Thoughts on October 7

From the perspective of a newly-bereaved mother, 7/10/2023 was very hard to take. One year on, it's arguably even harder...

Saturday October 7, 2023 was Day 17 of life without my 21 year old eldest son, Jackson, who had died in an accident in the first hour of Sept 20. I was deep in mourning, groping my way, day-by-day, towards his funeral, on October 14. 

On October 7, too, Hamas terrorists launched their attack on Israel. We later learned that this had resulted in the deaths — on Day 1— of around 1200 people, with a further 240 taken hostage. At the time I was of course aware of the unfolding horrors but my own very deep, very fresh grief precluded me from engaging wholly with Israel’s; I needed to insulate myself from an already overwhelming pain.

Yet even if my eldest son hadn’t recently died I still wouldn’t have watched this story unfolding via the BBC (or any other broadcast channel)— I’d stopped watching TV news during Covid and hadn’t regained the habit. Instead, I scrolled and read some of ‘print’ news online, attempting to absorb it in tiny bite-sized chunks. The details — Hamas’s paragliders swooping over the border to take out the young Nova Festival-goers, in particular — were so appalling I turned away.

Swaddled in my personal pain — to which even giant global horrors temporarily paid obeisance —  I could nonetheless see with great clarity that this was a terrible violence perpetrated against a nation of people who were very obviously—and justifiably—soon going to retaliate. And I could see, equally clearly, that this would ignite a tinderbox, both literally and metaphorically, in the middle east — because surely Hezbollah would soon want in (if they weren’t already) on this new twist in the ongoing Islamist journey towards the eradication of the state of Israel.

I could see all this while peering out from inside the grief-bubble. If my heart could have broken a bit more it surely would have, however it was already in pieces. Any sympathy for/empathy with Israel’s Jews — and the Jewish diaspora more generally — was at this stage largely intellectual. I understood their pain — I just couldn’t feel it.

Very quickly, however, people in the west swiftly took to the streets, apparently celebrating Hamas’s horrifically grotesque terrorist invasion of the middle-east’s only outpost of western democracy, created in the wake of the Holocaust as a refuge for a people who deserved one.

I am not a Jew and I have never visited Israel—it has always remained mid-table in my Fantasy Travel Premiership—however I know a lot of people who have, and do, and work and play there, and know it well. As a result, I suppose I flatter myself that I’m broadly across the politics even if the granular details elude me (please don’t ask me about the specifics of the Levantine/Ottoman Empire, or the woozy historical borders of ‘Palestine’). 

I suppose that like a lot of Brits (for whom the middle east is effectively our nearest faraway place), I know what I know from recent history: the state of Israel was created in 1948 largely out of leftover bits of a former British colonial outpost, and this process was mandated by Britain and the US, and the UN subsequently oversaw those parts of Jerusalem that were of religious interest to all parties.

Eventually, however — having apparently done right by the post-Holocaust generation of Jews — many of us elsewhere would attempt to turn a blind-eye even as the hand-wringing of the local Arabs and Jews became inevitably something more. And because everybody had their own vested interests in a complex region, everybody could comfortably talk the talk even if they were all ill-equipped to walk it.

Or at least this is how it looked to me, from a comfortably distant, very occasional vantage point. And of course every so often the touch-paper would be lit, and cities would burn, and people on both sides who didn’t deserve to die would die — because that’s what happens, tragically — and all the parties involved would then declare the other parties unfit for purpose — if not morally depraved and genocidal.

And, comfortably elsewhere, PLU* (preferably not to be confused with the PLO) would nod and furrow their brows and admit that, relationships-wise, the middle east is ‘complicated’. And then turn away and hope to God (whichever one you care for) ‘they’d’ sort it out.

Anyway, as far as I can tell—with my tangential, no-skin-in-this-game grasp on the politics of the middle east—over time the state of Israel understandably entrenched its position but (less easily understandably) expanded its remit... while its formerly modernising Islamic — but not yet extremely Islamist — Arab neighbours sought solace by eschewing the idea of democracy and waging a local proxy war on the western values exemplified by Israel, and voted for rabidly extremist Islamism in the form of Hamas and Hezbollah.

Whose central ideologies, in turn — and which they have helpfully never begun to hide — are the destruction of the state of Israel and, by default, the eradication of Jews.

Which all sounds a bit, well, Holocaust-y, to me.

So here we are. And forgive me if my detail is sketchy and politically unsophisticated. However, I will — emphatically, passionately, clearly — say that, early in this conflict, I saw many of my closest friends proudly announcing their intention to march in central London in support of ‘Gaza’ and even from within my state of deep grief, I growled with anger.

