Whitehall, London

7 October 2023. It is an unseasonably warm mid-autumn in London. The trees in the great parks are a blur of orange and russet and the bright green grass is pockmarked by fallen leaves. Clear blue skies suspend a bright sun; it will be a warm 15 degrees by lunchtime.

Across Whitehall1, between the tall, many-windowed buildings looming disapprovingly over the famous boulevard, the young highfliers of Britain’s civil service march cheerfully between the statues of wartime leaders and the creators of Empire, on their way to work.

The women among them are still in flowery dresses of summer, the men sport tight-legged trousers and various styles of facial grooming. They negotiate the security guards and the vagaries of controlled electronic doors, and arrive, more or less punctually at their desks. Half-finished beakers of coffee are abandoned on piles of yesterday’s work and myriad fingers hammer passwords into keyboards.

Already, headlines are flashing across screens; email inboxes are overflowing with urgent messages, classified systems are buzzing with intelligence.

Exclamations spiced with profanities ring through the corridors of government,“That’s one helluva lot of missiles!”

Alarm bells begin to shrill in the great offices of state. Foreign Office mandarins demand briefings, petulant ministerial aides protest the lack of forewarning. Over eggs and bacon in their clubs, Ministers scan hurriedly prepared briefing papers. From the rear seats of large black cars, Generals issue clipped orders to their aides to contact liaison officers and defence attachés on the ground.

Above the historic boulevard, in open plan officers secured behind thick windows with sweeping views of London’s skyline, analysts race to dust off long-neglected sources. In much smaller numbers, hidden in various corners of the Civil Service’s far-flung architecture, deep experts brace for the inevitable panic.

One refrain rings clear around the globe: “Where the hell did this come from?”

Tel Aviv, Israel

It is the end of the 7 day festival of Sukkot. Israeli Jews awake in holiday mood. Yawning, they make for breakfast rooms and terraces for breakfast. Plates of warm, toasted challah with home made cream cheese; tables groaning with slices of melon and platters of slow roasted tomatoes, peppers, olives. Turkish coffee and scrambling eggs perfume the air.

The sky is overcast. Israel languishes in an October heatwave. It is already 30 degrees in the shade and the air is leaden.

Suddenly the loud wailing of sirens heralds danger; they have just 90 seconds to find safety. Children are dragged from their beds, people shrug quickly into whatever clothing is at hand; and head for the shelters. The streets are suddenly busy with clusters of hurrying, dishevelled, alarmed figures.

In the shelters, they consult news sites on mobile phones and tablets; realisation begins to dawn. This is not ‘just another’ of the regular two-rocket attacks, the near continuous sound of the Iron dome missile interceptors doing their work overhead proves that.

For most, it already feels like Israel is at war. For many, it is an all too familiar feeling.

On a broad wooden bench at the public shelter in central Tel Aviv, a grandmother stares without looking at the bare concrete wall opposite. Around her the hubbub raised by the indomitable teenagers in her extended family goes unnoticed. Her mind scrolls back over the ten or so decades she has lived. Back through the many conflicts she has survived.

She is old enough to remember Nazi Germany between the wars. She remembers the flagrant anti-semitic vandalism that seemed to spring from nowhere, so that even a short walk on the streets of her home town of Frankfurt-am-Main was a more terrifying prospect than the 13-year-old could bear. She remembers being turned away from school by rude men in black shirts, the crackling flames as one by one the Jewish shops were burnt to the ground. And she remembers, still with horror, the yellow cardboard star she was forced to wear until her father, with the help of many others managed to spirit his family away, away to Britain and safety.

She knows the family was lucky. Lucky to make it out before the horrors of the ghetto and the concentration camps. Lucky not to have been among the six million who never returned. She shudders at the thought. At the thought of being driven from her home, at the memory of friends and families who were less fortunate.

She had wondered then where God was in all of this. But now she knows the answer: it was all part of His plan. His plan to bring the Jews back to their homeland, the promised land. To rebuild Judaea and Samaria, to ensure the survival of the Jewish race.

She shifts, trying in vain to find a comfort that the hard bench refuses to provide. Her old eyes wander over the faces of the others sheltering with her. They look little different to the faces of the English families she shared the shelters with while the Luftwaffe’s Dorniers bombed the south coast of England. Those shelters were a far cry from this modern Israeli version; they were dank and cold. But somehow the fear that drove people underground, fuelled their hatred for those who had forced them into this humiliating discomfort, was essentially the same.

She remembers witnessing the war against her former countrymen from afar. Too young to be of much use but old enough to understand the news of battles and bombings which the newspapers recorded. She remembers how the newspapers fanned a hatred for Germany from the initial embers to open flames, remembers the scorn expressed for the victims of the bombing campaigns by the Royal Air Force which razed her hometown and many others to the ground. Dresden, Frankfurt, Hamburg. Not a thought for the innocent civilians caught up in the fire storms and shrapnel and falling rubble.

