YOM HAZIKARON 2013

Last night I attended the local Yom HaZikaron commemoration at Robert Blackwood Hall in Monash Uni Clayton.

I wrote about my brother Yehuda who fell in the Yom Kippur War, October 1973, last year, and I really have nothing more to say about him. Although, there is good news; my daughter named her baby boy after him 5 months ago. Little Yehuda Raphael is the first to be named after him, may he always be a source of nachas to his parents.

So I won’t write about my brother. I want to write about the actual ceremony.

Some 20+ years ago when Yom HaZikaron started being commemorated in Melbourne, it was a small, short affair. It went from 8pm to 9pm, pretty much sharp, and it was all in Ivrit and attended mainly by Israelis. About 300 would come and the venues wandered around from Beit Weizman to school halls and town halls, eventually coming to rest at the Robert Blackwood Hall, one week after the Yom HaShoa commemoration. It got bigger and bigger, it drew more diverse participants and, along the way, it changed from a tight, rather military-style evening with a very Israeli flavour, to a rather long, bilingual affair, with pre-recorded segments from Israel being screened as well as lots of speeches from local dignitaries and heads of Zionist organizations. This is all OK up to a point. But the interesting thing is that, while Yom HaShoa, which attracts slightly larger crowds and involves children’s choirs and a lot more people coming and going on stage, as well as survivor testimony and candle lighting by elderly folk and their families, has become tighter and more streamlined, starting at 8 and ending at 9.30, the Yom HaZikaron evening seems to get longer and longer; last night went from 7.30 to 9.30, and then there was a singalong for the Israelis, at which point we left.

In fact, I understand why this evening has spread out in this way. Early on, there were 7 candles lit, each in remembrance of the wars fought: 1948, Independence war; 1956 Suez war; 1967 Six Day War; 1967-70 War of Attrition; 1973 Yom Kippur War; 1982 First Lebanon War; and a candle for the victims of terror. And lives lost in training accidents.

Well, unfortunately, you can see the problem here. There have been more wars. Second Lebanon. Gaza, Cast Lead and Pillar of Defence. First and second intifadas, although that was more about terror attacks. 

It’s not as ‘neat’ as Yom HaShoah and the 6 candles for the 6 million. It keeps growing. But you can’t just keep adding candles. So now there are still 7 candles lit but it’s all over the place. With each candle we hear the story of an individual who lost his or her life in defence of Israel, usually in combat but sometimes in training, or as a result of terror. 7 people come and light them, family or friends of the dead. And there are stories and stories and stories.

23,085 people have lost their lives since the State was established. Every family in Israel has been bereaved.

Last night, the hall was pretty full; but it should be overflowing. Yom HaZikaron is a reminder that, however you feel about it, as a Jew you have a link with Israel, the only Jewish state in the world. This little piece of land which has been fought over for millennia, is our land, and it’s all we’ve ever had and it’s all we’ll ever get. We’ve been kicked out of it and stomped on numerous times, but we’re still here, and it’s still ours. Whether you are religious or not, Zionist or not, left or right in politics, when push comes to shove, Israel with its politically blurry borders and its hostile neighbours, is all we Jews have. If we had had Israel, or any sort of foothold in Palestine during the time of the British Mandate, the horrors of the Holocaust would not have been. Jews had nowhere to go, in the main, and history showed that nobody wanted them, and they were murdered. We were murdered; one third of the 18 million Jews at the time, the flower of European civilization, were murdered. Triated, not decimated; decimation is the killing of one in 10. One in three of us perished at the hands of Nazism and world apathy. If we had had a Jewish state, even only a little piece of the ancient Jewish homeland which the British at first ‘gave’ us with the Balfour Declaration and then prevented us from entering during the Mandate, maybe we would have ‘only’ been decimated. We might ‘only’ be mourning 1.5 million martyrs instead of 1.5 million children. But millions would have been saved.

It is not good enough to say that Yom HaZikaron doesn’t interest you or is not meaningful to you or you have something better to do on the night. Israel is our birthright, as Jews. If we don’t show ourselves, our children, the world, that it is important to us, then it looks like we don’t care. And if a Jew doesn’t care about the Jewish state, then who the hell will?

In memory of the fallen, the heroes in battle, the victims of terror;  those who have survived with injuries, physical and psychological and spiritual; and the wounded families, whose lives have been changed forever. 

Lest we forget.

Am Yisrael Chai.

