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.