Blogger’s Note: I have remarked previously on the diversity of my readership. Mine is not one of those blogs by an enthusiast of late 14-Century coastal Chinese ivory carvings for enthusiasts of late 14^th-Century coastal Chinese ivory carvings. I do try to be more than one or two things to more than one or two folks, and that inevitably means that not every post I write will interest everyone who reads it.

If words ain’t your thing, you might want to skip this week’s post. If you get a third of the way through and aren’t enjoying it, there’s not much point in reading on. I plough a narrow furrow this week, and I know it’s not a furrow that everyone finds groovy! As Bernice said when giving it her seal of approval: “OK! It’s not for me, but it’s a nice blog.”

You have been warned. No money back beyond this point.

A pudding, my OED (Oxford English Dictionary) informs me, is a sweet or savoury steamed dish made with flour. What, I ask myself, could be less suitable for Pesach, since steaming flour would inevitably create chametz, the leaven that is the very antithesis of Pesach? However, the reality of life at the moment makes me want to embrace some kind of escapism, and so I offer you, this week, a piece that is full of hot air and, featuring, as it does, a cabbage and a mulberry, promises to be both savoury and sweet.

When I’m looking to escape, I usually bury myself in a puzzle. Any puzzle will do, but, given the choice, it would be a word puzzle; if available, a crossword puzzle; preferably, a Times crossword puzzle; ideally, the Times Cryptic. So, I seek refuge this week in two of the clues from last week’s Times Cryptic puzzle.

Let’s start with the cabbage. In last Thursday’s Cryptic, the following clue appeared:
Steal from Savoy (7)

Most solvers were able, from the ‘lights’, (the letters shared with words that crossed this word on the crossword grid) that the answer was CABBAGE, of which Savoy is a variety that is similar to green cabbage but a bit milder and sweeter, with leaves that are looser and more ruffly. Its name derives from its assumed origin in the Savoy region of France, the Western Alpine area bordering Italy and Switzerland.

So far, so good.

“But what”, you – and many, many Times crossword solvers – ask, “has ‘steal’ to do with cabbage?”

Well, it transpires that ‘cabbage’ is slang for ‘steal’.

“But why?” you continue – and even if you don’t, because you are asleep by this stage, rest assured that I certainly did.

And the answer is…not as straightforward as you might have hoped. All I can offer you, after considerable research, is a couple of tentative suggestions.

There are many cases where a slang word appears to bear no relation, in sound or meaning, to the target word. ‘Cabbage’ seems to have no association with ‘steal’. In such cases, the most common explanation is that it is a term in Cockney rhyming slang, a slang devised deliberately to be incomprehensible to outsiders. Cockney rhyming slang uses the device of finding a common two-word (or sometimes three-word) phrase that happens to rhyme with the target, then removing the second (rhyming) word of the phrase and using only the first word in slang. Common examples are:
butcher’s (hook) = look
apples (and pears) = stairs
daisy (root) = boot

It has been suggested that ‘cabbage’ derives from cockney rhyming ‘cabbage leaf’ to mean ‘thief’. However, this is unlikely, since the standard cockney slang for ‘thief’ is ‘tea leaf’ (and not, confusingly, ‘tea’). In addition, ‘thief’ is not a synonym of ‘steal’.

‘Cabbage’ is used as a slang term for ‘money’ (presumably because a cabbage leaf is green (the traditional and original colour of the ₤1 note) or, when it is stale and worth less, brown (the traditional and original colour of the 10-shilling note). However, the leap from ‘money’ to ‘steal’ seems to me too far.

A second, more promising, suggestion comes from the tailoring trade. When a customer pays a tailor to make a suit, part of the cost is the cost of the length of material cut from a bolt (or roll) of cloth. The cutter unrolls a suitable (pun intended) length of cloth, chalks out the pattern of the suit on the length of cloth and cuts the length from the bolt. He then cuts out the chalked pattern. The art of the cutter lies in laying out the various elements of the pattern (the various pieces of the suit – two sleeves, a jacket back, a jacket front, pocket flaps, etc.) in such a way as to minimise the length of cloth required, thus enabling the tailor either to minimise the cost of the suit, or to maximise his profit margin, as desired.

Nevertheless, however skilled the cutter is, there will inevitably be some scraps left over after the pattern has been cut out. For those of you who have stayed awake to this point, we have reached our destination. Those offcut scraps are referred to as ‘cabbage’. This probably reflects their resemblance to shreds of cabbage, or, possibly, their resemblance to straw wastage (which was called ‘garbage’, a word which then came to acquire its modern meaning). Over the years, the word ‘garbage’ mutated to ‘cabbage’. Some people claim that, because of its resemblance, when shredded, to straw garbage, the brassica was originally named ‘garbage’, which was corrupted, over the years, to ‘cabbage’.

