Day 52: Monday

Today, let’s take a deep dive. Of necessity, a deep dive insulates you from all of the noise above the surface of the water. This means that I’m not going to wrestle with what will probably, in the next day or two, become Israel’s next unanswerable question: if and when we proceed on the understanding that Hamas will release ten abductees in return for a further day’s pause, and Hamas offers, instead, only nine or eight hostages, will we accept this, or will we tell Hamas to keep the hostages, and resume hostilities?

Similarly, I’m not going to discuss Hamas’s psychological torture of the Israeli public over the exchange of hostages for terror prisoners.

I’m not even going to discuss Kay Burley’s breathtaking assertion during her Sky News interview of Israeli Government spokesman Eylon Levy. (In this particular case, I’m not discussing it because words fail me – thankfully, they did not fail Eylon Levy, although, in his case, his eyebrows were even more eloquent than his mouth.)

Instead, I want to look at a phenomenon that only became prominent following the advent of mass media, and was, indeed, enabled by mass media: fake news. The world’s first big international fake news story revolved around what became known as The Rape of Belgium: the German invasion of Belgium in autumn 1914. This is a story in instalments, and it has relevance to what is happening today.

Between August and October 1914 German troops invaded and occupied Belgium. Rumours quickly spread of brutal acts of violence against civilians, including mass rape and mutilation of Belgian and French women. As a result, Belgium, France and Great Britain set up a committee of inquiry to document the German war crimes in accordance with the Hague Convention of 1907. The committee confirmed the reports of massive sexual assaults on the female civilian population by German soldiers.

The Allies considered the rapes to be a central component of the atrocities committed by the German troops, rendering the German enemy inhuman and impossible to negotiate a ceasefire with. These reports were used to justify the war and the continued killing so as to prevent further such acts and avenge the violence. The defence of family and sexual values became an essential element of Allied motivation. Apart from the mobilisation of the British and French people, the instrumentalisation for propaganda purposes of the German atrocities also served to influence neutral countries, particularly Italy and the United States.

Tabloid newspapers, popular literature, postcards and cartoons disseminated the image of German barbarians and their Belgian and French victims. Not just individuals but the entire German people were accused of the atrocities. Germany became the ultimate evil power capable of committing the most atrocious deeds. The German war atrocities and their exploitation for propaganda purposes contributed significantly to the image of Germany as an enemy and to the moral legitimation for the war by the Allies.

Many of the more sensational stories of German “outrages” are very hard to believe, much less corroborate.  German soldiers eating Belgian babies; German soldiers hanging Belgian nuns between church bells and ringing them to death; German soldiers crucifying dozens of farmers by the roadside; and so on — these are stories that after the war became standard examples of why “propaganda” is not to be trusted, with the result that all stories of German atrocities were largely discredited. It is possible that this distrust led to the English-speaking peoples’ failure to react swiftly to the events of the years leading up to 1939.

In recent decades, historical research has indicated that, in fact, large-scale German atrocities were indeed committed against the Belgians. It turns out that it is not the atrocities that were fake news, but the discrediting of the atrocities.

Fast forward 109 years, and we see that fake news is alive and well, and flourishing in the modern world of social media and online video. Indeed, as media become more sophisticated, so does the range of tools and techniques available to propagators of fake news.

In a world where fake news passes for reliable information, how do we separate lies from the truth? Enter Fake Reporter, an Israeli online watchdog group that uses a combination of professional intelligence experts and an online crowd-sourced research platform to lead efforts against disinformation, Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour (CIB), hate speech, and online incitement.

In 2021, they logged over 9,000 reports, and this number has risen every year since.

The organisation was formed to protect and support Israel’s civil society and pro-democracy forces against targeted attacks, as well as expose the mechanisms and actors behind the distribution and weaponisation of malicious content online. Since October 7, Fake Reporter has been working around the clock to identify, expose, debunk and, where possible, take down, fake news around the events in Israel and Gaza.

For those of you who are Hebrew speakers, this 9-minute TV report on Fake Reporters’ activities in the last weeks gives a sense of the scale of the challenge. Six minutes in (at 2:34:36), it gives an example, in English, of AI-generated video that seems to me undetectable to the naked eye as fake.