Liberation and beyond

A few nights ago I attended a Seder which commemorated freedom No, not Pesach, that was 2 weeks ago. This was the annual commemoration and celebration of my father-in-law, Nathan Werdiger's rescue and liberation from Buchenwald April 11 1945. He calls it his rebirth. He had survived slave labour in Auschwitz Birkenau, then a death march to Buchenwald and was probably hours from death when the Americans came. He had in fact been thrown onto a pile of corpses and left for dead. His brother Nechemia, the only one of his family who had survived, had refused to leave the camp to go into the forest as the Nazi guards had ordered him to so that they could gun him down as they did with the other running Jews. Miraculously they let him stay. Under cover of darkness he went back to the pile of corpses and pulled his brother out; he was still alive.
My father-in-law doesn't really remember these details because he was unconscious. He remembers that he had been unable to walk for some time before, having to creep on all fours 'like a dog'. He remembers that he was a Musselman, a walking skeleton, neither fully alive or dead. He remembers lying in the shelf bunk, helpless in his own filth because of the typhus. He remembers being held upright for the roll calls, because anyone who collapsed would be shot. In fact, when he did collapse, he wasn't shot because the Nazi didn't want to waste a bullet on someone who was so clearly moribund, and that was when he was thrown onto the pile. That part Nechemia told him.
The Americans resuscitated him, refed him very slowly, as by then they had learned a little about the risks of food to such starved individuals, many of whom died from rapid refeeding; and his friend Shabsi Kornwasser z'l taught him to walk again. (Shabsi eventually made his way to Melbourne and was also a friend of my father z'l.)
The brothers were sent to Davos in Switzerland for treatment and rehabilitation. The Swiss interned the survivors in barracks surrounded by barbed wire-topped walls - very sensitive of them- because they were terrified of the diseases that these desperately sick people carried. They made them all sign documents that would ensure that they would leave Switzerland once they were well enough and not try to claim refuge and citizenship.
My father in law tells of the time that he arrived in Davos. Escorted by military personnel, a group of these boys- they all had to be under 18 in order to merit this treatment, so some became younger, (just as they had to be older in order to escape the selection for the gas chambers on entering Auschwitz, so some had immediately become older)- were in their prison camp garb, and some previously content Swiss citizens saw them. Some turned away. Some wept. Some offered Nathan money. He took the coins and threw them back at their feet. He told them that giving him money wouldn't take their guilt away from them. It was the first time since his rescue that he felt real anger.
Anyway, after 3-4 years in Davos sanatorium the brothers had regained their health. Photos at the end of the rehab show Nathan as a stocky young man, smiling at the camera, squinting into the sun carrying a pair of skis on his shoulder. But where was he to go? Certainly not back to Sosnowiecz where his family's apartment was now occupied by Poles who would not be happy to see the Jews return. Nechemia went to the US but US immigration didn't want Nathan because of his TB and poor health. But a cousin in Australia sponsored him out and the rest is history.
He married several years after. The short guy with the positive attitude won the beautiful daughter of the Rabbi and restarted his life. He managed to keep his optimistic outlook and his love of Yiddishkeit and Torah and raised a family which now has more than 100 members. He has been successful in business and life is good. He thinks he is 90, but he might be 88, and nothing is more important than his family whom he loves with all his being.
So at the Liberation dinner there is always bread to eat, because that was what they all dreamed of when they were starving, chicken soup, klops (meatloaf which my mother in law makes a superb version of) and other delicacies. My father in law gives testimony. Children and grandchildren speak.
My daughter Esther, who lives in New York, wrote a letter which I will excerpt:
'Central to my own relationship with my grandparents has always been the instinct to not only relate to them as matriarch and patriarch of our giant family unit, but as actual and real people - people with urges, flaws, regrets, idiosyncrasies. I always like to ask myself that if my father wasn't my father, or if my sister wasn't my sister, or whatever, and I met them at a party, would I talk to them? Would we become friends? Would we make each other laugh? Respect each other? When I'm with Bobba and Zaida, I'm often compelled to ask questions - and I really feel like nothing is too banal - because everything tells you SOMETHING. I ask questions ranging from, "Hey Zaida, when did you first eat a hot dog?" to "Hey Zaida, how did you believe in G-d after the Holocaust?" - and not out of any kind of irreverence. As members of the Jewish people, and members of each of our family units, we are collectors and stewards. We are gatekeepers and bodyguards, and we safeguard memory, ritual and experience. We collect things and pass them on. We document everything and we live to bear witness for what happened to our parents' parents, but also to what happened to the very first Jews. It's in our DNA - we don't exist in a vacuum, but as a small part of something much bigger and older, and each of us is entitled to the knowledge of all these events - as stressful as that may be for me to contemplate. It's too easy for all of this to translate to fear, guilt, pressure and resentment. But it's also so easy to see the beauty, the strength, and the power that comes from it all too. '

So it's a Seder. We talk, we listen, we discuss and we eat (of course!). We cry a little. We laugh. We are Jews and we are proud.
'In every generation', we read in the Haggadah, 'there rise against us those who would destroy us; but the Holy One, blessed be he, saves us.'
In every generation.
Never forget.
Never Again.
Am Yisrael Chai.

