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What can I say? There are no words that can do justice to the horror that has been inflicted in cold blood upon my people. That is why this post has no title.

More Jews have been killed in one day than on any day since 1945. Babies have been decapitated, young girls raped and dragged through the streets with blood running down their thighs. An old woman was murdered and her murder filmed on her own smartphone and then uploaded to her facebook account. Another old woman, a survivor of the previous holocaust, was caught up in this one and carted off to Gaza in her wheelchair along with many other hostages.

But there is something almost worse than that: all over the world, people have been rejoicing at what has happened. And, no, sadly England is not an exception to that statement.

I have loved England all my life, though I have never considered myself to be English. I am British by birth and I grew up in London, but in a house where a foreign language was spoken and foreign food eaten. My parents were both refugees. And, by the way, they both came here legally, my mother on a domestic service visa, my father transported on an American ship with a load of rescued Polish prisoners. I am very grateful that they were both taken in and given shelter. How could I not be?

The UK was at that time the only Western European country still fighting Hitler. It cost them not only the Churchillian blood, toil, tears and sweat, but many British lives. I remember the British men and women of that time with admiration and gratitude. How could I not?

In those days, and for decades after, the BBC was a beacon of freedom for the world. Everywhere people living under various tyrannies listened to it in secret, because they knew that the BBC told the truth. It was famous for its honesty and impartiality. I admired it too. How could I not?

But now England has become a country where Jewish schoolboys cannot wear a kippah on their heads on the street because it would put them in danger of being beaten up. And the BBC has become so rotten with cowardice and hypocrisy that it dare not even call the people who committed all these atrocities terrorists. Officially they are “militants”, as if they were no worse than stroppy trade unionists organising a strike on the London Underground. At Wembley, the home of English football, there will be no blue and white Israeli flag displayed in lights, although they are happy to show the Pride flag. Apparently they not aware that Israel is the only country in the middle east where gay and trans people are treated with respect. All the surrounding Arab states persecute them. In Gaza, Hamas kill those that they discover.

Of course GB News, that raunchy working-class channel, still calls a spade a spade and a terrorist a terrorist. So does the Spectator, one of the most civilised and intellectual of weekly magazines. All honour to both of them!

When the survival of the United Kingdom was at stake in 1940, the British people fought for it. And that fight was not pretty, even if it is recalled now through rose-tinted spectacles. At the time it was horrific, bloody, brutal. Many German civilians were killed in bombing raids and later by the invading allied armies, and not all of those people were Nazis. But that is what modern warfare is like. The invasion and crushing of Hamas-led Gaza is going to be just as ugly as the invasion and crushing of Nazi Germany, and just as necessary.

Israel has given warning of where it intends to strike, in accordance with the laws of war (and in notable contrast to the behaviour of the Hamas terrorists). But there is no real possibility that the population of north Gaza can be be evacuated in time unless Egypt opens its border to a flood of refugees. That will almost certainly not happen, because the last thing Egypt wants is to have Hamas terrorists setting up a new enclave within their currently peaceful country. Who can blame them? Only Israel will be blamed for what is now going to happen.

But if you force people to choose between their own annihilation and killing those who threaten it, with all the collateral damage and blame which that will lead to, they are not going to choose annihilation. Not even if they happen to be Jews.