Never Forget

Random Thoughts on Everything

In Israel, the siren for Yom ha Shoah wails, a long and mournful crescendo.

The sound differs from the all too familiar rise and fall, rise and fall, that warns Israel’s population of incoming rockets. This is a soulful shout of collective pain, an open wound of memory for the millions who died in the Holocaust. Six million of them murdered, simply for being Jewish. Six million. Innocent men, women and children … unimaginable, brutal, a number so huge it’s impossible to picture, to absorb, and truly comprehend its dreadful magnitude.

At 10.00am on Yom ha Shoah in Israel, everything stops. Cars, people, building sites, buses, all streets and motorways come to a halt. For two minutes the entire country stills, falls silent and pays its respects.

We tell ourselves never again, but we don’t really believe it … not anymore.

In the UK, Jewish communities have watched in disbelief as our rights and freedoms are trampled to curry favour with others. The Qataris are buying London and funding universities. Believers in a global Islamic Caliphate, they stir up the oldest hatred in order to serve their own nefarious purposes. They pretend to hold peace talks with their Hamas puppets whilst their proxies encourage our young to absorb a poisonous agenda intended to fracture western society. Improbably this aim has become interwoven with climate activists, gender warriors, and Queers for Palestine. Oh how the Qataris must laugh themselves sick at our idiocy, our ineffectual policing, and Parliament’s confused adherence to a type of free speech that openly promotes hate without repercussion.

On a personal level, I feel violated by the apparently illegal hate fest that was allowed to march through West-cliff-on-Sea on Saturday 19 April. My parents and much of my family either did, or still do, live in the area. For me it has always been the seaside town of Rossi’s Ice Cream, damp towels, mud flats and sand in my bikini. Happiness. A rose-tinted view first marred in 2022 by the shocking murder of Sir David Amess MP for Southend West. Stabbed to death by Ali Harbi Ali, a sympathiser of Islamic State.

How dare the Essex police tell West-cliff’s Jewish community to stay at home and not attend services on shabbat and the festival of Pesach? Instead of serving their local population they chose to chaperone 300 unruly protesters, allowing them to scream racist abuse in the streets around the synagogues on behalf of Chelmsford for Palestine. A group who presumably had taken a wrong turn off the motorway. Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper has now made a weak statement of intent to maybe/possibly … if there’s a full moon on a weekday beginning with B … empower the police to prevent protests near places of worship. Of course it’s work she thinks unnecessary to protect a paltry number of British Jews … less than 300,000 in the UK … few of whom will ever vote Labour again, thanks to the antisemitic shame of Jeremy Corbyn, and of late, the thoughtless buffoon who poses as our Foreign Secretary.

It has taken only 80 years for the world to feel comfortable denying the holocaust. Mere minutes in history. And to the world’s shame, the current advert for Israel’s airline El Al, features two Israeli tourists concerned at sharing their identities with the various cab drivers who ask them on film, ‘where are you from?’ Italy they say, Greece, France, giving non Israeli names in Starbucks for their coffee. The advert is comic and has a good outcome, but there’s no denying that its premise has become a sad truth as the Jewish community of Westcliff have now discovered.

Teresa Diamond one of the pro Palestinian organisers of the march through Westcliff has a social media history of supporting the terror group Hamas, and of denying the Holocaust. I don’t know where she thinks six million people disappeared to, or how she can explain that eighty years later this loss of life means we number only 15 million in a world populated by 8 billion others. Just 0.2% Jewish. I am absolutely certain Teresa will be happy to hear that in Kharkiv, Ukraine, a Holocaust memorial for 17,000 of the town’s murdered Jews was desecrated this week with Nazi swastikas.

In New York, also this week, posters of Holocaust survivors were torn down. Are you cheering, Teresa?

And in the cruelest, most gut wrenching of coincidences, 96 year old Magda Baratz, a survivor, was guest of honour at the Holocaust remembrance ceremony at the Bergen-Belsen death camp … just as her beloved grandson was shot and killed by Hamas snipers.

Here in Israel the siren faded but our hearts still ached. Here, as elsewhere, we understood all too well that the likes of Teresa Diamond and her despicable band of followers are far from alone in their need to express antipathy, not to Israelis as they would claim, but to all Jews, in whichever part of the world they inhabit.