The Queen of the Quince

Every Pesach my mother lives on in one particular food: the dessert of stewed quinces, deep ruby in colour, tart and well sweetened with sugar. Because without the sugar it would be inedible.
The quince is a pome fruit, related to the apple and pear, yellow skinned and white fleshed. Whoever first picked one off the tree and bit into it would have really been disappointed. Quinces are wonderfully fragrant but cannot be eaten raw: it's like trying to eat a gritty, astringent potato. So whoever thought that it could be rendered edible at all was a visionary; or desperately hungry. (Like the olive; have you ever picked an olive and popped it in your mouth? It is without a doubt the worst thing you could eat. It is unbelievably bitter. Anyone who bit into it would spit it out and declare it to be poisonous. So who first had the idea of crushing them for the oil in the flesh and the stone? Had to be a message direct from G-d.)
Quinces originally come from Persia and surrounding areas. I can only assume that my mother's grandmother who came from Bessarabia, brought the tradition of cooking quinces for Pesach with her and passed it down.
You peel it and quarter it and core it and cut each quarter into 2 or 3 wedges. You put them in a pot, cover with water, add a heap of sugar and cook them for about 3 hours. The longer they cook, the redder they get. (Apples will also go pink if you cook them long enough. I don't know why.)
Now, I've made it sound easy, haven't I? But it's actually hard work, because the quince is a bastard of a fruit. It is hard and gritty, often infested with bug holes that you have to cut around, uneven in shape, therefore hard to peel, and if they are a bit unripe, as they were this year (but not infested, praise The Lord), I swear it's like peeling and cutting a stone. And you have to wear gloves because they are so astringent and acidic they will leave your hands a mess.
Every year I say I won't do quinces again, and every year I do them again.
I mean, they taste amazing, there is a definite reward there, but crikey, it's hard-earned. They freeze well, they keep well in the fridge, and I just ate the last bit of Pesach quinces for dessert tonight. They were delicious. And with every bite I thought of my mother, peeling and cutting and cursing the damn things, as I do every year. Tradition!
Thanks, Mum. I think.

TOO BUSY

I'm not posting because I'm just too busy. I just got back from NY where my son married a girl from Crown Heights and we did Sheva Broches and we baked matzos and tried to spend some time with all the kids in some meaningful way and now Pesach is a few days away and I'm TOO BUSY.
And of course all the patients have decided that they need to see me. But I need to find a flat for the newlyweds before they come. So I'm too busy to see patients. Well, I'll see a few. Then I'll see a few flats. Then I'll pick one and arrange schleppers to get the furniture that I've collected over to the flat.
And them I'll cook borscht. And fish. And other Pesach food.
So have a kosher and happy Pesach and I'll post when I'm not too busy. Whenever that time comes.

