OPINION: Faced with subhuman barbarism on our border, what would we do?

A reporter was talking to an Israeli spokesman about the war. He asked her “If October 7 had happened in Britain, what would you do?” She was flummoxed and eventually said lamely, “We’re not talking  about Britain”. 

Fortunately Jewish News can tell you what we’ve have done because I know all about being bombed by rockets. If the trajectory of a  V2 rocket had been slightly different in 1944 I wouldn’t be writing this. It landed two streets away in Islington and made an enormous noise. V2 rockets killed 9,000 and did a great deal of damage.

What did the UK do in response? We sent 800 bombers to Dresden, a German cultural town, and officially killed 25,000 people in one night.

Ten years after the end of the war, I was a guide for American students visiting Europe. We arrived in Cologne and you could still see right across the city because we’d flattened it with thousands of bomber raids. Only the cathedral escaped.

Of course in 1939 when war broke out there were many Germans and Italians living in Britain. Thousands were interned on the Isle of Man as potential spies. Many Jewish refugees were among them. It was realised that  few of the Germans and Italians who had worked in Britain were fascists, so we sent 2,000 of them to Canada for their safety, on a ship called the Arandora Star. It was torpoedoed and the cream of Britain’s hotel executives drowned. Over 1,400 died.

We sent 800 bombers to Dresden, a German cultural town, and officially killed 25,000 people in one night.

What has changed since those wartime days is the speed of communication. We now know how many die, though the figures can be manipulated. In reporting the casualties in Gaza, Hamas says the vast majority were children, old people and the disabled.

No figures are provided for members of Hamas. We can also see the effects of bombing on our television screens, but the humanitarian disaster in Gaza is not matched  by coverage of the Israeli music festival where over 200 young people were massacred.

Just suppose that 200 were killed in Glastonbury? The atrocity in Manchester in 2023 killed 22 and we are still appalled by it.

We are fortunate to live in Britain. All the main political parties have agreed that Israel has the right to defend itself and many European countries are supportive as well. The difficulty is to keep reminding the world that Israel didn’t start this war. It began with the murder of 1,400 Jews on October 7.  We knew there was going to be a blitz when we went to war in 1939. Over 70,000 Brits died between July and December 1940. Bombing Germany did not raise humanitarian questions.

There was one agreement between the Nazis and the British though in that terrible conflict. It was agreed between them that they wouldn’t bomb Oxford and Cambridge and we wouldn’t bomb Heidelberg. The agreement was honoured on both sides.

Hamas have said their objective is to destroy Israel and kill all the Jews. Well, what would the man in the street do? He would call that a humanitarian disaster and do all he could to stop it. We’ve got another humanitarian disaster in Ukraine and that doesn’t look like ending soon either. What a mess.