If you want to learn more about the organisation’s work, this 25-minute presentation in English, made in 2022, gives an excellent overview of the spread of fake news and how it can be combatted. (Trigger warning: the organisation was founded at the height of the judicial reform demonstrations way back when, and is funded by the New Israel Fund. If the combination of those two facts tempts you to dismiss the organisation out of hand, I would recommend you read the rest of this post.)

If you encounter anything which you suspect is fake news or a fake profile, or which is an inciting post, you can use the following link to report it (in English or Hebrew) to Fake Reporter, who will then research it in depth.

https://www.fakereporter.net/?lang=en

What you should not do is respond to the incitement or the fake news online, since social media algorithms are built to promote any item that generates interest. By responding to the item, you will actually be promoting it.

Which begs the question: how do I spot fake news? The International Federation of Library Associations…. Remember libraries? They used to be large, imposing buildings where people went to google, back in the day. But I digress. The International Federation of Library Associations, as I was saying, has produced the following useful tips.

Let me now try to explain what led me to believe that I should turn my back on all of the headline issues this week, and focus my intention instead on what may seem like a comparatively academic topic.

In the last months, and especially since October 7, I have been puzzled, and sometimes dumbstruck, by the behaviour of much of Western intelligentsia. That a university professor felt exhilarated by the news and scenes of the atrocities of October 7 is astonishing; but it is not, arguably, unimaginable. All you have to do is imagine that degree and intensity of antisemitism. However, that functioning human beings should deny that the Hamas genocide of October 7 even happened seems at an entirely greater level of unimaginability. “But,” we say, open-mouthed, “they filmed their own video of it, and boasted of it in phone calls to their parents.”

In refusing to believe that evidence, I think that these people are saying that they refuse to believe any evidence. This may be a more extreme version of the allies’ inability to believe the evidence of the 1930s. As a consequence of the widening spread of fake news, and of the increasing difficulty of detecting it as fake, people are increasingly refusing to accept any news as true. Unable to judge what is true anymore, they give up the attempt, and reject all ‘objective’ evidence presented to them. What they are then left with is their belief system, their ideology.

What we are witnessing is, I fear, the beginning of what George Orwell documented with terrifying accuracy 75 years ago, in 1984. In Orwell’s words, these people are prepared to believe that “every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

There is no such thing as historical context, so any past action (such as slave ownership, or even manufacture that depends on purchasing raw materials that were made available using slave labour) must be judged solely by current sensibilities. There is no such thing as extenuating circumstances. There is only the one truth from which all moral judgement derives.

This renders the world binary. Everyone is either an oppressor, and evil, or oppressed, and good. No amount of rational thought will change that binary division, and, therefore, there is no practical benefit in rational thought. To quote Orwell again:

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?… Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?… The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

Clearly, Israel faces very real and tangible challenges: completing the return of all the hostages; destroying Hamas in the north and then the south of the Gaza Strip; finding a way of preventing the resurgence of Hamas or a similar terror army in the future. Equally clearly, if Israel does not meet these challenges successfully, there will be serious consequences not just for Israel and the Middle East, but for civilisation as a whole.

At the same time, the rise of fake news and the tightening chokehold of binary inter-sectionalism on the Western world may represent a no less serious threat to civilisation. 2050 is less than 27 years away, and Orwell’s prediction is looking more and more accurate every year.

Day 45: Sunday

I want this week to zoom in on a couple of small details, and also to zoom out to some much more general comments.

“…like a real hero”

Every day, on the morning’s news bulletin, the dreaded words: ‘Approved for publication…’, which always precede the announcement of the name of another one or two or, God forbid, more soldiers that have fallen in the last day.

Every day, in the morning interview programme, at least one item where the presenters speak to a family member who shares details of the fallen soldier.

Every day, details that are both common to so many families and unique to this one grieving family.

From one such interview with a bereaved sister last week: “He was so considerate. When we would go to the beach, and the sand was burning hot to walk on, he would carry his two sisters, one on each arm, like a real hero.”

We yearn for the days when the proof of a big brother’s heroism will only need to be his readiness to carry his sisters across the beach, and not also his readiness to lay down his life defending theirs.

Better than Home!

