This opin­ion piece by Simone Abel was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in the Aus­tralian Jew­ish News. Simone is a human rights lawyer and activist, and the Head of Legal at the ECAJ.

In Decem­ber 2018, I was called upon to help in a coor­di­nat­ed mis­sion in Iraq and Syr­ia, to res­cue and repa­tri­ate Mah­mud and Ayyub Fer­reira, ages 11 and 7. They were then the same ages as my boys are now. I had been involved in cas­es of chil­dren at risk of death in the past, but these two and their res­cue oper­a­tion were dif­fer­ent to my typ­i­cal work.

For about 13 years my work has focused on over­see­ing legal assis­tance and advo­ca­cy for indi­vid­u­als at risk of exe­cu­tion and state-per­pe­trat­ed extreme rights abus­es. Mah­mud and Ayyub didn’t have exe­cu­tion war­rants and they hadn’t been accused of com­mit­ting any crimes. But they were strand­ed in Camp Roj in north­east­ern Syr­ia, fol­low­ing the death of their father – an ISIS fight­er from Trinidad – and I believe that if we had done noth­ing then they would have died there.

These chil­dren were grains of sand in the human­i­tar­i­an dis­as­ter caused by ISIS’ reign of ter­ror in Syr­ia and the bloody war that pit­ted it against the evil Assad regime, but those grains were each a world to me. As a Jew­ish human rights lawyer I have always been moti­vat­ed by the val­ues of tikkun olam (repair­ing the world) and pikuach nefesh (sav­ing lives).

Enter Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters. Clive Stafford-Smith, the founder of the organ­i­sa­tion I was work­ing at, had been approached by Roger who was will­ing to char­ter a pri­vate plane and assist in the res­cue oper­a­tion. Truth be told, adding Roger into the mix in a high-risk oper­a­tion in Iraq and Syr­ia mas­sive­ly com­pli­cat­ed the sit­u­a­tion for all kinds of rea­sons. He was a kidnapper’s dream with a poten­tial­ly huge ran­som on his head, and he could not be trust­ed to fol­low pro­to­cols. That said, we assessed that with­out his involve­ment (and for rea­sons I can­not get into) we could not have car­ried out the res­cue oper­a­tion. Like many who my for­mer organ­i­sa­tion had worked with, Roger was no stranger to anti­se­mit­ic dis­course and had even dressed up as an SS-offi­cer at a con­cert in Berlin, but as I saw it then, his involve­ment was a means to achiev­ing a just end.

As Roger sub­se­quent­ly said in an inter­view with NPR: “A moth­er and a cou­ple of kids sep­a­rat­ed. It’s sim­ple; you have to put them back togeth­er”. On this, I agree.

So when I heard Roger’s inter­view with Piers Mor­gan last week in which he denied the atroc­i­ties of the Octo­ber 7 mas­sacre, or that broth­ers Kfir and Ariel Bibas – aged 9 months and 4 years old at the time of their abduc­tion by Hamas dur­ing the Octo­ber 7 mas­sacre in Israel – were being held hostage in Gaza, I felt my body shake and the bile rise in my throat. For over a day I couldn’t eat and I felt phys­i­cal­ly sick. My mind con­stant­ly flashed back to the 4 days where I had not slept a wink, track­ing those on the oper­a­tion to save the Fer­reira chil­dren as they crossed from Irbil to Roj to Qamish­li to Irbil to Zurich to Lon­don. There were so many points of risk on that oper­a­tion – it could so eas­i­ly have gone wrong so many times – and I lived, breathed and sweat­ed it, as did the oth­ers who helped in all sorts of ways.

How could some­one who had spent an untold for­tune and put their phys­i­cal safe­ty on the line to res­cue two broth­ers in Syr­ia have absolute­ly no feel­ing for the Bibas boys? For 10 months now, the entire Jew­ish world has prayed for the sur­vival of these two red-heads and their moth­er Shiri and father Yarden. Every pass­ing day we have felt the pain of what they must be expe­ri­enc­ing, along with the pain of the suf­fer­ing of the oth­er hostages, fam­i­lies and friends of those mas­sa­cred or kid­napped on Octo­ber 7; and, no less, the pain and suf­fer­ing of Pales­tin­ian civil­ians caught in the cross-hairs of a cru­el war caused by a cult of death called Hamas.

Roger, I kept my mouth shut then, and there are many like you who I have worked with, and who didn’t know I was Jew­ish, whom I shut up and smiled for. From Guan­tanamo Bay to the death rows of Egypt, Bahrain, Indone­sia, Sau­di Ara­bia and so many oth­er places, some­times the price of a person’s life or their free­dom is that you work with any­one to make it hap­pen. Some­times you even see evil in the face of some­one who does some­thing good. Just as Clive Stafford-Smith has always said, we are all bet­ter than our worst act, so too we are all worse than our best act. You did the right thing with the Fer­reira broth­ers, and for as long as I live I will con­tin­ue to do every­thing I can to help oth­ers whose lib­er­ty has been denied, and whose lives hang in the bal­ance. It does not mat­ter to me that most of the ben­e­fi­cia­ries of that work are Mus­lim. Their lives are just as valu­able as any­one else’s. I would have hoped you would see the Bibas broth­ers for what they are – lit­tle jew­els whose souls each rep­re­sent a whole world – that you would not deny their suf­fer­ing, their human­i­ty, or their exis­tence, but I sup­pose that was ask­ing too much because they are Jews.