Boy George reminds us why you can't reason with unreasonable Oct. 7 deniers - opinion

The unlikeliest person has become one of Israel’s most unlikely allies.

Predictably, the reaction was immediate.

Many praised him for standing up for what he believed in despite knowing he would face criticism. Others mocked him. One social media user sneered that it merely proved Israel’s only remaining supporters were “an aging 80s pop weirdo and Tommy Robinson.”

Sadly, that no longer surprises me.

What stopped me in my tracks was another comment beneath the article. Written by someone hiding behind an anonymous username, it confidently asserted that the young people murdered at the Supernova festival had in fact been killed by Israeli helicopters, and that Hamas had merely come to take hostages.

I read it twice.

Not because I thought it might be true.

But because I found myself asking a question that has troubled me ever since October 7: How do you have a conversation with someone who believes that?

When I first qualified as a GP, my senior partner and trainer was a wise, experienced doctor of Irish stock and of immense wisdom. She taught me countless lessons about medicine, but one in particular has remained with me for more than four decades.

“Jonathan,” she said, “you can’t reason with unreasonable people – so don’t try.”

At the time, I thought she was talking about the occasional difficult patient. The man demanding antibiotics for a virus, the woman convinced every symptom was caused by a mysterious allergy despite every test being normal, the patient who arrived not seeking advice but demanding confirmation of a conclusion already reached.

With experience, I realized she was teaching me something much broader – about life itself.

Reason only works when both people are prepared to reason.

Evidence only matters when both sides are willing to change their minds.

If someone has emotionally invested themselves in a belief, facts often become irrelevant. Every new piece of evidence is simply reinterpreted to support the conclusion they reached long ago.

That lesson, learned in a Manchester consulting room over 40 years ago, has become painfully relevant to the world we live in.

October 7 did not simply become a military battlefield. It became a battlefield over truth itself. Within hours, photographs, videos, eyewitness testimony, and forensic evidence were no longer enough. Every fact became negotiable. Every atrocity acquired an alternative explanation. Every piece of evidence became another opportunity for conspiracy.

It is exhausting.

And I suspect many Jews around the world are asking themselves the same question: How are we supposed to respond?

There seem to be three options.

The first is to retreat. I understand that instinct.

My wife has, in many ways, reached that conclusion. She has little interest in persuading people who have already decided what they wish to believe. Her attitude is simple: I know where I stand. I know where my home is. I’m not leaving the country. Let the rest of the world think what it wants.

There is something healthy about refusing to live your life according to the opinions of strangers.

The second option is the exact opposite. Fight every battle. Respond to every post. Correct every lie. Answer every accusation.

Many people do exactly that, and I admire their stamina. But it’s exhausting, and I wonder how sustainable it is.

Which leaves a third possibility: Perhaps we need to choose our battles more carefully. Not because truth no longer matters. It matters enormously. But because our lives matter too.

There is a danger that we become so consumed with answering every distortion that we slowly surrender the joy, purpose, and community that those lies are trying to destroy.

Perhaps our greatest response is not simply to defend Israel with words, but to continue building Israel with our lives.

To raise families. To teach our children. To volunteer. To create. To make music. To laugh. To argue with people who genuinely want to understand. And to quietly walk away from those who have already decided that reality itself is optional.

I wish I had a better answer. I don’t. Perhaps there isn’t one.

But I know this much: If those who hate Israel succeed in making us permanently angry, permanently suspicious, and permanently consumed by the arguments of the Internet, then they have achieved something far more significant than winning a debate.

They have changed us.

My old Irish boss was right: you cannot reason with unreasonable people. But experience has taught me a second lesson: you do not have to become unreasonable yourself.

Perhaps that is the answer I have been searching for. Not silence. Not surrender. Not endless argument. Simply the quiet determination to keep living truthfully in a world where truth itself increasingly seems up for negotiation.

Perhaps that’s all we can do right now, but maybe that is the greatest act of defiance of all.