The word “pogrom” appeared almost immediately on the morning of Saturday 7 October, as the news of Hamas’s shock attack on Israel broke. The desperate pleas of families whose loved ones had been killed, wounded or taken hostage were posted to social media. When more details emerged of a systematic murder of children, adults and the elderly, and of hundreds of casualties, some started calling it the “biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust”. Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, said on his visit to Israel that as a Jew he understood, on a personal level, “the harrowing echoes that Hamas’s massacres carry for Israeli Jews, indeed for Jews everywhere”.
These echoes were indeed inescapable. The collective memory of 20th-century pogroms is etched deep inside every Jewish person. The two children in Kfar Azza who hid in the wardrobe for 14 hours, after watching their mother murdered in front their eyes, inevitably brought to mind similar stories from the 1903 Kishinev pogrom in Czarist Russia, or the Farhud, the 1941 attack which killed hundreds of Baghdadi Jews. What made this comparison possible was not only the horrific violence, but also the fact that the attacked communities near Gaza were abandoned for long hours. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were nowhere to be found, and residents had to fend for themselves.
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