She remembers, too, the cheers with which downed German Messerschmitts were greeted, the delight as the young pilots, trapped in their cockpits fried on their way into their final resting places in the English Channel.

The old woman sighs. Her gaze on the wall ahead of her is unfocused. Another, happier memory emerges: the docks in Portsmouth as she and her family boarded the ship that would take them to the fledgling state of Israel. It was crammed to the gunnels with Jewish families heading for a new life. The passion with which her father spoke of Zionism, the Jewish return to the . How with hope lighting his eyes he spoke of a new homeland – a safe haven – for the Jews.

The early years were tough, she recalls, a small frown settling on her brow. Summer after summer they worked; men, women and children toiling ceaselessly to hew life from the barren, rock-strewn desert. One minute crouched against the baking heat, the next shivering in freezing winters, forced to live on potatoes and hard bread, sleeping in the unheated kibbutz dormitories. Such a life turned people hard; a life that left people feeling they had earned their right to a land. A life they would never give up, come what may. With God’s help.

Nowadays, that once-barren land has been transformed. Fruit farms flourish, the kibbutzes boast swimming pools with sparkling blue, chemically cleaned water. Water produced by innovative desalination plants invented using the ingenuity of Israeli Jews.

The wars still haunt her. War after war as her people struggled to force the hard ground to accept and nourish the roots of its new occupiers. Again and again the Arabs came, hammering their fists on the gates of Jerusalem in a clamour for attention. Attacks from every side by the armies of their new neighbours. Armies vanquished repeatedly by brave Jewish forces composed often of barely trained young Israelis with rudimentary weapons managed to repel those attacks. How? With God’s blessing, she thinks, and shares another wan smile with the wall opposite.

Now she gives not a fig for the Arabs. For years they have been trying to block God’s will; for years they have been defeated. She knows they will never learn.

But those rudimentary weapons, that desert land developed quickly. It became the envy not just of the Arab world, but of the West as well. Each successive war left its citizens more determined, a notch braver, even a little wealthier.

There is the little smile again. She thinks about the report she has just read, over the shoulder of her Granddaughter. Hamas was merely the latest enemy to try. She knows that the coming period will be painful, that it will take time. That, as in 1948, in ’67 and ’73 and on many other occasions, mothers would lose sons. And new Jewish heroes would be recognised.

Her face clouds. An image springs to mind. She remembers the moment he left for the war. A tall boy, hair cut short, a thin growth of stubble on his chin. The drab green of the Israeli army uniform, headdress carefully folded and pushed neatly through the epaulette on his left shoulder.

Avi was barely 18 when the Arabs attacked. The whole country was celebrating the holiest day in the Jewish calendar – Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. It was a surprise, much like today. She remembers the letter mobilising him; the rush to make the necessary preparations. She remembers standing at a bus stop, her eyes filled with tears, waving him off in the bus which came to collect him, his smiling, still boyish face peering excitedly back at her through a window.

It was to be the last time she saw her only son. He was killed on the first day of combat, a victim of an anti-tank rocket fired by the invading Syrian army on the Golan heights. Inwardly she is proud, the Syrian’s punishment was an ignominious defeat and the loss of their land. It is Israel’s now; never again will Syrian soldiers fire down on Israelis from that vantage point.

Every month her daughter takes her to his grave on Mount Herzl. It takes an hour and a half by car. The journey awakens memories for her, painful memories. As she drags her old, black clad bones up the hill in the heat to place flowers on his grave, she wonders what he would have become had he lived. She turns and smiles at her youngest Grandchild. His name is Yoni; he is barely 14. He smiles back at her and reaches across to hold her hand.

“It is ok, Bubbe.” he says comfortingly.

As she smiles back at him feelings of pride swell within her ancient breast, she is proud of what they have built here. In his smiling face she sees her own son. She wonders when his turn will come. For come it surely shall. This is not a battle to be won in a day; this is a battle for generations, one whose dynamics shift and change but which the Jews must win. It is their lot; always to defend the homeland they have won from the harsh land by the sweat of their own backs. With the help of their God. It is a happy alternative to running from the oppression of others.

It is the nature of things, she thinks, as the sirens begin to wail again and the explosions of the Iron Dome interceptors resume. She knows, with a certainty borne of years of experience and an implacable faith in a pathway written by God, that they will win. Whatever the cost.

The view from Israel - “What exactly is this outfit called Hamas?”

Hamas’ brutal, unforgivable attacks on 7 October 2023 were many things, but one thing they were not was new.

The Israelis and Palestinians in this particular corner of the Middle East have been fighting and killing each other for 75 years. In wars, insurrections, terrorist attacks and aerial bombardment campaigns without number. The enmity runs deep. There is barely a family – Jewish or Palestinian - whose history does not include a relation lost in conflict. Neither side is in any doubt about the intentions of the other.

