From that day, October 7th 2023 until the last living hostages were released in October 2025, I have not experienced true tranquillity or happiness. For those of you who are not one of the fifteen million Jews worldwide (yes, just 15 million out of a total of 8 BILLION people in the world) this may be difficult to understand. Those who are Yazidis (less than 1 million worldwide), Druze (less than 2 million) will understand the feeling of solidarity within each of our communities and the sense of pain and overwhelming helplessness that we feel when one of our number is excluded, injured or killed, raped or tortured just because of our ethnicity. I cannot speak for those other groups but I can tell you how I have felt for the past three years and how I fear for the future of my children and grandchildren and wonder whether they will have a place or a future in Britain, Europe, Canada, Australia or even America.
I have ceased contact with a few local fair-weather friends who made no mention of the “situation” and failed to understand that murders of Jews in Manchester and attacks on Jews and Jewish-supported ambulances in London affected me as a member our small British, Jewish community (less than 300,000 out of nearly 70,000,000!).
I am grateful for the personal support from many non-Jewish friends but they are not, by and large, willing to speak up and out to protect the Jewish community against the attacks and ostracisation on university campuses, in workplaces and hospitals and schools and online. Then again why should they?
I am sick of saying that we are “the canaries in the coal mine”. I am sick of reading Holocaust literature, I am sick of having to justify the existence of the State of Israel and I am very, very angry.
Sometimes I ironically sing the Miranda Lambert song, “Time to get a gun” but know that I would probably rather die than use one – but at the same time I do not want the Jewish people to go like lambs to the slaughter as so many were forced to do in the Holocaust.
I remember with tears in my eyes the beautiful young people killed at the Nova festival. I weep for the families murdered, burnt, separated and destroyed and for the women and girls raped and mutilated – their photographs haunt me. I cry for those survivors who took their own lives because the pain was too great and those who are struggling to overcome mental and physical injuries so deep that they may never recover.
And every day I see photographs of handsome young men and women who are being imprisoned, tortured and hung by the very same manic regime in Iran who fund Hamas, Hizbollah and the Houthis. I see no demonstrations against the Iranian regime here in the country of my birth and I am bitterly resentful of the hypocrisy that pervades western society, our politicians and the UN.
I smile, I play with my goats, I kiss my grandchildren, I write my books and poems – poems that are too dark to publish.
This is just what I feel, I speak for no one but myself. I am shocked and shattered at the open and blatant Jew hatred that has erupted since October 7th. I can no longer fool myself that I am fully accepted in my country but I will not leave without a fight.