I was so furious that it shocked me. My anger at the universe for taking my (funny, brilliant, beautiful, recently-graduated) son, who wanted to make the world a better place (and, ideally, get rich doing so; he was no ascetic!) had, unsurprisingly superseded everything else.

And then, on November 11, I received a Whatsapp from a close friend, kindly checking-in. Given this friend is so relentlessly, righteously left-wing that they are almost beyond parody it was no surprise when they signed-off with a cheerful ‘And I am very much looking forward to marching to the American Embassy today!’

More surprising was that I suddenly found a voice that had been temporarily silenced. I replied:

I very deliberately rowed back. In my newly shrink-to-fit world I didn’t want to lose any of the (very few) friends who had had the courage, strength, emotional intelligence and generosity of spirit to meet me on this terrible journey—and this particular friend had been right there for me, offering love and support, from the start.

As I stepped back from the brink of my anger I knew I couldn’t express any of what I felt publicly. In my grief I simply didn’t have the strength. I wasn’t, anyway, compelled to write about anything other than my son— and that writing was, for the time being, private; I wrote a diary ostensibly so I could keep one hand on the tiller of my grief.

Marrakech: September 20, 2024 I was woken at 5am by the — beautiful, haunting — Muezzins’ call-to-prayer. After drifting half-in, half-out of sleep, I eventually made my way up to my Riad’s rooftop in the centre of the Medina, where I watched the sun rise, the Atlas mountains emerge through the soft pale light and, on the horizon, a cluster of hot air balloons start their ascent. Alongside birdsong there was the waking buzz and hum of this extraordinary city. It had been a perfect place to be with Jackson’s brother as we prepared to embark on our second year without him.

Now, however, having passed the first anniversary of Jackson’s death, I am emerging, slowly, from my own ‘Year of Magical Thinking’. That this coincides with the first anniversary of the attack on Israel seems like the correct moment to ‘come out’. To declare that I have, this past year, watched with horror and disbelief as the west entrenched itself in its own non-position as an apparently morally dissolute mess.

I wish I didn’t need to worry about the future of the democracy so many of us hold so dear. Or the apparently easy-come, easy-go progressivism of Britain’s largely London-fed/led liberals, resulting in the mass idiocy of identifying as ‘pro-Gaza’.

Saying you’re ‘Pro-Gaza’ is a meaningless, mass-exhalation—the sigh of democracy in its death-throes: pass-me-my-keffiyeh-and-let’s call-an-Uber-for-the-march. Being ‘Pro-Gaza’ isn’t a stance, it’s an identitarian ‘whassup!’ Describing yourself as ‘Pro-Gaza’ is not A Thing, it’s an empty slogan — contemporary western politics’ very own ‘Live Laugh Love...’

I’ve heard people taking my position described as ‘right wing’ by those who are endorsing — indeed often pro-actively celebrating — a theocratically fundamentalist terrorist-led attack on a democracy. Friendships with my ‘pro-Gaza’ mates have (thus far!) sustained largely because I’ve kept quiet — and I appreciate they may be on borrowed time from now on.

Incidentally, when Jews (and their allies) did finally march in London (on November 26, 2023) either my friend chose not to join them, or did so and kept uncharacteristically quiet about it. And because I don’t have a monopoly on courage (or my tent pitched permanently on the moral high ground, come to that) at that time I decided I wouldn’t ask my friend whether they had or hadn’t stepped up for ‘our Jewish friends’; life for me in November 2023 was tough enough so I didn’t really want to know.

However, a year after the invasion of Israel I’m moving forward. I now describe the bereaved and newly-configured version of myself as ‘my own avatar’. I look like me, I sound like me, I can pass as me to anybody who knows me.... yet I am irrevocably different.

I always encouraged my kids to ask big questions, to avoid groupthink and the idiocy of unbending party political tribalism, to cherry-pick from all the angles and, therefore, hopefully acquire life skills that would help them to spot any Emperors-manqué, parading very proudly in the altogether. And despite having mostly predictable student politics (and inevitably plenty to say on all the issues his generation care about) I like to think Jackson would approve of the ‘new’ me, too. I think he’d recognise that my loss has somehow, simultaneously, sparked a fresh take on the hum of human interconnectivity.

I make no apology for the fact that the hum is now so clear and loud and strong that it compels me to say that if you are a middle class British white person who identifies as ‘pro-Gaza’ then you are — God help you — effectively a useful idiot for the terrorists of extremist Islam. And if as a result of pointing this out I lose you as either a subscriber or a friend… then so be it. Thank you for coming this far.

[*People Like Us]