Eight weeks ago, as Israelis reeled from the pogrom launched at them from Gaza, a bloke I slightly know asked me why I had a large Star of David tattooed to the left side of my chest.
We were standing in the gym showers at the time, so it was on full display. “Are you Jewish?” he asked.

I’m not Jewish, and until very recently it had been years since I gave my tattoo any thought. But the question is a good one. Why do I have a Star of David over my heart, adorned with a series of dates, the most important being 1948, the year Israel was founded?

Jeremy Corbyn is one of the reasons. In September 2015, Labour Party members saw fit to elect him as their leader. As my leader. That year he also invited members and advocates of Hamas to take tea with him in the Houses of Parliament. What do you discuss with Hamas? Over tea?

In this same period, the Brighton branch of BDS decided to picket the Israeli-owned store EcoStream. As its name implies it’s a store devoted to recycling, clean living and kindness to the environment. Its factories and warehouses employ mostly Palestinian workers. Its entire sensibility could be described as progressive.

Brighton is my adopted town so I joined a much smaller counter demonstration. And as I stood alongside elderly ladies and Jewish mums with their kids, I was struck by the genuine hatred directed at us. I’d felt it before on the football terraces. But there you give as good as you get. Here, it was entirely one-sided. On one icy afternoon, a woman in her twenties told a Holocaust survivor in her eighties to die of hypothermia. They both knew that the freezing Polish winters were one of the Nazis’ tools for killing Jews. A few weeks later EcoStream closed its Brighton doors for ever. BDS had won.

So Corbyn and the BDS partly explain my tattoo. But it was the pain I saw in my Jewish friends’ eyes during the Corbyn years that made me determined to be indelibly marked. Those friends include my best friend. We have known one another since our early twenties. We bonded over music, politics, literature and sport. We holiday together and he was the best man at my wedding. His wife and my wife share cooking tips, and jokes at our expense.

In 2015 with the BDS marching through Brighton, and a leader of the Labour Party who had seemingly never met an antisemite he didn’t like, I saw pain in my best friend’s eyes. Pain, anger and more than a little fear.

So the following spring, while in southern Spain, I got my tattoo. It was not my first tat. But the previous ones had been meaningless, decorative tribal squiggles.
This tat meant something. This was a tat both literally and figuratively close to my heart.

On that same holiday I had visited a private glass museum. The Spanish aristocrat who owned the place explained that Spanish Jews had made the pieces. “Then the Jews were expelled from Spain. Many moved to Venice, and this is why Venetian glass is as beautiful as Spanish glass,” he continued. “And then they were expelled from Venice . . .” On and on the story went. A story of pogroms, senseless cruelties endless expulsions. Centuries-old tragedy told through shimmering pieces of rainbow-coloured glass.

That evening I thought of how as a tiny child I had watched The World At War with my grandfather, a decorated veteran of that struggle, and how the episode Genocide still haunted me.

As do the many, many books I have since read about the Holocaust. And I was so glad that a few days earlier I’d had my tattoo done. 

Seven years and eight months later, we are learning details about fresh pogroms unleashed by the longest hatred. And the details being detailed are the worst, unrepeatable and thoroughly unimaginable.
Except imagine them someone did. A person did those things. A person ordered those things. In Martin Amis’s 2006 short story The Last Days of Muhammad Atta there is an al-Qaeda department devoted to thinking up the unthinkable. This was as far as Amis’s imagination could go. Even the best fiction writers cannot imagine what a dedicated sadist can dream up. Orwell’s room 101 was just a hungry rat in a cage. He could envisage communist totalitarianism, but was not himself vicious enough to envisage its unutterably grotesque cruelties. The gothic depravity of Hamas, its psychopathy, is so far out there it has entirely leapfrogged fiction. Like the Nazis before them, Hamas has made that exponential leap.

Anyone would do and say anything to avoid that level of barbarity, and this is the final reason I have my tattoo. Should I ever find myself in a situation where I am scared out of my skin, and feel tempted to lie about where my heart is, my skin cannot lie. My skin will not lie.