It is only the international community that looks on this with wide eyed shock, asks itself what on earth is going on, how can this possibly have come to this? This is a naivety borne of years of inattention, a willingness to be distracted by matters closer to home, a media with a limited attention span. A general public whose interests lie elsewhere. A failure to understand.

The Attacks

Shortly before sunrise on Saturday 7 October, at around 0630 Israel Summer Time, Hamas operatives in bunkers in the Gaza strip, shouting excited exhortations of “Allahu Akhbar,” God is Great, fire the first shots in what will become Israel’s latest war. Missile salvos of as many as 2,200 rockets arc toward Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and the south of Israel. At the same time, Hamas commandos in body armour and webbing and clutching assault rifles prepare for a major land assault on Israel.

Elsewhere, on a beach close to Gaza City in the north of the Strip, other young fighters don wet suits ahead of a planned amphibious assault. Inland still more struggle into the harnesses of powered paragliders to attack from the air.

Hamas’ command centre operators have already steered drones in attacks on Israeli observation towers, blinding the Israeli intelligence architecture and disarming the automatic machine guns which line the birder fence.

Within minutes, explosive devices detonate at nearly 30 individual locationsi along Israel’s expensively constructed and hitherto “impregnable” border barrier. Through eddies of dust and clearing smoke, 3,000 Palestinian commandos enter Israel, mounted in pickup trucks, two-up on small motorcycles and on foot. Adrenalin courses: they are pumped for this, a moment years in the making. There is much ecstatic shouting. Overhead, the steady drone of paramotors flying below Israel’s high tech warning systems accompanies them as they race towards their targets.

The orders are to cause maximum impact, to “kill anyone they see”ii, other than those to be captured alive, held for later use as hostages, as bargaining chips in the inevitable negotiations for peace.

Barely a stone’s throw from the Gaza barrier, in the kibbutzes of Kfar Azza and Be’eri, at a music festival near Kibbutz Re’im, and in townships and military bases along the border, the attackers achieve complete surprise. In the unbounded hacking and brutalising, the indiscriminate murder and the wanton rape and abduction which follows, the commandos achieve more than they can ever possibly have imagined.

More than 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals are killed. As many as 5,400 more are injured. 240 are taken hostage. Camera and phone footage of beheadings and burnings clog social media channels. Fatalities include babies, young children, elderly women. Whole families are slaughtered. Hostages are dragged from their beds and thrown into the back of trucks, and transported to Gaza where, as video evidence chronicles, wildly elated crowds demean and abuse them.

It will be years before the full extent of the savagery meted out on Jewish women is properly known.

Barely half an hour after the first salvo of missiles, in a televised speech, the shadowy head of Hamas’ Izz al din al Qassam Brigades military wing, Mohammed Deif, calls for support from Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. He declares Hamas’ actions to have been in defence of the Al Aqsa Mosque, and as a response to Israeli attacks on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bankiii.

Despite the power and reach of Israel’s much vaunted intelligence apparatus and its long roster of allies, Tel Aviv is blindsided by the unprecedented ferocity of the attack, by its tactical sophistication and by Hamas’ highly effective, years-long campaign of disinformation. And by Hamas’ extraordinary operational security.

Israel’s population is composed mainly of refugees. These are people who, having fled persecution and war, have come to depend upon the unparalleled military might of their Army and Air Force to keep them safe from threats emanating from all directions. For such a people, the events of 7 October 2023 marked the beginning of a new, far more uncertain era.

So what?

The Grandmother in this story represents merely one perspective of many here. Israelis are not the British. Or the French or the Americans. We are not surrounded by aggressive, bellicose neighbours, armed and dangerous, continually threatening our demise.

We have not been driven from our homelands by persecution, have not built from scratch a vibrant world class economy in a mere 75 years. With little but our own hard labour and determination.

We have not been forced to defend our land from repeated attack by our immediate neighbours. And we have not been the victims of generations of attacks by those amongst whom we live and who persist in attacking our children and loved ones with every weapon they have at their disposal.

And we are not the beneficiaries of a land promised to us by God.
The humanitarian disaster in Gaza does not cut through in the Israeli media. To Israelis the Palestinians are a problem which does not go away. The Hamas attacks are a new holocaust; a holocaust which wholly justifies whatever it takes to deal with the problem.

The threat is driving a new sense of unity among Israelis. Unity to replace the division brought about by Benjamin Netanyahu’s extreme right wing government and its thinly veiled autocratic agenda.

The basis of that unity is a nation’s fear of destruction, of the annihilation threatened by so many of its foes. And in this context, there can be little doubt as to exactly how far Israel will be prepared to go to defend its Promised Land.