One reservist we know returned last week to his unit on the Gaza border after a brief home leave, to discover two lorries paying a visit to the unit. One was an initiative we had seen featured earlier on television: an enterprising citizen has fitted a lorry trailer with a row of washing machines and a generator, and is touring army bases offering laundry service (including doing the ironing himself).

However, the other seemed even more surreal. This was a lorry trailer fitted with a generator that heats and aerates a jacuzzi for the reservists to relax in!

Yes, Ma’am!

Let’s play a game. If I say: ‘Israeli army reservist major’, what image comes into your head?

I’m guessing something like the following, an American-Israeli reservist major who watched the events of Black Shabbat unfold, on TV, from his Chicago home, and by Sunday evening was with his unit on the Gaza border.

Well, here’s another Israeli army reservist major, brought to my attention by a good friend:

As I think I mentioned last week, after individual acts of heroism by women in Otef Aza on October 7, and with mixed infantry units now on the ground in Gaza, the question of women combat soldiers will, from now on, no longer be a debating point in Israel. I don’t actually know what unit of the army this major is attached to; if she is a combat officer (which I doubt), then I suspect she trimmed her fingernails and was advised to “Get yer ‘air cut!” before actually going into Gaza. If you want to know what made her as animated as she is in the photo above, listen to what she has to say to the world.

“They did not distinguish between Jews and non-Jews”

It is a truism of the interpretation of Jewish law by rabbinical authorities that it is important to be aware of, and to take account of, the specific circumstances of every case. It is also true that Jewish law, as a general rule, allows for leniency or stringency of interpretation, in light of those specific circumstances.

One of the great failures in Israel’s development in the last decades has been the surrender of religious authority to the ultra-orthodox, who do not always subscribe to this view of religious law. This rigidity is reflected in Israeli state practice regarding such central issues as marriage, kashrut certification, and conversion.

I don’t want to get into the larger debate here, but just to bring one painful instance of the religious authorities showing a level of tone-deafness that, given where the country is at the moment, is almost inconceivable and seems to me totally unforgivable.

21 years ago, Olga Falahati came to Israel from Russia. Her daughter, Alina, grew up in Israel, served in the army, and, during her army service, began the process of conversion to Judaism. Before she could complete the process, while she was enjoying the Nova party on October 7, she was brutally murdered, by Hamas. Her burnt body was identified only last week, and, on the eve of her burial in the family’s hometown of Bet Shean, the rabbinate informed the family that Alina would be buried just outside the Jewish cemetery wall, since she was not Jewish.

The story became public after the funeral, when the matter was raised at a meeting of the Knesset’s Aliyah, Absorption, and Diaspora Affairs Committee by the committee chair MK Oded Forer, who stated that he was “ashamed on behalf of the State of Israel that [the family] were treated this way.”. Rabbi Eliezer Simcha Weiss, who sits on the rabbinate’s committee for honoring the dead, said he would propose a special representative to find solutions to problems like these, “so that there will not be a great trouble like this.” He added that “they did not distinguish between Jews and non-Jews in the brutal attack. We can do everything in line with Jewish law.”

Eventually, the fence separating Alina from the cemetery was removed, leaving only a low fence similar to many other internal fences in the cemetery. In a functioning country, this is what would have been done, discreetly, on the evening before the funeral, with no attention being drawn to the internal discussion that would have preceded the adoption of this halachically acceptable solution.

The People of the Book, Part 1

The National Library of Israel moved into its new, spectacular, building just a couple of weeks after October 7. I had planned to devote an entire blog post to this breathtaking edifice (which we were privileged to enjoy a private tour of, a couple of months ago, courtesy of another good friend, who just happens to be the civil engineer attached to the project). I still hope to do so, and, meanwhile, I urge any of you who are in or around Jerusalem to take advantage of the free 90-minute guided tour.

I mention the library here because of an extraordinary display they have created.

This view down into the main library reading hall gives you a sense of the sweep of the architecture. You will also notice the seats arranged in an arc of three rows, including adult seats and little children’s chairs. On each seat has been placed a picture of one of the 237 abductees, together with a book selected by the library, from its shelves, on the basis of information gleaned from the media and the families about that particular abductee.

Thus, for example, quoting from the library’s website: “We chose the book The Kiss That Got Lost for 3-year-old Avigail Idan, who is likely missing the hugs and kisses of her parents Smadar and Roy, who did not survive the attack by Hamas.”

