Looking at the state of the world today, it is tempting to blame it all on a kind of collective amnesia. There are not many people alive who can remember the 1930s.
There aren’t many people who can remember the Europe of the dictators. People have forgotten the demands of Adolf Hitler — how he would endlessly use the alleged sufferings of German-speaking communities as a pretext for invasion of other countries.
There aren’t many of us who can remember the pre-war culture of casual anti-Semitism that was to be found in so many supposedly civilised European cities.
We know about it generally from watching documentaries, or films, or from reading books. But for the vast majority of the population it is not something that chimes in the memory. We don’t personally hear the echoes and the alarm bells that should be going off in our mind — because we no longer viscerally remember this stuff, and where it can lead.
Private security patrol Stamford Hill in North London, home to a large Orthodox Jewish community
It must be amnesia, because otherwise it is hard to explain how we fail to draw the comparisons between Hitler and Putin — both of them with their narrative of betrayal and the alleged injustices suffered by the speakers of his own language; both of them with their bogus interpretation of history; both of them claiming that they are committed to peace, and then using barbaric violence to further their demands; both of them habitual liars.
It must be a kind of mass amnesia about the horrors of the 1930s, because otherwise it is hard to explain how we can tolerate the upsurge in anti-Semitism — not just in continental Europe, this time, but also on the streets of our own capital.
We have Jewish people sitting peacefully on the Tube and told that ‘your religion kills people’.
We have SS signs daubed on the walls of synagogues.
We have students jeering at Jewish Society stalls at universities and we have huge crowds demonstrating, week in, week out, in major European capitals — including London — and calling for the homeland for the Jews to be wiped out, ‘from the river to the sea’.
According to the Community Security Trust, there has been a massive increase in anti-Semitic incidents of all kinds. So in the face of this memory loss — this weird senior moment on the part of humanity — let us remember where this all leads.
Look back at the 1930s, and remember the denouement of that low, dishonest decade. The 1930s climaxed with an appalling global conflict that cost millions of lives; they ended with the gas chambers and the Holocaust.
When we failed to stand up to aggression, when we allowed ancient and irrational prejudices to take root and to spread throughout a European civilisation, we ended up with a total catastrophe.
As it happens, I don’t think that history will repeat itself. There are many reasons for hope and many ways in which the world is a far better place.
But we cannot be complacent and we must learn the essential lesson of the pre-war epoch: that you have to be strong and clear-eyed, and to stick up for your values; and above all you have to do it in time, before it is too late.
I understand the grief and anxiety that people feel about the suffering of innocent civilians in Gaza. Of course we are all praying for the conflict to end. But there is a very simple way to bring the Israeli operation to a close —and that is for Hamas to return the remaining 134 hostages taken on October 7.
Too many people have forgotten what this is all about and how it started — indeed, people don’t talk about it any more, as if it were somehow uncouth or irrelevant. This nightmare started one fine morning last autumn, at a time when hopes for reconciliation between Israel and its Arab neighbours had never been higher. It began when terrorists using cars, motorbikes and paragliders swarmed out of Gaza and indiscriminately attacked civilians. They killed about 1,200 people and demonstrably committed such appalling acts of brutality — raping corpses, burning their victims alive — that one wonders if they were on some sort of drug. They killed women and children in cold blood, and abducted about 250 civilians.
After the Hamas terror attacks, people came out in their thousands to wave not the Israeli flag but the Palestinian flag
Indeed, they still hold some children as their captives, one of them barely more than a year old.
And almost as soon as they had performed this wickedness — before Israel had even formed a plan of retaliation — there were demonstrations on our streets; not against Hamas, not against the killers, but against Israel.
People came out in their thousands to wave not the Israeli flag but the Palestinian flag. They say that they are not siding with Hamas — but of course they are. What were the Israelis supposed to do, when they suffered the biggest massacre of Jewish people since the Second World War?
I suppose that they should have appealed to the government of Gaza, and asked for those responsible to be found and handed over, so that they could receive a fair trial.
But that option was not open to Israel, because the perpetrators — Hamas — were and are the elected government of Gaza; and they certainly weren’t going to hand themselves over.
To all those people who continue to drape themselves in Palestinian flags and shout for Israel to be wiped off the map, remember whom you are backing.
Hamas is a group of Islamist extremists and among their whacko predilections is torturing gay people. We can’t possibly let them win and we can’t let this hideous fog-like anti-Semitism return to cloud our minds.
The lesson of the 1930s is democracy is always more fragile than you think. We have to stand up for democracy in Israel, in exactly the same way that we have to stand up for democracy in Ukraine.
We cannot let Putin win, any more than Hamas. I don’t believe he will and it looks as though there is now a good way to unlock the crucial $60billion tranche of U.S. funding.
Donald Trump has proposed to Republican lawmakers that the cash should be designated as a loan — and that seems sensible; indeed, it is the American way of doing these things.
When Lend Lease began in 1941, it wasn’t a grant to wartime Britain, it was a loan. In fact, the UK continued to pay it back until 2006, when the last cheque for $83million was signed by one Ed Balls, then Economic Secretary to the Treasury in the government of Tony Blair.
Give the Ukrainians the tools and the support they need, and they will finish the job; because unlike the Russians conscripts, they believe in their cause.
We have seen this script before, in Europe. We have seen what it is like when a dictator is willing to use indiscriminate violence against his neighbours.
We have seen what happens when anti-Semitism gets out of control. The answer is to act now, and decisively — because Putin and Hamas must fail together.
Let us remember the lessons of the 1930s and we won’t repeat the disasters of the 20th century.
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