At least since the 20^th Century, the convention in Britain was that any cabbage was the property of the tailor and not the customer who had paid for the cloth. Therefore, when I read suggestions that ‘tailor’s cabbage’ is the origin of the slang term ‘cabbage’ for ‘steal’, I was surprised, and, on Bernice’s behalf, deeply offended. Her late grandfather, at least one great-uncle, and, later, an uncle, were all cutters in London’s East End.

However, further research shows that this convention was not always the case. As far back as the end of the 17^th Century, tailors tried to claim the scraps from cutting out a client’s garment as their perk, but this was by no means the norm.  Some clients felt that the scraps should be theirs, not the tailors, and less scrupulous tailors were even accused of inflating the amount of fabric needed for a garment, or cutting it poorly, in order to maximise the cabbage.

Dyche’s Dictionary of 1748 describes cabbage as: “…a cant word to express anything that is pilfered privately, as pieces of cloth or silk retained by taylors, mantua-makers or others”.

In 1811 A Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue described cabbage as: “clothe, stuff or silk purloined by tailors from their employers”. (The use of ‘employer’ here, rather than ‘customer’, implies that this refers to tailors employed as a permanent part of a great household. In that case, it seems less likely that the cabbage would have been regarded as the tailor’s, rather than his master’s, property.)

It is a short step from ‘the thing stolen’ to ‘to steal’, and this explanation seems to me most likely.

On that inconclusive note, let us move one day back to last Wednesday’s Cryptic, and the following clue:
Lives, I see, in cooler Iranian city (7)

This is what we cruciverbalists (crossword enthusiasts) call an IKEA clue, containing, as it does, cryptic instructions which, if you can follow them, enable you to assemble the answer piece by piece. Let’s first solve it step by step.

Lives = IS; I see = AH!; Cooler = FAN; I see is in cooler, so we need to write IS and then AH inside FAN. This yields IS F-AH-AN; in other words, ISFAHAN, an Iranian city.

I came to the crossword only on Thursday morning, and was therefore very amused to see this clue, since the news that morning was full of reports of the defence system for Iran’s nuclear installation at Isfahan being destroyed by missiles. When I looked at the website that offers analysis, every day, of the Times crossword, explaining the solution of every clue, I saw that many of the commenters, who had, of course, solved on Wednesday, before the news broke, were complaining that they had never heard of this ‘obscure’ Iranian city. In defence of the setter, since the IKEA clue was very fair, it was certainly possible to construct the answer without having heard of the city, which many, many solvers did.

On the Thursday morning, I posted a comment on the site, which read as follows:

I suspect that fewer solvers will not have heard of the Iranian city at 19 Down this morning. Shades of the Telegraph crosswords before D-Day.

That reference to the Daily Telegraph is a story that bears retelling. In the run-up to the D-Day landings in 1944, a Daily Telegraph crossword compiler was arrested and interrogated by British Intelligence after a run of crosswords featuring codewords linked to the landings — UTAH, OMAHA, OVERLORD, MULBERRY and NEPTUNE all appeared. He was a headmaster at a school next to a camp where US and Canadian forces were preparing for the landings. He was eventually released, and the incident was dismissed as a bizarre coincidence, or possibly a sub-conscious selection of words overheard in the pub as a result of careless talk.

This post is due to be published on the morning after chag in Israel, and the last morning of chag outside Israel. I hope you all had a meaningful and restful chag, and feel ready to steel yourselves for what promises to be an even-more-than-usually-charged 9 days embracing Holocaust Day, Remembrance Day and Independence Day in Israel: of which, probably, more next week.

I am publishing this week’s post over 20 hours early (assuming I can finish writing it by then), because, of course, Pesach begins this evening. For the same reason, this is going to be a fairly short post. Bernice and I are actually well on schedule with all of the practical preparations for hag. However, Pesach, and Seder night specifically, are not only about practical preparations. If Judaism is a religion that inhabits the space shared by ritual and theology, then Pesach is the festival that, perhaps more than any other, belongs to that space.

Sukkot is, I would argue, the only other genuine contender for that title, and, even then, nobody starts preparing for Sukkot until after Yom Kippur, a few days previously. Many people start preparing for Pesach immediately after Purim – a month in advance (and some after Chanukah – over three months in advance in a non-leap lunar year).