Each book also contains a personal library card, each one marked with a return date – NOW.

The People of the Book, Part 2

In the good old days before Amazon axed it, most Israeli Anglo bibliophiles ordered books from Book Depository, because of the range it offered, the user-friendliness of its website, its excellent customer service and (perhaps above all) its FREE DELIVERY WORLDWIDE! Since then, we have all, largely unsuccessfully, been hunting for a viable alternative. Adapting to the new reality, Bernice and I have joined a local bookswap WhatsApp group, which works very simply and quite effectively. Members post photos of books they are happy to part with. Other members fire back a message – “Finnegan’s Wake, please”, for example – and whoever is quickest on the draw gets a free book.

The other day someone posted a message on this group informing us that an army unit was currently located not far from us, and was desperately looking for books. “Isn’t it wonderful!” I thought to myself. “These guys have been fighting in Gaza for weeks and, as soon as they get the chance, the first thing they want is a good read! Shortly afterwards, someone else posted, pointing out that a closer examination of the original message revealed that they were actually looking not for sefarim (books), but for something that is (in unvowelled Hebrew) a homograph: saparim (barbers). What they were actually desperate for was a haircut!

Not the ugliest of things

As the weeks go on, the resolve within Israel to continue the war in Gaza until its ends are achieved seems as strong as ever. In the last couple of weeks, the conversation has turned more and more to questioning what the elimination of Hamas actually means, whether it is achievable, and what will happen the day after the war ends. However, certainly at the moment, and, I am confident in saying, until the abductees are returned safely, Israelis are not discussing ending the war.

At the same time, we know very well that this is not true in the rest of the world, even among some of our friends abroad. It is therefore to them that I offer the following words, written by John Stuart Mill in a magazine article published during the American Civil War, but no less relevant today than they were 160 years ago:

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, — is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.

Fault Lines

In many respects, the sense of national cohesion remains as it has been since the day our world changed. However, as the weeks go by, the chasm between the people and the government gapes ever wider.

There are some good reasons for this. One of the most prominent ones is Netanyahu’s continued refusal to take responsibility for the failures on October 7, and his insistence that all such discussions must wait until after the war. This leaves a wound that is, with time, only festering.

Another target for people’s expressions of disappointment with the authorities is that even now, over six weeks since October 7, many desperately needed mechanisms are not in place or not functioning smoothly. Here are a couple of examples. The Government has agreed to offer financial compensation to some businesses and some self-employed whose income has been drastically affected by the war. As of this morning, the website on which candidates for the compensation have to register their application was not yet up and running. It is difficult to escape the feeling that, at the same time as civilian volunteers in their thousands are working around the clock to provide support and care, civil servants in government departments are working their usual 9 to 5.

A volunteer on the radio this morning described how suitcase donations from abroad of goods requested by frontline soldiers have been held up by Israeli customs officials, because one or two individual items infringe import laws (medications, for example). The officials have not been prepared to isolate these items and release the rest of the consignment, and the independent storage company that is holding the consignments at the airport is now demanding payment for storage before releasing the consignments. The storage charges in some cases exceed the value of the consignment.

I understand that it is impossible to ride roughshod over the law of the land. However, this volunteer described how she is wasting days being referred from one office to another, and nobody in authority has seen fit to act on their own initiative, recognise the need here, and expedite this process.

The level of contempt for Netanyahu particularly is very high. A long-running gently satirical TV show has launched a new season to cover the war. The troupe who present the show began as young lions, and are now in their 70s. Their show pokes wry fun at the situation, and they also include two nostalgic, tender songs in every programme.

In fairly stark contrast to this gentle attempt to bring a smile to a traumatized nation’s lips, and to offer a moment’s balm, is the line they take when satirizing Netanyahu. This is not a gentle joshing, but an unsmiling attack on his authority. Please don’t misunderstand me. I believe that Netanyahu deserves every poisoned dart they aim at him, and more. However, I still find myself surprised that they feel their approach is what the country needs, at this particular time, at this stage of the war, given that nothing anyone says will lead Netanyahu to resign now. There is a sense in which their approach seems to me counter-productive, although I know that they would argue (and it is a reasonable line to take) that it is as patriotic as it could possibly be.

