, we will remind you what happened the last time Jews refused to know their place. If one of your sons or daughters falls, we won’t even give you their body back.

Different countries, different institutions, different decades, but the same demand.

Disappear.

This week’s article is dedicated to those who refused.

Kol Hakavod to Hapoel Tel Aviv.

There are few places on earth where directing Nazi salutes towards Jews should carry greater historical obscenity than Katowice. This week, Hapoel Tel Aviv travelled there to play GKS Katowice and was met by supporters hurling antisemitic abuse and making Nazi salutes towards the Israeli players.

Katowice, the city that hosted the first public Zionist conference in 1884, thirteen years before Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel. Think about the history contained within that sentence.

Poland was once home to more than three million Jews. Nearly all were murdered in the Holocaust. Then, in 1968, Poland’s Communist government launched what it called an “anti-Zionist" campaign that drove thousands more Jews from the country.

Now, in 2026, Israeli Jews arrive in Katowice to play football and are greeted by the salute of those responsible for the greatest crime ever committed against the Jewish people.

History does not always whisper, sometimes it screams, it demands you pay attention, look, see and feel the echoes of a message that lands like a punch in the solar plexus.

There is another irony, a simple one that so many choose to forget. Israel only plays in European football because it was forced out of Asian football in the 1970s after countries refused to play against it. Apparently Jews being somewhere they are not wanted is a recurring problem.

To the fans of Katowice, at least do your homework and see who you are protesting against. Of all the Israeli clubs to target, they chose Hapoel Tel Aviv, historically associated with the Israeli left, whose supporters have spent years protesting Israeli governments and their policies from the stands. None of it mattered, because the target was never a government. It was Israel, it was Jews.

So what did Hapoel do? They didn’t simply stay on the pitch, they beat them, they eliminated Katowice and sent their racist fans back to obscurity. In the face of the hatred, in the face of Nazi salutes, in the face of people invoking the darkest chapter in our history as a weapon against Jews once again, they stood there proudly as Israelis.

There is something wonderfully defiant about that image. The Nazis sought a Europe without Jews. Eighty years later, Jews arrived in Katowice representing their own country, wearing the colours of an Israeli football club, defeated the home team and walked off the pitch with their heads held high.

You wanted us gone, look at us now.

Kol Hakavod to Hapoel Tel Aviv and to every Jew who understands that sometimes the greatest response to those who invoke our destruction is not simply to survive them, but to stand proudly in front of them and win.

Kol Hakavod to Israel’s European champion marathon team.

Then there was Birmingham, Britain’s second city, a city where, less than a year ago, Israeli football supporters were prevented from attending Maccabi Tel Aviv’s match against Aston Villa.

This wasn’t simply a policing decision. Local politicians helped create the climate. Local opposition to the presence of Israeli supporters was loud and sustained. Institutions that should have defended the basic principle that Jews and Israelis have exactly the same right to enter a British football stadium as anybody else instead participated in, enabled or accepted their exclusion.

Whatever the individual motivations involved, the outcome was extraordinary. Israelis, Zionists, Jews were excluded from Britain’s second city and it was allowed to happen.

This didn’t happen in 1936, it didn’t happen thousands of miles away, it happened in Britain, in our lifetime. Jews told that their presence at a football match could not be accommodated.

This week Israel returned to Birmingham, not simply to watch from the stands, but to stand atop the podium. Six Israeli men won team gold in the marathon at the European Athletics Championships.

In Birmingham, Hatikvah played. The anthem of the Jewish state ringing out in the very city where Israelis had so recently been excluded from supporting their football team. There is poetry in that.

But look more closely at those six Israeli athletes, because there is another inconvenient truth standing on that podium. Every one of them is of Ethiopian descent. Six black Israeli men, six Jews, six Israelis, six European champions.

We have spent years listening to people reduce one of the most diverse populations on earth to the intellectually bankrupt slogan of “white European colonialism". It is a story that works only if enormous parts of the Jewish story are erased. Mizrahi Jews must disappear, Ethiopian Jews must disappear, Jews expelled from Arab and Muslim countries must disappear. Two thousand years of continuous Jewish connection to the land must disappear. Reality must disappear.

Then six black Israeli athletes of Ethiopian descent stand together on a podium in Birmingham, gold medals around their necks, the Star of David on their chests, while Hatikvah fills the stadium.

No argument required, no history lesson necessary, just look at them and let the truth do the rest.

You tried to exclude Israelis from Birmingham, Israel returned as European champions and made you listen to their anthem.

Sometimes the most devastating answer to a lie is simply to stand proudly in front of the people telling it.

Kol Hakavod to Yotam Budnik.

Yotam is in the 12th grade, he is also one of the finest young computer scientists in the world. This week, at the International Olympiad in Informatics in Uzbekistan, he won a gold medal.