So, in terms of physical preparations, we are in good shape. As I write these lines, Bernice is preparing this evening’s meal. Yesterday, I did my ritual biscuit and cake bake. This year went very smoothly, after an initial hiccough. I began by gathering my ingredients for the three-and-a-half-hour bakeathon – French chocolate cake, coconut pyramids, florentines, almond macaroons, cinnamon balls, all executed in accordance with a songsheet that has been refined over the years to best utilise baking time for preparation of the next item, while taking into account the limited number of baking trays at my disposal, the fact that we have only one cooling tray, varying oven temperature times, calls for egg yolks and whites, and so forth.

The initial hiccough was when I discovered that during our big pre-Pesach shop, we had somehow missed the sugar on our list. A word of advice. If you’re going to forget one item from your pre-Pesach baking shopping expedition, don’t make it sugar, which is, of course, common to all of the above goodies. So I had to dash out to buy some sugar last minute. However, as I say, from then on things went smoothly, and I was able to relinquish the kitchen to Bernice in good time.

This leaves me free, today, to devote myself to the spiritual preparation, which takes the form, for me, of deciding what we should speak about during the Seder. At the risk of almost repeating myself, and appearing to contradict myself, if Judaism is a religion that inhabits the space shared by liturgy and free expression, then Pesach is the festival that, perhaps more than any other, occupies that space. The essence of the Seder is not only to read the Haggadah, but also to have the text of the Haggadah serve as a springboard for exploring our faith.

This year, more than any year in my lifetime, and certainly in a way that we have not seen since the 1970s and the Movement for Soviet Jewry, it seems impossible simply to read the Pesach story this evening. The situation in which both Israel and world Jewry find themselves, the fact that well over a hundred thousand Israelis are not able to celebrate in their homes near the northern border or near Gaza, the hundreds and hundreds of families grieving for their loved ones who were murdered on October 7 or who have fallen in the war, and most powerfully the continued incarceration and enslavement of those abductees that are still alive, and the holding of the bodies of those that are not, cries out for us to explore, in the Pesach story, ways to understand where what we are living through fits into the Jewish story, and how we can live with it.

I don’t want to say more than that, because Bernice might read these words before Seder night, and I want to avoid any spoilers.

Instead, let me offer a couple of quick observations about life in Israel as viewed through the radio. (Yes, I know you can’t view anything through the radio. “…as discerned through the radio”, if you insist, but it doesn’t have the same ring.)

As the days have ticked on (199 days from Simchat Torah; 1 day to Pesach), with October 7 not getting smaller in the rearview mirror and Pesach looming ever larger through the windscreen, the conversation in Israel has turned increasingly to the two questions I pose in my title this week. How can we celebrate the Festival of Freedom when 133 hostages are either dead or alive and still underground in darkness in Gaza? How can we wish each other a Joyous Pesach when the reality is so depressing? I believe that there are answers to these questions, and I believe that the Seder table is the place to discuss them, but I also believe that the questions are not only legitimate but also are begging to be asked.

Oh dear! That last paragraph looks remarkably like a spoiler to me. Let me back-pedal. The clash between celebration and the suspension of celebration has been very noticeable this week on my usual radio station. The bulk of the content of the morning current affairs programs has been focused, in recent days, on these questions. The presenters have explored possible answers with the families of the abducted, whose empty chair at this year’s Seder, barring a miracle of Biblical proportions, will be real and not symbolic. They have also explored them with religious leaders and thinkers.

These morning programs are sprinkled (which may be how the network sees it) or rudely interrupted (which is how I see it) by upbeat advertisements and promos for the network’s upcoming television programs. The sombre, often heart-wrenching, nature of the discussions is thus interrupted by a jarring promo, publicising a cooking competition or a sitcom. The dissonance is painful, and leaves me feeling that the network simply doesn’t take its own programming seriously.

Let me leave you this week with one of those ‘only in Israel’ moments: a public service announcement that has been aired repeatedly this week. This week is, paradoxically, the single time in the year when more Israelis travel abroad than at any other time, celebrating the Exodus from Egypt with an exodus from Israel). The announcement offers advice to those planning to fly from Ben Gurion airport: arrive three hours before your flight; check in online beforehand; if you have only carry-on luggage, go straight to the check-in desk. The announcement then ends with one more item, from airport security: make sure you haven’t left any live ammunition in your luggage.

When I realised that that didn’t sound strange to me, I knew I had reached a new level of acclimation to life in Israel. Wherever you are, and whenever you read this, may I wish you and all of yours a Joyous and Healthy Festival of Freedom. (Spoiler alert: Joyous even if not Happy; Freedom even if not Liberty.)