Which brings me back to the hardest, the saddest, the most painful, the most complex, of this week’s stories: the continuing story of the families of the abductees. Depressingly, this seems to be yet another area where the government’s behaviour has fallen woefully short. The government seems to have decided that it wants to avoid having anything to do with the families, while the families (or at least a sizeable number of them) have spent the last seven weeks demanding to be updated by the authorities.

Let me say first that every action taken and every word spoken by any of the abductees’ family members is completely understandable. They will naturally do all they can to ensure the safe return of their loved ones, and it would be inhuman to criticize them for the decisions they have made. I believe some of their words and actions may have been counter-productive, but I cannot fault them for what they said and did.

As I write these lines on Sunday evening, there are reports that a deal including a partial release of abductees is imminent. Rumour has it that 50 abductees – children and women – will be released at the rate of ten a day over five days. For those five days, there will be a suspension of hostilities, and an increase in humanitarian aid to Gaza, including fuel. In addition, Israel will release 100 security prisoners, including women and children,  

Let me offer a number of observations, not necessarily internally consistent, certainly not building to a coherent case for a particular line of action, but each, I believe, worthy of serious thought.

Deciding what information to share with the families will involve the government making a decision as to the reliability of statements conveyed to Israel, through the mediators, ostensibly stating Hamas’s stand. How does the government decide what to believe?

The very act of sharing any information with the families of the abductees will add an additional dimension to the government’s process of decision-making over any exchange deal. This dimension will be complex, since there will be no unanimity of response from the families, and its existence will inefficiently complicate the process. How would the government factor the families’ multiple stands into its decision-making process?

It is inconceivable that Israel would agree to the safe passage out of Gaza of the Hamas leadership. If the leadership is indeed trapped in Gaza, then there is, for Israel, only one way this ends: with the destruction of Hamas’s capabilities and the death of its leaders. In that case, what can Israel give Hamas that Hamas wants, in exchange for the release of abductees?

As weeks turn to months and the abductees are not returned, the frustration in Israel at our inability to achieve their return will only grow, hardening into resentment at the government’s inability. Already, the tension between the families and the government led today to a screaming match in the Knesset. I can only imagine the glee with which this was watched by the Hamas leadership. What can we offer Hamas that will be worth more to them than to see Israeli society once again falling into disunity?

Which is why my expectations of a return of all of the abductees is low. I pray I am wrong, but everything we have seen from Hamas in the last 15 years tells me I am not.

You will, I am sure, believe me when I say that I would far rather end on an optimistic note. However, I can only call it as I see it, and this is how I see it at this moment. I pray that, by the time you read these words, I will have been proven wrong.

Day 38 (Monday)

Since I wrote last week, I have spent too many of my waking hours reading summaries, perspectives, analyses, of the situation in Israel and around the world, especially in England. I have tried to watch fewer videos, and to listen to fewer first- and second-hand accounts, of unimaginable atrocities, and of equally unimaginable acts of bravery. For news, I have depended almost exclusively on the three daily WhatsApp bulletins I mentioned last week, and another three or four of the on-the-hour radio bulletins through the day.

A Very Israeli Story

However, some narratives I have found it impossible to ignore. One of these is the story of Shura, which I see as a microcosm of the story of Israel.

The Army Rabbinate performs many functions, one of which is the preparation for burial of the bodies of fallen soldiers. This work is carried out at their headquarters in Shura Camp in the centre of the country, which has the capacity to store 200 bodies.

The police national forensic centre at Abu Kabir, in Tel Aviv, receives civilian terrorist victims, and conducts autopsies of other civilians. It is a small and understaffed facility.

By the end of October 7, it was already clear that Abu Kabir could not handle the civilian victims and that Shura would need to scale up its capacity by six or seven times. It also soon became clear that the identification of the bodies would be, in many, many cases, far more challenging than is usually the case, both because of the degree of butchery committed and because of the intense heat of the housefires (fed by fuel) in which many victims were burnt alive.

By the end of October 8, Shura had made itself ready for this unimaginable task. 25 empty shipping containers had been brought in. Each was equipped to be able to store the remains of 48 victims. A thousand reservists were called up, including army rabbis, dentists (to identify victims from their dental records) and pathologists. Hundreds of volunteers also stepped up.

