Several years ago, I was chairing a panel of writers talking about motherhood when an Orthodox Jewish author made an observation I have never forgotten. Twins were not viewed as a blessing in her community, Sally said.
“Why?”
“Because when they come for you, it’s too hard to pick up both of them and run.” The other mums on the panel were stunned into silence. When they come for you, the Jewish mother said, not if.
On Saturday October 7, Itay and Hadar Berdichevsky realised that “they” had come for them. Gunmen were breaking down the door of their house in a kibbutz not far from the border with Gaza.
The couple, both aged 30, placed their 10-month-old twins in a secure place. In their panic and dread, with seconds to spare, the parents locked away their treasures for safekeeping.
Itay and Hadar were murdered by Hamas thugs. Twelve hours later, Israeli soldiers (IDF) found the two babies in their hiding place. They were alive, but they were orphans; the mother and father, who spent their last minutes on earth protecting them, were gone.
In the five days since Hamas’s monstrous attack on Israel, we have heard many such devastating stories, flinched at graphic videos like the one of the battered young woman meekly being bundled into a Jeep, her jogging pants full of blood.
Such images make you feel physically sick. But watching the TV news, and listening to the radio, I notice how quickly certain broadcasters prefer to move the conversation on from these so-called “unimaginable” traumatic events to the plight of the Palestinians.
(In particular, Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s International Editor, has provoked the ire of some British Jews with his flinty lack of compassion for Israel’s sorrow).
With indecent haste, before the 900-plus victims have even been laid to rest, reporters seek the opinions of extremists who are permitted to explain that mass murder, rape and the abduction of children and ladies in their 80s are somehow justified because the Palestinians are oppressed.
One Hamas representative actually told Radio 4’s World at One that his side had not killed any civilians. Would presenter Sarah Montague have interviewed the head of an Einsatzgruppen Nazi death squad in 1943 to provide similar “balance”?