ORDINARY HEROES

Now that I am sitting quietly in the Changi airport lounge, on my way to my son's wedding- escorting him actually- I have a few minutes to reflect on the events of the last few days. Which have been very busy. Understatement.
I won't go through everything, such as the fact that I had Senator Joe Lieberman and his lovely wife Hadassah, as house guests over Shabbos, hosted a lunch for 20, and then flew out after Shabbos, leaving my guests in my home. Alone. Until they flew out too. (A few hours later). Weird but it's not as if I was afraid they would trash the house or anything.
No. Not writing about that. Didn't want to name drop or anything (but I kept wishing me parents could see me now).
The Senator was here to help fundraise for UIA (yeah yeah, I know you're all sick of UIA but it really does good work and as much as I'm sick of the work and stress and stuff, I get such a buzz out of meeting famous people! I confess.) and we had other awesome guests.
And now I can talk about Gilad Shalit. There was a whole blanket thrown over his visit for security reasons (a security blanket?) but he's left for home now. I managed to spend a bit of time with him and his minder/friend Halel. I have to tell you, he is a terrific table tennis player, according to my kids. And he is a sweet guy. He looks like a 15 year old with freckles and a goofy grin. He is small and slight. And he is the most unlikely accidental hero you could meet. He was abducted and imprisoned basically in a Gaza dungeon, in solitary, for a quarter of his life, and was released through relentless activism propagated by his parents and carried on throughout the Jewish world, eventually released after an obscene prisoner exchange, for 1000+ Palestinian prisoners many of whom were convicted murderers and terrorists. It was an awful decision that Bibi had to make but he made it and Gilad was released. Whoever has seen the footage of that event would be haunted by the image of the emaciated, ghostly pale youth saluting his superiors and embracing his father. (And would also be angered by the stark contrast of the hale and hearty Palestinians released in their multitudes from Israeli prisons). Not to mention that interview by that cow of an Egyptian TV 'journalist' immediately after his release.
When Gilad came out of that hole in the ground where he had been kept for 5 and a half years, he was unable to see more than about a metre in front of him and had no peripheral vision. He had untreated shrapnel wounds to his shoulder. He could barely walk. He needed to relearn basic social skills and still has trouble eating in public. He is very polite and won't push people away, but everyone who sees him wants to hug him and tell him their story (I prayed for you when I lit candles, I wrote letters to embassies. IRC, UN, I campaigned for you etcetc) and he is very grateful; but it's like torture to him.
Ironically, the main reason he survived was that he was an introverted kid, not a social type of guy, and thus he had a rich inner life and was able to stay sane. And now he walks into a room and people stand and applaud him and want to touch him and have photos with him.
He got a little overwhelmed a few times and had to go somewhere quiet with his minder to recompose himself but he did ok. It's not easy being someone who symbolizes so much to so many. He does not enjoy his celebrity and he loved the relative anonymity he found in Australia.
He is Quiet Stoicism. He is a Survivor. He symbolizes the injunction of Pidyon Shevuim, redemption of the captive. Of how all Jews are responsible for each other, of He Who Saves A Single Life, It Is As If He Has Saved A Whole World. And all the Jews are looking at him and wondering; are you worth it? What will you do with yourself? We expect great things from little Gilad.
Well, I can tell you, he is doing really well and he is very grateful to be free. He is working hard at learning how to live again. And once he has finished touring the world to thank all the Jewish communities and being an incredible drawcard to Jewish fundraising events, and catching up on stuff like backpacking and things that normal young Israelis do, he should just be left alone to finish his rehab and live his life. Won't be a star athlete or Nobel Laureate I think. Just a nice regular quiet guy. But tough.
Another person whom I had he privilege to meet is Noam Gershoni, Israel's first gold medal- winning Paralympian. He won gold in 2012 London, wheelchair tennis.
You couldn't find much more of a different personality from Gilad. Noam is a cheeky charmer, a real social animal; but again, inner toughness in spades. His story is one of too much happening, as opposed to Gilad's absence and deprivation.
He was a helicopter pilot whose Apache collided with another Apache while flying on a mission in 2006 in the Second Lebanon War. The other pilot and copilot were killed as was his own copilot, also a friend. He was almost given up for dead as a result of his multiple injuries and catastrophic blood loss, but the medics didn't give up on him and he survived. He underwent multiple surgeries and long rehab, surprising his doctors and nurses with his resilience. As much as he sort of fell into flying, as it had never been an ambition, he sort of fell into wheelchair tennis, and was adept even though he just played for enjoyment, not caring that much about winning (to the despair of his coach). Before his accident he had been a sporty guy, enjoying extreme stuff like bungee jumping and skydiving as well as skiing, and it wasn't about competition for him. What spurred him on to win in London, according to his speech, was not wanting to disappoint his family and the friends who had bought tickets to see him win. He says he is just a regular guy 'maybe with a bigger gold necklace than you'.
Maybe so. But not everyone could have gone through what he did and not only lived, but turned his awful misfortune around, to change direction and succeed. The physical and mental strength needed is awe-inspiring.
So, two unintentional heroes. I don't think Noam could have survived what Gilad went through, nor do I think that Gilad would have survived Noam's ordeal. But they both survived and are themselves trying to understand why.
And the rest of the Jewish world can draw inspiration and strength from their examples. And donate to worthy causes in Israel. Please.

It's the little things...