I’m writing this sitting at the table in our backyard, accompanied by the call of turtle doves, which I still find very soothing, and the more energised twitter of some smaller unidentified songbird, which not so much. The flower beds are one grand splash of reds and purples as what Google Lens informs me are our impatiens are in flamboyant colour, to which my phone’s camera does not do justice. The coffee by my right hand is full-flavoured and still hot. In short, this is a morning when it is good to be alive.

This overwhelming feeling is immensely enhanced by the fact that it is also an enormous relief to be alive, since being alive this morning was, from the vantage point of last night, by no means a given. We went to bed with the news that the Home Front had issued new instructions, suspending all educational activity for 48 hours and restricting gatherings to 1000 people. It’s true that neither of these restrictions affects us directly; our children are over school age and we weren’t, in fact, planning to attend any rock concerts this evening.

However, knowing that tens of Air Force planes had scrambled, and that the whole country was on full alert for an attack of some sort from Iran, was somewhat sobering. Learning later that drones and missiles were on their way from Iran didn’t help, even though the estimated arrival time suggested that the Iranians were using a delivery system developed by Israel’s Post Office.

The night passed, as you presumably know, accompanied by considerable pyrotechnics. Even the skies over our sleepy backwater were illuminated by the streaks and flashes of interceptions of missiles. Even our windowpanes were rattled by the explosions marking the successful elimination of yet another threat.

Not that I was aware of any of this at the time, of course. No: I slept soundly through it all. Not much chance of a missile attack waking me. I am, after all, the husband whose wife barely managed to wake him when she went into labour in the middle of the night 40 years ago.

Bernice, however, watched the entire show over Jerusalem from a front bedroom window. She assures me that it seemed as though the shrapnel was falling in the football field half a kilometre away, rather than over the hill in Jerusalem, eight miles away. By the time I woke up for a bathroom break at 3:50, all of the fun and games were over.  

Waking up this morning to discover that we had not been blown away in our beds was a particular relief for me, for a reason that I will now explain.

Every weekday, my day begins with cutting up fruit for a fruit salad that Bernice enjoys with oats, seeds and yoghourt and I eat with granola and yoghourt. On Shabbat morning, however, I have a piece of cake with my cup of tea before shul, and Bernice just has a cup of tea.

I used up the last of our thick oats last week (about 1200 grams) to make a large amount of granola. (Oats, since they are washed as part of the processing before being offered for sale, are chametz gamur – absolute leaven – and cannot be ‘sold’ for Pesach, but must be disposed of.)

This Shabbat, Esther, Maayan and Raphael came to us on Friday for dinner and stayed overnight. I know they enjoy fruit salad. I therefore decided to cut up a large bowl of fruit for the girls, which had the added bonus of encouraging them to help me out with the granola. In the end, they also took some granola home, so now I have just the right amount to finish before Pesach.

In the event, they only ate about half of the fruit salad. (I have discovered that there is more Polish mother in me than I ever previously suspected. When I make fruit salad every day for Bernice and myself, I make just the right amount. When I am making for the kids, I make about twice as much as necessary.) What this meant was that I did not have to chop up more fruit this morning.

Before we went to bed last night, Bernice remarked that she hoped we wouldn’t be blown to smithereens last night, because it would be a terrible waste of the fruit salad. So, yes: it was an even greater relief to wake up this morning.

The Home Front is urging us not to be complacent, and assuring us that the threat is far from over. My personal feeling (as I write this on Sunday morning) is that Iran has rattled its sabre sufficiently to satisfy its sense of honour, delight its supporters at home, and assuage its proxies in Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen. In meeting Iran’s challenge, Israel has retaliated sufficiently to assuage its own critics, while not risking alienating allies. Further action by Iran directly or by Israel directly against Iran is in nobody’s tactical interest.

Of course, if I am proven wrong by events between now (11:25 on Sunday morning) and publication time (9:00 on Tuesday morning) either I or this paragraph will have been deleted by the time you read the blog, so I risk my reputation as a pundit very little by writing this.

I think I may stop here, although I am well under my target length of 1500 words. The fact is that this kind of plucky British humour is only sustainable for so long.

This humour is playing out against a fundamentally unchanged but constantly deteriorating situation of 134 abductees (of whom probably fewer than 100 are currently alive). It is playing out against a ‘negotiation’ process which I still believe is a farce, since nothing that Israel can offer Hamas in return for the release of the hostages is as valuable to Hamas as the destructive effect, on Israel’s morale, internal cohesion and national spirit, of not returning the hostages. It is playing out against a war where Israel cannot completely eliminate Hamas and cannot stop trying to. It is playing out against a political situation where every day that Bibi does not announce his decision to step down further diminishes his standing, tarnishes his reputation and damages the country.

