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October 7 and the celebrations that followed on UK streets stirred our deepest demons

The Hamas attack brought together modern anti-Israel activism with centuries of racism, says Dave Rich

May 15, 2024 09:14
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Israeli soldiers remove bodies of of Israeli civilians in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, near the Israeli-Gaza border, in southern Israel, October 10, 2023. (Photo by Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
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The heaviness that descended on the Jewish world on October 7 has still not lifted, and not only because the war in Gaza that followed was so awful to watch from afar.

The scale and method of the Hamas killing spree dragged us all back into a Jewish past that we believed we had left behind for ever. When we see Jews being hunted in their houses and in forests and fields, captured at gunpoint and taken against their will, hiding silently in secret rooms while gunmen search their homes, these are not novel experiences. They are familiar family tales from times and places buried deep in our collective memory.

And, crucially, this history of persecution is not specifically Israeli but Jewish, dating back well before the creation of Israel in 1948. It was Jews, not Israelis, who were murdered in the Russian pogroms our great-grandparents fled, exterminated by the Nazis at Babi Yar, slaughtered in York’s Clifford Tower in 1190, and massacred in the Rhineland a century before that. These historic Jewish traumas are shared by all Jews, everywhere, including those who do not care much for Israel, and we all made the connection. “I was like Anne Frank,” said one survivor of the Be’eri massacre who hid from the Hamas gunmen. “It was a pogrom. Like going back to the Kishinev pogrom.” This is part of our history, and for a day our history became reality once again.

Sometimes it’s in the details that the loudest echoes are heard. In a pogrom in Pohrebyshche, a small town in central Ukraine, 375 Jews were slaughtered in August 1919 in a matter of hours. “They looted, raped and killed,” the chairman of the Pohrebyshche Jewish community said afterwards. “They didn’t want just what we owned. They wanted our souls. They dragged people up from their cellars and down from their attics in order to kill them. They spared neither young nor old.”

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October 7