It's been a while since I posted, because I have been busy with other more important things. Like arranging a wedding which is 3 weeks away, in Crown Heights. Like cooking for Pesach, seeing as we will be coming back a week before, and not to mention arranging cleaning for my GIANT house. Like getting Purim together, which was going to be doing the Purim Seudah for about 80 people; my mother-in-law bestowed the honour of the Seudah on me last year, but this year I begged off because of the wedding and other responsibilities, and ended up deeply offending her; so we thrashed that one out in a phone call from Jerusalem a few weeks ago. So now it's just putting together Mishloach Manot, and I can't believe I am writing this, but my husband, He Who Must Be Obeyed, doesn't want me to do cards for Tzedaka, he likes my original and cute gifts. I do it to myself. But thank G-d I don't have to worry about kids' costumes. Or the giant Purim bashes we used to have when my uni-student/graduate girls were home, for 300-500  20-somethings so they could hear Megillah, eat and drink and trash my house and garden. (Such a mitzvah! Yeah, so you do it then.)
So much stuff to do. Newlyweds coming here to stay for a year or so, so I have to find them someplace to live. Every rental I have seen is yuk. After I saw one place I actually berated the agent and told her to tell the landlord that he had an absolute cheek asking the rental fees he did for a place where the kitchen was worse than my mother's, and she's been gone 27 years. Hadn't been touched for 40 years. So he offered to sell it to me, so I could have the joy of renovation. Yeah, right. I'll find something. And furnish it. And hope that my new daughter-in-law will like it!
OK, step back; sure, the wedding is in NY, and it's my son, not my daughter, and thus I will not be doing the lion's share of the work. But here we have the call-up and the kiddush and the family lunch, and then a Le'Chaim when the young couple comes to town.
And I am arranging all this, and lots of other stuff regarding hosting several speakers who are coming for the Feb-March UIA campaign, and this includes house guests who are pretty illustrious - so I decided I needed to buy new beds for the guest room (and the old ones will go to the new couple, ha ha!)- and I did that too.
And then my shvigger asked me, in all pleasantness, whether I had an outfit for Shul for the call-up.
Shit.
No, I didn't.
Well, yes I did, but I've worn it a lot already.
Shit.
I hate this stuff.
So yesterday on a 35C degree day, of course, I took myself off to Malvern Rd to look at 2 boutiques - because forget going to a normal shop for me, nothing ever fits, (and that's why I shop in Bloomingdales whenever I get the chance, with a personal shopper who forced me to change my style from Greek Widow Black to something more stylish)- and found myself in a shop selling clothes of the odd sort of quasi-Japanesey style, with shop assistants looking like they were on their way to a gallery opening, in unstructured monochrome layered clothing and chunky bangles and beads.
I tried stuff on- layer upon layer, like a Sara Lee Danish pastry- and I reflected that, a few years back, I would have been ecstatic to find these clothes! But now, after 30kg weight loss 6 years ago, I was finding it to be a retrograde step to be in all these unstructured floaty bits and pieces, which I explained to the (very helpful!) assistant. In the end I bought 3 pieces- grey skirt, little black summer jacket and in-between sort of long greyish-charcoaly printy layer top so I could maybe eat something and not show it. So not a black shroud. Cost enough but I hope my mother-in-law will be happy.
(She usually does this thing where, on the day, she tells me how nice I look, and then several months or years later, she mentions that the skirt didn't fit so well, or the neckline was wrong or the pantyhose was the wrong colour or something. If I were made of more delicate stuff I would be wounded and wary, but I don't give a crap, in fact, I laugh now when she does it. It has been going on for nearly 33 years after all!) (By the way, my mother-in-law is extremely stylish and always well put-together and she knows a thing or two about clothes, but nothing about being bigger than a size 10.)
Shul outfit. TICK.
NOW I need to make sure that I fit into the gown for the wedding. Oy. Bye bye carbs.

Lessons from The Holocaust

I didn't write this but I want you to read it. I want everyone to read it.  I don't agree with David Finkelstein about the settlements, but that's another argument.

Lessons from the Holocaust? Try these two

(An article by Daniel Finkelstein that appeared in The (London) Times on 30 January 2013)

The Jews have learnt all about Man’s inhumanity to Man. But also that you cannot rely on others to keep you safe.

 
By the time my grandmother boarded the train from Belsen she was close to death. For a year she had given every scrap of food she had to her little girls, to my mother and her two sisters. Now starvation meant that she could scarcely stand. But somehow she managed to hold herself upright and stumble on board.

She had to, for this train was the only chance of liberty. A prisoner exchange had been arranged and somehow, using false passports, my family was on it. But the Nazis were excluding anyone whose illness might disclose to the Allies the hunger and disease in the camps. My grandmother knew that, starved though she was, she would have to walk to freedom. If she did not, her girls would die, as so many, many more had died and were still to die.