It is also playing out against a countdown to Yom Hazikaron immediately followed by Yom Ha’atzma’ut. This juxtaposition of the Memorial Day for Israel’s fallen leading into Independence Day creates every year a tension that for some is very difficult, but for the majority of the population has a particularly Israeli and Jewish poignancy. There are things worth dying for. We mourn and commemorate the dead, while also recognising and celebrating the meaning of their death, what they died for.

This year, I cannot fully visualise how that transition will be achieved. The very uniqueness of that pivoting structure makes it a potential focus for all of the frustrations, the feeling that the state deserted the people on October 7. Far from being the moment when the country comes together, the moment when Yom Hazikaron becomes Yom Ha’atzma’ut may this year be the moment when the country falls apart.

Miri Regev, the government minister responsible for planning the official transition ceremony from Yom Hazikaron to Yom Ha’atzma’ut, has announced that this year’s ceremony, always attended by thousands, will be recorded in advance, with no attendant audience. There is no doubt in my mind that this decision arises not from external security fears, but rather from fears that hostage family members or other anti-Government protestors will disrupt the ceremony. These fears do not seem to me unrealistic, although I find them profoundly disturbing.

My instinct was right. I should have stopped four paragraphs ago. Sorry!

A little housekeeping, before we start.

After last week’s outpouring, I found, on the pages of last Friday’s Jerusalem Post, a proposal for a possible ‘day after’ scenario that was not as bleak as my conclusion. Amotz Asa-El is a political commentator with an enviable grasp of the sweep of history and his is the first column I read every week in Friday’s paper. Well, not exactly: the chess problem is the first column I read, but his is the first serious column I read. While you may find his suggestion a little Polyannaish, it makes thought-provoking reading. You can find it here.

Incidentally, reading last week’s chess problem, I discovered that Humphrey Bogart was a keen and talented amateur chess-player, who was a regular opponent, in friendly games, of the world blindfold champion George Koltanowski. Lauren Bacall was, I believe, not a chess player, which explains why she said to him: ‘You know how to castle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.’

And now that we’ve got that out of the way, I should explain that this is one of those weeks when I’m not going to be writing a post. I just haven’t had the time. It is now gone 9PM on Monday evening, and I still have not a single idea about what to write.

The problem is that, in the last week, I haven’t had a moment to stop and think. Much like the moon blocking the sun and ploughing a swathe of still, silent blackness across North America, various major bodies in my universe have conspired to align themselves this last week, leaving me scarcely time to load the dishwasher.

First, there is the constant proliferation of medical appointments and tests. My medical year ebbs and flows like the sea’s day, although, in my case, the prime influencer is not the moon’s gravitational pull but, rather, our trips to Portugal. Scheduling of routine medical checkups is regularly deferred to the month after we return from Portugal, so these last few weeks have been very busy, from my teeth to my feet.

My latest appointment was to remove accumulated earwax. This is something I used to schedule whenever I woke up one morning to discover that overnight I had lost all hearing in one or the other ear. A couple of years ago, it occurred to me that if I scheduled to see my little Russian ENT man every six months, I need never wake up deaf again. Fortunately, he does a monthly afternoon gig in Maale Adumim, where I strongly suspect I am his only patient. This means that I can always get an appointment, and, since suctioning wax from the ears if it has not had a good 18 months to build up is a 15-second job per ear, I can, as I did today, leave home at 2:20 and be back home at 2:32, good to go for another 6 months. It gives me a sense of what a Formula One racing car must feel like after a smooth pitstop.

The doctor pointed out after he had waved his magic wand how propitious my timing was. I have taken Pesach cleaning to a new level; even my ear canals are chometz-free.

Which reminds me that, of course, Pesach cleaning is something else that really has to be treated as a priority. Every year, we become more and more efficient in our cleaning. A couple of years ago, I started tackling just one drawer unit a day in the kitchen. This year, I suspect that if I want to follow that plan I need to have started several days before I did, but we know we will get to the finish line.

Then there’s the shul magazine, the editing of which is one of the tasks that gives me a great deal of pleasure and also involves considerable levels of stress which, I read, are what is needed to stave off Alzheimer’s. Crossword and Sudoku don’t cut it, apparently; there needs to be something at stake that gives the challenge an edge.