There was just one problem, he wasn’t allowed to compete under the Israeli flag.

Imagine explaining that to a teenager. You are talented enough to represent your country, you are talented enough to beat everyone in the world, you are welcome to stand amongst the world’s brightest young minds. Just don’t tell anyone who you are. Don’t show your flag, don’t make your identity visible.

Yotam had other ideas. When he stepped onto the podium, he reached into his pocket, pulled out an Israeli flag and wore it.

The organisers demanded his medal back, he refused. His certificate was taken and his ranking removed and Yotam’s explanation was magnificent:

“The law that prevents me from waving the flag is based only on politics, and I thought there was no place for that in a scientific competition."

He is a schoolboy and somehow understood something that a room full of adults apparently could not. There is nothing neutral about telling only one child that his country must disappear. There is nothing apolitical about forcing an Israeli to become invisible as the price of participation and there is nothing shameful about the Israeli flag. So Yotam wore it.

They could take his certificate, they could remove his name from a website, they could demand their medal back, but they couldn’t make him ashamed.

Kol Hakavod to Yotam Budnik and to every young Jew who refuses to accept that belonging requires hiding who they are.

Kol Hakavod to the State of Israel.

This final story is different, because it isn’t about refusing to hide, it is about refusing to forget.

On 11 June 1982, during the Battle of Sultan Yacoub in Lebanon, 21 Israeli soldiers were killed. Among those who disappeared was Yehuda Katz. He was 25 years old, his family could not bury him.

A year passed, then ten, twenty, forty. Governments changed, leaders died, wars began and ended. Children were born, grew up and had children of their own. Israel kept looking, because there is a contract between the Jewish state and the people it asks to defend it.

We will not leave you behind.

Not after a week, not after a year, not after a generation, not even after 44 years.

We saw the same covenant after October 7th, as an entire country organised itself around the conviction that those dragged into Gaza could not simply become yesterday’s news. Bring them home. Three words that became almost a national prayer.

But that promise did not begin on October 7th, it is embedded in the relationship between Israel and its people. The State of Israel asks its sons and daughters to defend the Jewish homeland knowing that doing so can demand the ultimate sacrifice. In return, the Jewish homeland makes them a promise.

If you fall, we will come for you. If you are taken, we will come for you. If we cannot find you today, we will search tomorrow and if tomorrow becomes forty-four years, we will still be searching.

This week, Yehuda Katz finally came home. Not as his family prayed he would, not remotely soon enough, but home. To his family, to his people, to the earth of the country he died defending.

There are nations that remember their fallen, Israel does something more. It refuses to accept that time makes any one of them expendable. Because the Jewish state was created in part from the terrible lesson of what happens when Jews have nobody whose fundamental responsibility is to come for them.

Now we do.

Kol Hakavod to the State of Israel, and to the sacred contract between the Jewish homeland and its people: that however far away you are taken, however long you are missing, however impossible your return may seem, Israel will never willingly give up on a single one of its sons or daughters.

Four stories: Katowice, Birmingham, Uzbekistan, Sultan Yacoub. A football team, six runners, a schoolboy, a fallen soldier. They could hardly be more different and yet look again and the message is much the same.

In Katowice, they confronted Israeli Jews with the salute of the people who once tried to erase us, we beat them and stood proud. In Birmingham, institutions allowed Israelis to be excluded from Britain’s second city. We came back, stood on the podium and made them play Hatikvah. In Uzbekistan, they told a Jewish teenager that he could compete, provided his country remained invisible. He reached into his pocket and raised the flag. And for 44 years, one of Israel’s sons remained missing, but the Jewish state never stopped looking for him.

Perhaps that is why these stories make me angry.

Jews should not still have to prove that we have the right to be visible. We should not have to apologise for our flag. We should not have to defend our anthem. We should not have to explain why Israeli athletes belong at international competitions, why Israeli football teams belong on football pitches or why Israeli supporters should be allowed into stadiums. We should certainly not have to beg for our dead to be returned to us.

Enough.

For two thousand years, other people decided where Jews could live, what professions we could enter, where we could worship, when we could display our identity and when it would be safer to hide it.

They expelled us, ghettoised us, persecuted us, murdered us and still we refused to disappear. That is why the flag matters, why Hatikvah matters, why an Israeli shirt matters and that is why bringing Yehuda Katz home matters.

These are all expressions of the same Jewish insistence.

We are here.

Not quietly, not invisibly, not conditionally, not provided somebody else grants us permission. Here with our history, our identity, our anthem, with our flag. With a Jewish state that will cross borders, governments, battlefields and generations rather than willingly abandon one of its own.

The Jewish story has been filled with people who tried to make us disappear.

Our answer is not simply that they failed.

Our answer is that we refuse.

Kol Hakavod.