“That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.”

 – A.E. Housman, “Into my heart an air that kills”

Headline after headline, headlines about the Middle East have spread internationally like wildfire again. The mainstream media have hopped on the bandwagon and enjoyed the vast amounts of exciting reports — in which “exciting” isn’t used positively. The Middle East has always been an interesting place, and by interesting it implies the apocryphal Chinese curse: “may you live in interesting times”.

However, many people have a tendency to overlook the history of the land and the displacement of Jewish people. The myopic media that focus on sensationalist news tend to detach readers from what is truly happening. To elucidate, media ought not to be a form of ephemeral intellectual delectation; persecuted Jewish people are figuratively being commodified on the cover of a magazine for the sake of debate. Lest I be misunderstood, I do not imply media shouldn’t cover the Middle East. Rather, I say people remote or close to the Middle East must engage in any way possible to understand Jewish identity without treating it as a means to an end. Instead of spectatorship, I ask for you, the reader, to veritably undertake a soulful journey with the Jewish people to their homeland.

Hiraeth, a Welsh word that conveys the desire of a person or people to return to their home. The Jewish people feel homesickness sincerely, and three times a day they say a prayer called the Amidah, which includes a supplication for the rebuilding of the walls and the Kibbutz Galuyot. There’s also a Jewish tradition to break glass at a wedding to symbolise that the lost land will not be forgotten, even at the crescendo of happiness. The Jewish zeitgeist alone speaks volumes about the desire of returning home.

It is well known that the Land of Israel and the Jews living there have suffered from deliberate estrangement. Emperor Hadrian renaming Israel’s province Judea to Syria Palaestina — which is semantically the root for the word invader — had caused irreparable harm to the Jews. The Bar Kokhba revolt, excluding the deaths by famine, had resulted in over five hundred thousand deaths. Even at the time of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, Israelites had been displaced and thus felt lost, yet their perseverance to return home is as noble as Odysseus’s endeavor in returning to his family, notwithstanding being hindered.

Nevertheless, many Jews today still live in golah. Israel’s adjacent nations, the same ones that established the “three noes” against it, still chant for its demise and wish to consume its culture. Antisemitism still “runs amok” in the United Kingdom, Yehuda Kaploun suggests, and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, alongside Defence Minister Lord Coaker, ‘paused’ Israel from British military courses in calls for ‘de-escalation’. To be candid, I believe now is the time the jews need our help the most.

My family has been to Israel several times and noted that the Jewish camaraderie with the world is one of the greatest. Israel actively endeavors to bring Jews back to its land. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the 2012 Taglit-Birthright Mega Event, “This is your homeland, literally. This is where we all sprang from. This is where the Jewish people forged their identity. This is where we lived for thousands of years until we were kicked out for thousands of years”. Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir remarked: “We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs: we have no place to go”. This homesickness is not inherently tied to the land of Israel; it also relates to the families and people there. Heinz Ludwig Katscher was 16 when he was forced to emigrate to England at the start of the Second World War alongside ten thousand other Jewish children who weren’t able to be escorted by parents. Katscher’s parents had written a letter to him: “Bubi, if you get homesick again, know that we think of you incessantly, day and night”. If one were to believe this is merely a tragic fragment of history, a terrible bygone where Jewish children as young as 2 felt homesick, which won’t happen again, then their belief is fundamentally erroneous.

At least thirty-five Jews have been held captive in Iran simply for their ties to Israel; they have been persecuted merely for being connected to their land. Nevertheless, these arrests were made in 2025. As the clock hands turn today, a substantial number of Jews have been captured in response to wartime — sound familiar? Intellectuals like rabbis who happened to reside in Iran would have been apprehended for the mere reason of being Jewish. Spanish essayist and poet George Santayana had written these succinct lines: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.

There are many more cases of this tragedy; yet the principle stays the same: the Jews are homesick and wish to live safely with their families in their own land that they have had for over two thousand years. They miss their culture, their food, their picturesque landscape, and their people! It is imperative that you sympathise and stand with many Jewish children and adults who fear for their lives and feel homesick. Even when the flame of the Jews seems to dim, the flames of Hanukkiah illuminate again, encompassing the periphery of the world. Even if you are not Jewish, you may relate to their struggles, which is evidently clear if you ask the question: Have you ever felt wistful for a place you cannot return to?

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)