On board she collapsed as the train made its winter way through frozen countryside to safety in Switzerland. And then, stranded in the middle of nowhere, the train stopped. A guard appeared. He waved his hands at my family and told them that there were too many people on the train. They would have to get off. They would be left to die in the snow.

My aunt, the eldest child, protested. My grandmother was too ill to be moved, she said. The Nazi guard looked. He shrugged. OK, he said. And he moved on.

My grandmother lived just long enough to see her little girls through their ordeal, to deliver them from the camps to safety. She crossed the border to Switzerland and before the day was done, she died.

Last week, in anticipation of Holocaust Memorial Day, David Ward, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bradford East, said that the Jews — my Mum, perhaps, her sisters — hadn’t learnt the lesson of the Holocaust. “It appears that the suffering by the Jews has not transformed their views on how others should be treated.” I’ll give my Mum a call when I have a moment and pass on his complaint.

The comparison the MP made, between Jews and the Nazis, is a distressingly commonplace one. It pops up all the time in the anti-Semitic mail that I receive on a regular enough basis that I have developed a standard reply (“Dear Sir, Thank you for your note. It is kind of you to warn me about the Jews. I will certainly keep an eye out for them. They sound terrible. Daniel”). But in public, most people are subtle enough to use the word Zionist when they mean Jew.

Even in this more socially acceptable form, the charge is outrageous. It suggests a complete failure to understand the sheer scale and intent of the Holocaust. As it happens, I am very critical of the Israeli settlements policy. I regard it as both wrong and strategically disastrous. I am critical, angry, about its human consequences. But to compare Binyamin Netanyahu’s policy to that of the gas chambers of Auschwitz is shameful. Nauseating, actually. Which is not a word I am given to employing often in political debate.

Gerald Scarfe’s deeply misconceived drawing in The Sunday Times was, at least, not guilty of this error. But I hope I can be excused if I found his explanation that he hadn’t remembered that he was supposed to be remembering the Holocaust more darkly amusing than I usually find his cartoons.

While lecturing the survivors of the concentration camps and their children on the lessons they would have learnt if only they had been good people like him, David Ward did not only show a lack of proportion. He also showed a lack of insight.

It is true, as Mr Ward says, that what happened to my grandmother shows the dangers of Man’s inhumanity to Man and the need to avoid it. But that is not the only lesson it teaches. And not the only lesson Jews have learnt.

When the Nazis invaded Holland, and arrested my family in their home, and stole their property, and killed their friends, and destroyed their community, and put them on trains to go to death camps, they were able to do it because they had the army and the soldiers and the guns. They were able to do it because the Jews were defenceless. They were able to do it because speeches and books and ideas about liberty, for all their great truth and power, weren’t enough.

How could the Jews not have learnt that lesson? How could they not have learnt it, David Ward, when they went home to the East of Europe and found they couldn’t live in their houses or reclaim their property or be safe with their neighbours? How could they not have learnt it sailing round and round the harbour because no country wanted to take them?

The Jews have learnt the same lesson as everyone else about humanity and compassion, and been as good and as fallible as anyone else when trying to show it. But we have also understood a harder, harsher truth. That we cannot rely on others to keep us safe. And Israel exists precisely because of this.

On New Year’s Day, the artist Yoko Ono paid for a full-page advertisement in The New York Times. She then left it blank save for two words. In the middle of the page it read “Imagine Peace”.

After it appeared, The Guardian conducted an online poll, asking readers: “Will Yoko Ono’s advertisement help bring world peace?” A third of respondents, hundreds of people, reviewed the white space of the ad, then considered the massacres in Syria and Algeria, the murders in the Sudan, the conflicts of the Middle East, before responding that yes, in their carefully considered opinion, Ms Ono’s commercial would help world peace.

Wouldn’t it be marvelous to really think that? To really believe that the cause of peace can be advanced by imagining it? Wouldn’t it be good if no one ever had to die to allow others to live, and freedom didn’t need to protect itself with a rifle, and little girls could go to school in Pakistan without being shot? I want that world as fervently as anyone else.

But one of the lessons of the Holocaust is that wanting it is not enough. Israel is deep in a struggle to defend the Jews who live there against more death and confiscation and terror. Because the Jews have had enough of that, thank you very much.
It’s right to be critical when Israel gets it wrong. It is creditable to make the human rights of Palestinians a cause. But to forget that after genocide and destruction the Jews wanted a home they could defend? Never again.