The word pogrom was not meant to exist in Hebrew. In the new Israel, the very idea of Jews being murdered en masse, their children butchered before their eyes, was meant to have been banished to the realm of bitter memory. It was only in the eastern Europe of exile that Jews would have to flee from tormentors bent on killing them, only there that they would hide in the dark, trying to stifle their breath lest they make a betraying sound. Once they had a state of their own, where they could defend themselves at last, there would be no need to speak of pogroms, except in the history books.
But it was a pogrom that came to Israel last weekend, multiple pogroms in fact, as lethal as any that cut down the Yiddish-speaking Jews of the early last century or, in repeating patterns, the centuries before. Jews still remember the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, a calamity recalled in poetry recited to this day. At Kishinev, 49 Jews were murdered. Last Saturday, at least 1,200 were put to death, many of them in ways too sadistic to be recounted in a newspaper.
It was a rampage of killing, as the men of Hamas tore down the fence that separates Gaza from southern Israel, gunning down the young at a music festival, slaughtering the old at a string of kibbutzim, killing children wherever they could be found. The victims were tortured while alive and mutilated once dead. One journalist, familiar with the most graphic evidence, says the right comparisons are with the massacres staged during the Rwandan genocide of 1994. In the 75-year history of the state of Israel, 7 October 2023 stands as its darkest day.
It has already outstripped 6 October 1973 – exactly 50 years and one day earlier – when Israel was last caught by a surprise attack that prompted fears for the country’s very survival. Until last week, the Yom Kippur war, when Egypt and Syria launched an invasion from the south and north, was seen as the moment of Israel’s maximum peril – but the despair, the dread, is even greater now, heightened yet further today when rocket sirens sounded across Israel’s north.
That fear, and anger, seem set to bring a terrible retribution. Early on Friday morning, Israel gave residents of the north of Gaza – more than a million people – 24 hours to evacuate to the south. Given that, along with relentless airstrikes, Israel has already imposed a total siege on the strip, denying the 2 million Palestinians within food, fuel, electricity and water, it’s no wonder the UN has warned that such a mass movement of people will bring “devastating humanitarian consequences”.
Among Palestinians and their allies, the Friday edict prompted a graver fear, one rooted in history. They suspect that Israel is preparing a de facto expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt, the permanent “transfer” long demanded by the Israeli far right – with its baleful echo of the original dispossession of 1948. Still, Israel says it is determined that, after Black Saturday, it must wipe Hamas off the face of the Earth, and its allies, including the US, seem to have given it a green light to try. Such a goal, even if it’s inherently unachievable, will surely entail a ground invasion. The angel of death is licking his lips.
For Israel, these events will mark a turning point. Golda Meir was blamed for the intelligence and military failure of 1973 and was driven from power. The same fate should await Benjamin Netanyahu, whose people now say they feel unled and unprotected. Prime minister for most of the last 15 years, he can blame no one else – though, man without honour that he is, he will try. (Unlike the head of the Israeli military, he has yet to take any responsibility for last weekend’s disaster.) He will say it’s the fault of “the left”, and all those who protested against his power-grab attempt to gut the judiciary, including the army reservists who, in their campaign to save Israel from autocracy, refused to serve. But this failure belongs to him, to his complacent, fatally wrong assumption that Gaza was quiescent and Hamas contained; and to his diversion of precious military resources from protecting the southern border – with its left-leaning kibbutzim – to defending the settlers in the West Bank instead. It was a criminal failure, its cost paid in blood.
And yet, 7 October 2023 is also a landmark event in Jewish history. It will be remembered as a byword for Jewish vulnerability, the more painful for coming in the very place where Jews were supposed at last to have shaken off the powerlessness that blighted them for two millennia.
Its impact is not confined to Israel or the Middle East, but is felt wherever Jews live. Not all, but most Jews are connected to these events: it might be a friend of a friend who was among the 260 murdered at the music festival, a wife’s cousin on one of the kibbutzim, an old colleague whose aged parents are now hostages. The Jewish people is small, just 16 million across the world. This week each of us is just one or two degrees of separation from heartbreak.
Even when we are not connected to it, we are affected by it. In the UK, antisemitic attacks quadrupled in the immediate days after the killings, compared with the same period last year. Security has had to be stepped up outside synagogues, at Jewish schools and, on Friday, even at a High Wycombe performance of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. At the Jewish Free School in north London, the children have been told they don’t have to wear their uniforms when travelling: the Jewish symbols on their blazers might cause them trouble. Three Jewish schools in London closed today, as a precaution. Others are practising “invacuations”: the teachers try to make it a game for the youngest children, five-year-olds told to listen for the siren, run into the classroom and keep silent – quietest class wins.
Such vigilance is not born of paranoia but glum realism. You can watch the weekend footage of pro-Hamas demonstrators in Sydney, chanting, “Fuck the Jews! Gas the Jews!” Or the street rallies and social media posts full of praise for the murderers and rapists of Hamas – hailing the massacres as an event to be celebrated, as something “beautiful and inspiring”. You might want to tell yourself these were expressions of anger at the subsequent Israeli retaliation, but the chronology tells a different story: these demonstrations were organised before Israel had made any substantial response. The bleak truth is that this was jubilation at the massacre of Israelis. This was delight in Jewish death.
Others have detected something milder and subtler, but more prevalent: a kind of qualified empathy, a sense that last weekend’s acts of terror did not quite merit the same response as other atrocities. There was no moment of silence before last Sunday’s Premier League matches, even though such a gesture is usually routine. Previously vocal celebrities found themselves suddenly mute, or issued condolences that came with an “all lives matter” refusal to grieve for Israeli civilians specifically. The plea from Jewish communal leaders, urging the BBC to call Hamas terrorists – as other such killers have been called terrorists – is partly driven by an emotional need for Jewish lives to matter as much as any others.
I suspect there are some progressives who – even unconsciously – hesitate before expressing full sympathy for the murdered young festival-goers and ageing kibbutz peaceniks because they worry that, if they do, that will somehow diminish their support for the Palestinians. That is a mistake.
Because Hamas is not identical with the Palestinian cause: it is a curse on it. With a founding charter, never revoked, packed with explicit, medieval anti-Jewish hatred, it has become an Isis-style force of bloodcurdling cruelty, one that brings calamity down on its own people – a calamity that threatens now to become even more devastating.
It isn’t that difficult. You can condemn Hamas and name its actions as evil, even as you support the Palestinians in their quest for a life free of occupation and oppression. And there should still be room in your heart for a Jewish child whose last moments were filled with unimaginable terror – the same terror his grandparents, and their grandparents, thought they had escaped for ever.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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