The gathering, editing and translating of the articles all goes fairly smoothly, although there is always a period when I fear only three people are going to submit articles and then, in the space of two days, twelve people who didn’t mention anything to me send in articles. We are timing this edition to come out for Yom Ha’atzma’ut. Given the looming presence of Pesach, I pushed all the deadlines earlier, and we are in very good shape, with all but one of the articles already received, edited and translated.

Starting with the last edition, we lost the services of our very talented graphic artist, unfortunately, and were unable to find a replacement. I therefore took on that function as well. I freely admit that I have shamelessly copied the existing graphic style of the magazine. Fortunately, my skills as a forger/imitator are fairly well honed. I thoroughly enjoy the challenge of laying out the magazine, but it is very time-consuming. So, this last week has seen some long days and late nights.

Lastly, our cupboards, as always before Pesach, contain some items that are chametz gamur, which we cannot sell for the duration of Pesach but must get rid of. So, last night, I made rye bread, rye and spelt crackers, and granola. Whenever I attempt these multiple bakes, I draw up a timetable, which ensures, on paper, that the oven becomes free of Recipe A just as I need it for Recipe B, and that the prepping of Recipe C will neatly fill the baking time of Recipe B. These schedules give me immense satisfaction; on paper, their cogs and springs mesh together as in a mid-20th Century Swiss watch. On paper! Sadly, in the real world, nothing ever seems to work out. B needs to go into the oven when A still has 15 minutes in a much hotter oven. I am only halfway through the prep of C when B needs to be taken out of the oven.

Last night, uncharacteristically and magically, everything aligned in real life just as it had on paper, and I was done, washed up, floor swept wiped over, everything cooled, wrapped, and packed away, in record time. Unfortunately, I still had no idea what I was going to write about, and I was ready only for the intellectual stimulation of The Times Quick Cryptic crossword and bed.

All of which explains why (and not for the first time, as you probably don’t need me to remind you), I have nothing to write about this week. I’d like to promise that next week will be better. However, Pesach will, by then, be casting its shadow over the doorstep. The printer will be asking when the magazine is going to be ready. At least I can be confident that my earwax won’t have built up yet, so that’s 12 minutes saved!

By the time you read this post, we will be in the 180th day that Israeli abductees, civilians and soldiers, men, women and children, pensioners and a baby, are being held in who-knows-what conditions somewhere in Gaza. I have been guilty of ignoring them in the last several weeks’ posts, but I feel that a corner was turned this week that will not allow me to ignore them further.

I wish that I could tell you how many of the abductees are still alive. I wish I could tell you how many of them were already not alive on 7 October. I wish I could tell you with any certainty how many there are in total. The figure that is being publicized is 134; seldom is it pointed out that, of those 134, 11 are reliably believed to have been murdered, 10 are reliably believed to have fallen in battle, 3 have been killed in a tragic misidentification by Israeli troops.

The reason for the uncertainty is, of course, that some were abducted by Hamas, a terrorist organisation recognised as such by the civilised world (or what little remains of it), others were abducted by Islamic Jihad, a smaller terrorist organisation, and others, in all probability, were abducted by some of those Gazan civilians who are, Hamas informs us, caught in a humanitarian crisis that horrifies the civilised world.

Presumably, these are some of the Gazans that were recently polled as supporting Hamas’s pogrom on 7 October. As The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) reported on March 22, 71% of all Palestinians recently polled supported Hamas’s decision to attack Israel on October 7, up 14 points among Gazans and down 11 points among West Bank Palestinians compared to three months ago. Fifty-nine percent of all Palestinians believe Hamas should rule Gaza, and 70 percent are satisfied with the role Hamas has played during the war.

Given that the abductors are either members of one or other terrorist organisation or are unaffiliated ‘freelance’ Gazans, it should not surprise anyone that no details of the hostages have been released by those abductors: no numbers, no list of names, no record of whether they are living or dead. The Red Cross has, I hardly need tell you, not been allowed access to visit the abductees. Does anyone believe that the medication Israel provided for the chronically sick among the abductees has reached those abductees?

The New York Times (a newspaper not remotely supportive of Israel) carried last week a story featuring the testimony of Amit Soussana, a 40-year-old released abductee who is the first such person to speak about the sexual assaults she suffered at the hands of her Hamas captor. Pramilla Patten, the United Nations special representative on sexual violence in conflict, visited Israel from January 29 to February 14. She brought an investigative team that included forensic scientists, interviewers specialising in survivor interviews and experts in video technology and ‘fake AI’ detection.

The UN report published after the visit confirmed that “sexual violence, including genital mutilation, sexualised torture, or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” was perpetrated by Hamas terrorists during the 7 October attack. The report also confirms that there is “clear and convincing information that sexual violence, including rape, sexualized torture, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, has been committed against hostages,” and that the remaining female hostages were being subjected to ongoing “sexualized torture.”