Meanwhile, the officer in charge of the operation of locating bodies in the killing fields and sending them to Shura soon realised that identifying sometimes very small fragments of bone in the ash of a burnt house was a highly specialised job. So he phoned an acquaintance who is one of Israel’s leading archaeologists and asked him if he could bring a team of volunteer senior archaeologists to Otef Aza to carry out this work. They arrived the following day and immediately began working throughout the daylight hours.

Since then, in the Shura camp, one team of police investigators have been conducting basic police work: establishing cause of death, identifying murder weapons, taking fingerprints and DNA, recording any identifying characteristics such as tattoos or items such as jewellery. Following that, the remains go to a second team of crime scene investigators, who photograph and carry out other tests. At the end of this conveyor built, the remains pass through a CT scanner.

Even with all of this activity, it has proven heartbreakingly difficult to achieve identification in all cases. The criteria for positive identification are intentionally very demanding, to minimise the danger of misidentification. In cases where victims were incinerated, temperatures were sometimes high enough to distort the teeth beyond recognition and to make it impossible to detect DNA. Despite all of the technology, the huge databank available, the expertise and dedication of the teams working, it is still a fact that, even now, over five weeks since the atrocity, every day or two the identity of another person who died on October 7 is confirmed.

You can hear Dr Qanta Ahmed, a medical professional and a world expert on genocide who spent time at Shura, addressing the Haifa Technion here.

You can view a TV report , subtitled in English, on this sacred work, here. (I’m not sure this link will work for you. If so, this is a very moving and powerful report. If not, I apologise.)

We all wish with our entire being that this whole project were unnecessary. However, the project is essential, to honour the dead and to bring the mourners closure. In its humanity, in its multi-disciplinary co-operation, in its deeply religious commitment, in its cutting-edge technology, in its improvisation and speed of execution, and in its creative answer to a completely unforeseen challenge, Shura seems to me to encapsulate much of what is best in Israel.

The Day Israel Changed

I’ve also been struck, this week, by some of the dramatic changes that we have seen since October 7. It certainly makes sense to talk about Israel before and after Hashabbat Hashchora – the Black Shabbat.

For example, consider Gershon Baskin. He is arguably the Israeli most single-mindedly dedicated to furthering coexistence between Jews and Arabs in Israel and peace between Israel and the Palestinians throughout the last forty years. If the name means nothing to you, read his CV here.

Two weeks ago he wrote an open letter to the Deputy Foreign Minister in the Hamas government. (How surreal these civilised titles seem in the post-10/7 world!) You can read the letter here. In the last two weeks, I have reread it several times, because I cannot actually believe that I have read it correctly.

Almost as remarkable is an article by Thomas Friedman in The New York Times. While I wouldn’t endorse every word Friedman writes, his attitude to Israel seems to me to have changed. He now seems able to separate his feelings about the Government from his feelings about Israel. You can read the article here.

As well as these changes among media personalities, there are also changes at the personal, anonymous level. The world sometimes seems to have been stood on its head.

For instance, here’s a Gazan civilian, evacuating south along the Israel-provided humanitarian corridor, telling his Al-Jazeera interviewer that “Arab traitors are conspiring against us. Arabs, and only Arabs are betraying us. The Jews are kind with us.”

On the same subject: Israeli tanks and infantry in Gaza are deployed to protect Gazan civilian evacuees from Hamas fire.

Meanwhile, in Britain, police stood by, apparently oblivious, while Palestinian protestors made people selling poppies for Remembrance Day so uncomfortable that they eventually picked up their stand and moved to a different part of the railway station. However, two police officers were ready to pose, smiling, for a selfie with a child dressed as a Hamas terrorist. I have watched British police captured on video this week and seen nothing in their behaviour that I recognise.

Back in Israel, not only ultra-orthodox men but also over 200 ultra-orthodox women have applied to the IDF to enlist and assist in the war effort. The IDF is considering establishing a dedicated conscription program for the women. At the same time, 350 ultra-orthodox volunteer groups are among the thousands who have volunteered to help farmers harvest their crops.

That’s it for this week, except for the weather report. Winter may not have arrived in Israel, but it certainly has in Portugal, although the indoor hats may be more of a fashion statement than a reflection on the season.

