'After the pogroms, the angel of death is licking his lips'

The word pogrom was not meant to exist in Hebrew. In the new Israel, the very idea of Jews being murdered en masse, their children butchered before their eyes, was meant to have been banished to the realm of bitter memory

- Jonathan Freedland

It was only in the eastern Europe of exile that Jews would have to flee from tormentors bent on killing them, only there that they would hide in the dark, trying to stifle their breath lest they make a betraying sound. Once they had a state of their own, where they could defend themselves, there would be no need to speak of pogroms, except in the history books.

But it was a pogrom that came to Israel last weekend, multiple pogroms in fact, as lethal as any that cut down the Yiddish-speaking Jews of early last century or, in repeating patterns, the centuries before. Jews still remember the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, a calamity recalled in poetry recited to this day. At Kishinev, 49 Jews were murdered. Last Saturday, at least 1,200 were put to death, many in ways too sadistic to be recounted in a newspaper.

It was a rampage of killing, as the men of Hamas tore down the fence that separates Gaza from southern Israel, gunning down the young at a music festival, slaughtering the old at a string of kibbutzim, killing children wherever they could be found. The victims were tortured while alive and mutilated once dead. One journalist familiar with the most graphic evidence says the right comparisons are to the massacres of 1994's Rwandan genocide. In the 75-year history of the state of Israel, 7 October 2023 stands as its darkest day.

It has already outstripped 6 October 1973 - exactly 50 years and one day earlier - when Israel was last caught by a surprise attack that prompted fears for the country's very survival. Until last week, the Yom Kippur war, when Egypt and Syria launched an invasion from the south and north, was seen as the moment of Israel's maximum peril - but the despair, the dread, is even greater now.

That fear, and anger, seem set to bring a terrible retribution. Early yesterday morning, Israel gave residents of the north of Gaza more than a million people - 24 hours to evacuate to the south.