Never Again happened again

'Never Again' was a phrase we heard with regularity after the Holocaust, when six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis.

- ARJUN HARDAS

Last 7 October was a lazy Saturday morning for me.

I was taking full advantage of an office holiday to sleep late.

Sometime around 8.30 a.m., I received a beep from my "Red Alert" app, which was designed to alert Israelis about incoming rockets fired by either Hamas in Gaza or Hezbollah in Lebanon.

It is a life-saving system that alerts Israelis to get them into a shelter in sometimes less than a minute.

I had it installed last year when I was in Tel Aviv. As usual, I forgot to uninstall it when I returned home.

The peace of that morning was punctured by a barrage of beeps, nearly 5,000 in total. At first, I thought the app was malfunctioning. The sound it makes is not pleasant nor should it be. It's designed to get your attention.

I opened the X app and saw that thousands of rockets had been fired from Gaza and that Hamas terrorists had invaded Israeli territory. It soon became clear that the future of the Middle East would be forever altered.

"Never Again" was a phrase we heard with regularity after the Holocaust, when six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis. It was first used by prisoners liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp and has since served as a reminder that we must be ever vigilant to the forces of hate, dehumanization, and divisiveness that can overwhelm us.