British Jews are now feeling frightened, but there are good reasons not to despair

THE smallish British Jewish community has been traumatised by the Hamas massacres of Israeli citizens last weekend. The “never again” happened again.

- David Aaronovitch

Jewish people I know have close relatives called up into the Israeli military and some will die. Others have lost family members directly. The hurt and the fear are palpable.

And are accompanied by a strong feeling of isolation. This was captured by the Sunday Times’s Hadley Freeman this weekend. She wrote about the lack of Israeli flags flying in windows (compared with, say, Ukrainian flags) and reported the following:

“‘Well, now we know who would have helped us, and who would have pushed us on to the trains,’ a friend texted me.”

This friend’s sentiment falls into the category of the entirely understandable and absolutely wrong.

Four problems. The first is that in an atmosphere when people are talking about anti-Semitic attacks it may seem to many people unnecessarily risky to put an Israeli flag in their window. You can’t read a lack of solidarity into that. The second could be that though wanting to express solidarity with ordinary Israelis, there may be some reluctance to express it with the far-Right government of Benjamin Netanyahu — in a way that there wasn’t with Volodymyr Zelensky. This could be particularly true as Israel prepares for the ground invasion of Gaza and the horrors that must inevitably accompany it.