Before we get down to business this week: I just want to thank all of you who have contacted Bernice and myself to ask how our daughter-in-law, Maayan, is coping. As I mentioned previously, in the framework of her work with the organisation Elem, she was leading a team of volunteers at the Nova party in Re’im on October 7.

Last Friday evening, in a 13-minute report, Israel’s leading mainstream TV channel featured the team’s experiences on Black Shabbat. The report does not include graphic visual content, and, by the horrific standards of that terrible day, the narration is not, I feel, disturbingly harrowing. (Having typed that last sentence, I am sitting here rereading it and reflecting on how October 7 has for me, perhaps forever, redefined the disturbingly harrowing.)

I was not able to subtitle it in English, but I have prepared an English transcript of the soundtrack, because I felt that many of my non-Hebrew-speaking readers might appreciate viewing it. You can view the TV segment here. The translated transcript is available for download here.

Day 31

Yesterday, Day 30 (Sunday), marked the shloshim; for individual mourners, this represents the end of the second stage of mourning. Israel’s President Herzog asked all citizens to light a memorial light last night to mark this staging post, a further symbol of the way the country has been bonded together by the glue of Hamas’s unspeakable atrocity.

In May 2021, Arabs rioted in some mixed (Arab and Jewish) Israeli cities – Akko, Yaffo and Lod. It is reasonable to assume that Hamas hoped that their October 7 pogrom would spark similar rioting. However, so far there has been remarkably little visible tension within Israel between Arabs and Jews. The cohesion of the nation has seemed to cross ethnic and religious boundaries.

Individual Arabs have been tweeting that they now identify primarily as Israelis and secondarily as Palestinians, having realised that they would not be prepared to live in a state governed by Hamas. Among the stories that are still emerging are some that involve several Bedouin from Rahat, a predominantly Arab Bedouin city in the  Negev. In more than one case, Bedouin who drove to the Nova festival or to one of the Otef Aza kibbutzim to rescue relatives also rescued tens of other, Jewish, survivors they encountered. Hamas did not discriminate between their Jewish and Arab victims; neither did the rescuers.

That cohesion was threatened by the story of Member of Knesset (MK) Iman Khatib-Yassin (of the Arab opposition party Ra’am), who claimed, yesterday, that the Hamas terrorists raped no women and slaughtered no babies on October 7. This morning I watched her interview on the Knesset TV channel, in which she made this claim.

What she is saying in the interview is a little more nuanced than the simple, bald statement: ‘The Hamas terrorists raped no women and slaughtered no babies.’ Rather, she claims that she has been informed by MKs who viewed it that the film screened by Israel for MKs and foreign diplomats showed no rape of women or slaughter of babies. She certainly expresses her horror at what happened, and, as a religious woman, condemns it as being against the principles of Islam.

At the same time, of course, Khatib-Yassin’s attempt, at the end of the interview, to ‘understand’ the pogrom in the context of Israel’s prior treatment of Gaza is difficult to read as anything other than an attempt to justify it, despite her protestations.

Two more points need to be made about this story. First, Khatib-Yassin’s party leader, Mansour Abbas, called immediately for her to resign as an MK, stating that “there is and will be no space in our ranks for anyone who denies or minimizes the severity of the actions which negate our values and also the religion of Islam.” Second, Khatib-Yassin on the same evening issued the following statement: “I made a mistake, I am sorry and I apologize. I had no intention to minimize or deny the horrifying massacre of October 7 and the terrible acts against women, babies, or the elderly who were killed in the south.”

Had I watched the interview first, I know that the level of my outrage would have been rather less than it was having read the brief news report first. The richer the context in which we view a story, the more sensitive we are to the nuances of the story.

And now, in the interest of balance, let me present you with a specimen from the other end of Israel’s colourful political spectrum. Yesterday (Sunday), MK Amichai Eliyahu of Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party was interviewed on an ultra-orthodox radio station, Kol Barama. He was reported as saying, in answer to a question, that a nuclear bomb was “one way” to end the war in Gaza. Put like that, the answer seems little short of imbecilic, in light of the battle for the hearts and minds of the free world that Israel is attempting to fight, quite apart from the ludicrous impracticality of a nuclear bomb as a solution.

However, a look at the transcript of the interview highlights a couple of not-irrelevant points.

