Imagine if Jews had committed any of these bestial slaughters

Once again, we must swallow, as much as swallowing reflexes allow, the thousands of Hamas terrorists Israel has had to release, in exchange for their hostages, both alive and dead. We hear the word “disproportionate”, a not altogether proportionate amount in reference to Israeli defensive attacks, before and since October 7.

I like to crisply mention Dresden, Coventry, Hanoi and Nagasaki at these moments, where, only in the case of Israel, an eye for an eye is interpreted as an entire body for an eye. Show me a “proportionate” war and I’ll show you Incident at Wounded Knee.

One Jew-ish colleague actually looked away, embarrassed when I asked if Heaton Park was her shul. “I don’t actually belong to any shul,” she muttered, shuffling her papers. I didn’t wait for a sisterly moment and looked away, wondering to myself whether, perhaps we have got immune to Islamist terror? To machete attacks on London bridges, bombs on aeroplanes, planes flying into skyscrapers, beheadings of babies, self-immolation, kidnapping of schoolgirls, slaying of Christians. All that carnality has been forgotten in the rush to condemn the “occupiers” and protect the Palestinian claimants. Somehow, the media and a large percentage of Jo(sephine) Public, concur. In this context, proportionality is never mentioned.

Once again I put the question: if any one of these bestial slaughters had been committed by Jews, can you imagine the response in the world? How many would march for us… if such a thing as “us” remained alive on the face of the Earth?

On the way to my granddaughter’s glorious bat mitzvah last weekend with my daughter, I remarked, on seeing a man going to shul, that it took a brave man to walk alone through north London wearing a yarmulke. Her response was that Muslim and Sikh people encounter just as much racism. “Well, OK, I said, tone rising, but it is antisemitism that is dramatically on the rise at this moment.” She sighed. She hates talking about depressing subjects. We walked into the shul with our own version of a stiff-necked people. We are a tribe within tribes, an opinion split into schisms and it is both our strength and our vulnerability. Most Friday nights we have a debate around the table and if there are ten people, then four of the ten will have wildly differing reactions to what is affecting us. Some will not want to discuss it at all, some simply want it to “blow over”.

Ava wore a tallit and yarmulke when she read the Torah. Some people find that offensive.

We argue about kashrut and the position of Progressive Judaism now that it has combined Liberal and Reform. We often talk over chicken and potato kugel, about Jesus and the place where he was allegedly bar mitzvah’d, the point where Christianity had to reject its Jewish origins to the golden age of Jewish comedy – and when we don’t, we sometimes go around the table saying what was our best moment of the week and what was our worst.

One time I asked everyone to state what kind of punctuation they thought they might be. It was greeted with scorn but actually turned out to be quite an interesting game. I was a dash, since you ask.

Today, I made a dash to one of my favourite haunts, the Museum of Brands in Lancaster Road, Notting Hill. If you’ve never been, grab your duffle coat and scurry down there because it is so good for your brain. The collector Robert Opie created a space for his universe of vintage artefacts of models and packaging, radios, cigarette and washing powder boxes, serial cereal boxes – and if that sounds dry to you then let me assure you it will whet your appetite for recovered memories and put your own place in history in order.

As you progress from objects from the Victorian era through Edwardian times, the Twenties, the First World War, the Second and onwards to your own childhood, an odd thing happens. You start to remember, quite viscerally, your life, via the items with which you grew up. You are transported back to the living room, the uncut moquette sofa, the smell of tinned spaghetti on toast and cling peaches in syrup, the rustle of the pages of Eagle and the sound of Radio Luxemburg from the Roberts radio, beneath your eiderdown.

The Bakelite telephone brings back your mother ordering flank and brisket from the kosher butcher. The 9in television evokes memories of when all the neighbours piled in to watch the Coronation. The shelves of Omo and Dreft take you straight back to the smell of a Monday wash as you race into the kitchen hoping for a Five Boys chocolate bar and a Vimto. The radiograms and Dansette record-players whisk you back to the Milk Bar where you first shook your adolescent hips to Bill Haley and his Comets on the massive and magical jukebox. It is the antidote to worrying about the possible treachery of the future. I will go so far as to say it soothes the savage breast. Because every current fad, every headline, every front-page obsession, fades away to nothing in the twinkling of a packet of Fru Grains or a faded ration book and you realise that people have been dumb and susceptible to propaganda since people fought pterodactyls.

Perhaps PG, we can just ride out the malice and the demoralisation until the aliens from the planet Gonggong arrive and unite the gullible world into a different common paranoia.

On the other hand…