All of those quotes, I reiterate, are from a UN report.

I suspect you didn’t need me to tell you any of the above. I felt, nevertheless, that I needed to, to give context to what I am about to say.

I had a very depressing conversation this past week, with someone who is very well-informed, and who is a lifelong committed Zionist. Let’s call my collocutor Val. In the course of that conversation, Val expressed concern about the right-wing extremists who have central roles in the Government, and who are “expressing racist views”. Val, clearly concerned about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, then went on to ask my opinion about how the war, and the situation, will be resolved.

In my less than polished reply, I found myself making a number of points that led me to a conclusion. Let me attempt to marshal them here in a more organised form.

The entire population of Israel, the leadership of the US and Britain and the rest of the free world, recognise Hamas as a terrorist organisation that, by its own charter, seeks the destruction of Israel; that, by its statements since 7 October, intends to perpetrate similar pogroms again and again; that, by its actions in Gaza, has demonstrated and continues to demonstrate that, at best, it does not care about Palestinian civilian casualties and, at worst, it seeks to maximise Palestinian civilian casualties.

Knowing this, we all know that there is absolutely no point in attempting to negotiate a resolution of this conflict with Hamas. This is the reason why all parties are pressuring Israel to bring about an immediate ceasefire, which may then lead to a release of hostages, and nobody is pressuring Hamas to immediately release the hostages, which may then lead to a ceasefire.

It is also the reason why the families of the abductees are continuing to call on the Israeli government to bring home the hostages, and not demanding to meet with the Hamas leaders in Doha or calling on Hamas to release the hostages. In the 1970s, the Jewish world did not demand of the Israeli government: ‘Bring My People Home’. Instead, it demanded of Soviet Russia: ‘Let My People Go’, because it knew that, if the pressure were sufficient, the Soviets would recognise that it was in their realpolitik interests to comply. Hamas, in contrast, is in total thrall to its politico-religious fundamentalist ideology.

(Incidentally, I can think of no good reason why Hamas would ever agree to release even one more hostage. By not releasing hostages it is inflicting incredible pain on the whole country and also ripping Israel apart again.)

And yet, and yet: at the same time, there is an extraordinary dissonance going on. Almost the entire free world, and even, it appears, the Israeli government, is behaving as if Hamas is the rational and moral representative of a country. Israel is being told by the same bodies that recognise Hamas for what it is, that the resolution of the situation must be a two-state solution. Last week, the historian and commentator Gil Troy suggested that we should instead be calling for a ‘two-democracy’ solution. The question then becomes: How do we bring Gaza to the point where it can become a democratic state?

My answer to that, I am mildly surprised to discover, is that I do not believe it can be done. In 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza. The Gazans’ first act, after that withdrawal, was to loot and burn everything Israel left behind: from the houses to the state-of-the-art hydroponic fruit and vegetable greenhouses, in which Gazans had been employed. Their self-interest was sacrificed to their ideology.

In January 2006, elections were held throughout the PA. Gaza was divided into five electoral districts, from North Gaza down to Rafah. The 24 seats contested were split between these districts in accordance with the distribution of the electorate. Hamas received 44.45% of the vote throughout the Palestinian Authority compared to Fatah’s 41.43%. Broadly speaking, Hamas dominated Northern Gaza in the election, and Fatah won in the southernmost district. However, because of the complicated seat-allocation system used, and probably because Hamas analysed the system and worked it more effectively than Fatah, Hamas won 15 of the 24 seats and Fatah won only 8.

I have not been able to find any percentage figures exclusively for Gaza, other than for the Northern Gaza district, whose 6 seats were all won by Hamas, despite their polling only just under 47% of the vote, to Fatah’s just over 36%.

It is also almost certainly true that Hamas approached the elections very cannily, fielding candidates in accordance with careful mathematical calculation and temporarily dropping their Charter call for Israel’s destruction, in hopes of winning over moderate voters tired of Fatah corruption. Nevertheless, there is no disputing that Hamas won the 2006 election decisively and, within the electoral definition, democratically.

In 2007, in violent clashes with Fatah, Hamas effectively seized power, quashed all opposition and has held power since. If all of this reminds you of the rise to power of Hitler, then hold that thought.

So, who is Israel actually fighting at the moment? I would suggest that, in the same way as Britain did not declare war on Nazism in 1939, but rather on Nazi Germany, so, too, Israel is fighting not Hamas but Hamas-governed Gaza. That being the case, and given that Hamas does not distinguish its warriors from civilians by dressing them in uniform, or distinguish between civilian and military establishments, but rather houses its headquarters in hospitals and schools and mosques, Israel would, I feel, be justified in acknowledging Hamas’ decisions and waging war against Gaza.

