There are two things I remember about the day I spent in Sderot. The sky. It was brilliant. So clear, not a wisp of cloud and the shade of blue reminded me of a thousand Perth summers.
The other thing I recall and have shared many times before the events of last weekend was a gnawing sense of unease. I knew where we were, and I don’t just mean the name of the town.
The morning security briefing happened as we arrived at the home of an Israeli peace activist. From the driveway, there was a clear view of the outer Gaza wall. She had repurposed Hamas rockets as garden ornaments. A sort of botanical act of defiance.
If the alarm sounds, you have 15 to 20 seconds to reach a bomb shelter, they told us. I roughly calculated the distance I’d need to run, factoring in my wombat-like speed and agility, and knew I’d be in a lot of trouble if something were to happen.
Even with a bomb shelter at every bus top, in every home. In every child’s playground. There, the shelters are designed to mask the truth of terror. Brightly painted like butterflies and caterpillars, they loom large among the trees, swings and play equipment.
That was the reality of life there, yet in Sderot the rental vacancies were low. More people wanted to live there than there was housing to accommodate them. Good schools, a thriving local economy and what everyone we spoke to said was a strong sense of community.
In Sderot, we now know that Hamas savages went house to house, door to door, bus stop to bus stop and killed everyone in sight. Slaughtered them like wild animals, their bodies left to rot in the streets. In their homes.
I don’t know if the woman we visited is alive. There’s not yet news.
In a rare moment that felt like clarity this week, I realised something. This unthinkable murderous savagery of last weekend has catapulted us back in time.
We are now the generation of our grandparents. But this time, we have no excuses. Let me explain.
As the storm clouds of World War II gathered across Europe, the exhaustion from the Great War lingered still. A well-intended but cowardly policy of political appeasement towards Hitler preceded the Holocaust and the murder of six million Jews.
This slaughter was, for the most part, hidden. There was no social media. Oh, there was an effective and, for its day, advanced PR machine that pumped out black and white mini movie reels that made Nazi death camps look like jaunty holiday resorts. Call it a precursor. The world didn’t believe the whispers, the rumours. Why would they? They at least could claim not to have seen, not truly known. We have no such excuses.
Now? It’s all there to see, in unthinkable, irrefutable and deliberate clarity. Designed to stun and shock and terrify into submission.
This is not the time to look away. This is not the time to shrink back. This moment in time demands our courage and our defiance. Our future depends on it, and the bloodstained memory of those who died for freedom demands it. This is the very fabric of Lest We Forget.
The curse of social media has, this past week, offered a blessing of sorts. There can be no excuses. Nobody can say, I didn’t know. We have and are seeing in real time evidence that cannot be denied.
The atrocities of Hitler, Stalin and their ilk were for the most part protected by the lack of technology. No longer.
While families in Australia are protecting their children from online bots and pornography, Israeli mothers have been warned to shield their kids from being exposed to the beheading of their classmates, friends, and relatives.
A dear Jewish friend of mine, my age, mother of two tweenage girls, sent me a message midweek after I asked if she was OK. After 75 years, she lamented, how are we back here?
I’ll offer a suggestion.
Because of a succession of catastrophic failures that have been dressed up as progressive thought and left to go unchallenged. Because of faded memories and weakness of character.
Because history has become a lesson in moral revisionism rather than a warning to successive generations. Because of weakness in classrooms around the Western world, from primary schools to universities.
Because nobody has had the ticker, for example, to point out to our friends at Queers for Palestine just what fate would befall them should they consider a move to Ramallah.
There is a cohort of a younger generation that has been enamoured by the idea of “occupied” territories. They are ignorant of history’s basics. That Gaza was occupied by the Egyptians until 1956 then again from 1957 to 1967. They have no interest or understanding of what happened to those territories under the disastrous leadership of Yasser Arafat and how Hamas gained a stronghold.
All they see are checkpoints and walls. I’m old enough to remember why those checkpoints and walls are there. School buses full of kids being blown to smithereens, nightclubs, bus stops blown up by terrorists.
It’s easy to be a university student in a democracy like Australia and chant your slogans and talk about freeing places you’ve never been to, are likely too gutless to go to, and are embarrassingly ignorant of. The stupidity of youth I can possibly excuse, up to a point.
But the adult apologists among us, in academia, in our parliaments, you shame yourselves and Australia. If you are unable to denounce what has happened, while still managing to hold a nuanced view on the Middle East, then you’re not fit either morally or intellectually to serve in our parliament or teach a generation.
The only people who failed to condemn the slaughter of innocents in the NSW parliament this week were the four upper house Greens MPs. Abigail Boyd, Sue Higginson, Dr Amanda Cohn and Cate Faehrmann. All they were asked to do was condemn the atrocities. That’s all. But they chose not to. Know their names, and remember that when people show you who they are, best you believe them.
So many have shown us exactly who they are, this past week, by their silence and by their words in equal measure.
Our grandparents’ generation promised the global Jewish community “never again”. That mantle, that responsibility, has passed to us.
There can be no obfuscation. Never again is now.
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