Interviewer: “Your expectation is that tomorrow morning we’d drop what amounts to some kind of a nuclear bomb on all of Gaza, flattening them, eliminating everybody there…,”

Eliyahu: “That’s one way. The second way is to work out what’s important to them, what scares them, what deters them… They’re not scared of death.”

It’s worth noting, first, that the lunatic idea was raised by the interviewer and not the interviewee. In addition, the interviewer is clearly using ‘nuclear bomb’ as a metaphor (“what amounts to some kind of a nuclear bomb”).

Eliyahu then clearly rejects the idea and proposes instead looking for some solution that will deter them without wiping them all out.

Don’t misunderstand me. Eliyahu’s response was stupidly ill-considered. He should have said explicitly what he implied: “That’s, of course, a ridiculous idea, but we do have to find some solution that will utterly deter them. They’re not scared of death.” In not responding in those terms, Eliyahu demonstrated eloquently (if that’s the right word) his unsuitability to be a Government minister, particularly at this sensitive time.

It would have been very easy for Netanyahu to fire him, particularly since his Government ministry (he is the Minister of Jerusalem and Israel Tradition) is a meaningless entity created only to manufacture a ministerial seat that could then be given to Otzma Yehudit to cement their position in the Government coalition.

However, Netanyahu chose only to suspend Eliyahu from Cabinet meetings for an indefinite period. Demonstrating the Government’s extraordinary fragmentation, Government ministers mocked the ineffectuality of this disciplinary action. “This is a joke, there barely are any cabinet meetings anyway, and most of the work is being done in rounds of votes by phone,” an unnamed minister was quoted as saying.

A couple of hours later, Eliyahu tweeted: “It is clear to anyone with a mind that the statement about an atom [bomb] is metaphorical. But we definitely need a powerful and disproportionate response to terrorism, which will make it clear to the Nazis and their supporters that terrorism is not worthwhile. This is the only formula that democratic countries can use to deal with terrorism.”

He is not wrong about ‘anyone with a mind’. However, it should also be clear to anyone with a mind that a Government minister needs to engage his brain before engaging his tongue when being interviewed on live media.

Which brings us to Netanyahu himself. As the whole country rallies round and pulls together, Netanyahu continues sowing seeds of discord. Having attacked the fellow members of his security cabinet, and then tweeted his support of them, Netanyahu apparently announced that: “The day after the war, the effect, on Hamas’s plans for October 7, of reservists refusing to serve will be probed.”

The remarks were reportedly made in response to a reporter’s question at a briefing for diplomatic correspondents.

According to tweets by Channel 13 reporter Moriah Asraf Wolberg: “I asked the prime minister if he felt guilty and if he had prepared for war as the IDF had warned, and he replied: 1. No warning was received. 2. I warned about [reservists’] refusal to serve and I said that at the moment of truth, it wouldn’t happen [my emphasis]. The day after [the war], the connection between the refusals [to serve] and [Hamas leader] Sinwar’s moves will be probed.”

I would add to this that, on the radio this morning (Monday), another correspondent who was present at the briefing stated that Netanyahu further qualified his comment by presenting the refusal to serve as only one of several possible influences on Hamas’s decision to attack that will be investigated immediately after the war.

Once again, there are mitigating nuances here, even though, once again, Netanyahu’s response was remarkably ill-considered, particularly for a politician as cagey as he is. Unless, of course, he had a Machiavellian agenda that I am missing… but that seems far-fetched… doesn’t it?

My takeaway from all of this is that I shall endeavour, in future, not to react with a jerk of the knee every time I read a breaking story. I will try to read around the subject a little, and to acquire as much as possible of the context. We are living in an atmosphere that encourages instant reactions. No sooner does a message arrive by WhatsApp than we send it on to others. We need, perhaps, to guard against being quite so trigger-happy. Let’s strive to focus a bit less on the breaking news and a bit more on the mending nuance.

Changing the subject, your homework for this week is to come up with a realistic plan for what happens after (if) Israel completely destroys Hamas in Gaza. That is, of course, the huge question that is increasingly occupying everyone’s mind here… and elsewhere.

On a less controversial note: Raphael still thinks gan is the greatest thing since blueberries, Ollie seems a mite bemused, and Tao, having entirely missed the terrible twos, is now embracing the for-crying-out-loud fours.