However, of course, Israel has done no such thing. Let’s assume that the Hamas Health Ministry’s official figures for deaths and injuries are accurate (in itself a huge assumption, since Hamas and its media have been inflating figures consistently). Let’s also assume that the IDF figures for Hamas fighters killed are accurate (a more reasonable assumption, since the IDF is able to provide names of many of those killed). If we then calculate the number of civilians killed in proportion to the number of combatants killed, we arrive at a figure that may be unprecedented in any war, and is certainly unprecedented in any entirely urban war, as this is.

If we, further, understand what the legal definition of ‘proportionality’ is in terms of civilian casualties in wartime, then clearly Israel is, rather than committing genocide, carrying out a just war with full respect for international conventions of war.

Let’s jump to some bottom lines. If ‘winning the war’ means eliminating Hamas completely, then Israel cannot win the war. The best it can hope to achieve militarily is a much more severe than usual mowing of the lawn, which will mean reserving to itself the right to go back in and mow the lawn again periodically in the future. Part of the price of that solution will almost certainly be that the residents of the Gaza envelope will never be able to return home. Another part of the price of that solution is that Gazans will live under the threat of Israeli military operations within heavily populated areas of Gaza to eradicate terrorists.

If the long-term aim is to bring Gaza to the point where it can be a viable democratic state, then I see no way that that can be achieved. The hatred is by now so deeply embedded, the corruption, of Gazans and UN bodies, so complete, the pool of talent and ability in Gaza so depleted, as generation after generation of able Gazans move abroad to pursue a career and a fulfilled life, that the Gazans that are left are simply not equipped to turn Gaza around.

I genuinely do not see any solution that will make it possible for Israelis to live securely within Israel and Gazans to live freely in Gaza. Which leads me to one stark conclusion. If nothing that anyone does can create a situation where the Gazans will accept a Jewish state and live in peace alongside it, then it is inhumane, and insane, to continue as we are, condemning generation after generation of Israelis to a tangible existential threat, and generation after generation of Gazans to living unfulfilled and unstable lives under the nonsensical and cruel label of ‘Palestinian refugees’ in perpetuity that the UN created.

So, what is my plan for the day after? How do I see this situation being resolved? There are, I would suggest, only two options.

We can call an end to the Zionist venture, and condemn Jews to be again defenceless against the world’s hatred and dispersed amongst the nations. On an individual level, many Israelis are considering taking, and some have already taken, that step. I cannot condemn them. It is a moral act of considerable bravery. On past form, as confirmed by what is happening now throughout the free world, this will mean permanent insecurity for the Jews, frequent forced or voluntary emigration from one temporary haven to another, occasional or less occasional mass murder. Nothing in today’s world suggests that the fate of the Jews in the diaspora will be better in the future than it has been in the past.

Or we can encourage the Gazans to leave Gaza, perhaps by offering financial incentives to the Gazans and to potential host countries. ‘Where are they supposed to go?’ you ask. There are no end of Arab countries. Let them spread themselves throughout the Arab world. Just over two million Gazans represent about 0.45% of the population of all Arab states. Their lives will almost certainly be materially better and more secure elsewhere, and their grandchildren will thank them for it.

Let me ask you a couple of questions.

Do you honestly see any practical resolution other than the two options I have presented? If so, I would love you to offer it in the comments below.

Does one solution seem more acceptable to you than the other? Do you give any weight to the fact that, uniquely, the Land of Israel was promised to the People of Israel by the God of Israel? Possibly not. How about the fact that Israel’s right to exist as an independent state was supported by the family of nations in 1947? Not good enough? What about the fact that there has never in history been an independent state of Palestine, whereas Jews twice lived in the Land of Israel as an independent nation in Biblical times? Jews were made a nation by God when he took them out of Egypt. The Palestinians became a nation when their leaders deemed it politically expedient half a century ago. Does the fact of unbroken Jewish residence throughout the Land of Israel from Biblical times to the modern era carry any weight with you?

I reached the end of writing this, and could not really believe that the argument had led me to the devastating conclusion that it’s us or them. (I know that some of my readers will be astonished that it has taken me this long to ‘wake up’ to reality.) So I read the post again, desperately hoping to find where my argument is forced or distorting. I can’t see it, I’m afraid. Believe me that I wish I could. I invite you, I implore you, to point out to me where my argument falls down.