RUTHFULLY YOURS

The last question on the show came from a woman who asked whether, ‘since Israel has many more nuclear weapons than Iran’, we should agree with President Obama’s statement that no option (in other words, war with Iran) should be ruled out.The woman who asked this question was doubtless a reasonable, moderate person with a benevolent and kindly approach to humanity, who would be astonished to be told there was anything shocking about her basic premise.

But the equation she made was of course obnoxious. There is no reasonable equation to be made between Israel and Iran over their possession of nuclear weapons. Israel’s nuclear weapons – like those in the possession of every true democracy – are intended solely for the country’s defence against attack.

Israel, moreover, is in the unique position of being threatened with extinction by most of its neighbours — of which the most terrifying is Iran, which regularly announces its intention to wipe Israel off the map and is racing to develop nuclear weapons with which to realise that infernal aim. To equate Israel’s nuclear weapons with those of Iran is thus to equate the prospective perpetrators of genocide with the prospective victims of that genocide.

Behind this astonishing failure to grasp the fact that if the Iranian regime is not stopped a second genocide of the Jews is in the making lies the corresponding failure of the British public to understand the scale of the evil and the threat, not only to Israel but to the west and to the peace of the world, represented by the fanatical and apocalyptic Iranian regime.

The historical precedent for the Iranian crisis is not, as the audience seemed to believe, that ‘we were taken to war in Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction which never existed’ (which I don’t believe was the case either, but let that pass for now). The proper analogy is with the 1930s, when Britain supported the appeasement of Nazi Germany on the basis that the threat posed by Hitler was much exaggerated.

That disturbing little episode on Question Time was very much on my mind the following morning, which happened to be Holocaust Memorial Day and which found me in Beth Shalom, Britain’s first Holocaust centre situated in Laxton, Nottinghamshire. Beth Shalom is the creation of the wonderful Smith brothers, Stephen and James, and is dedicated to exploring the history and implications of the Holocaust in order to promote an understanding of the roots of discrimination and prejudice.

It specialises in teaching this to young children, which it seems to do with a very sensitive awareness of what is appropriate. In particular its exhibition of ‘The Journey’, in which the destruction of European Jewry is related through the eyes of a child, is a triumph of accessibility, imaginative projection and tact.

But what moved me so much at Beth Shalom was not just the images and exhibits on display of the lost world of European Jewry. Nor was it just that Holocaust survivors, now elderly and frail, each lit a candle in memory of their loved ones and the others who had been murdered in Europe — sometimes their entire families. These were experiences about which they had never spoken until they started coming to Beth Shalom, which has become as a result their home from home.

Nor was it just the poignant presentations by young schoolchildren who spoke about what they had learned from listening to these survivors’ stories – lessons they had absorbed about our common humanity.

No, the most moving thing of all was that, as we listened to those who as refugee children had fled the Holocaust on the Kindertransport and had been taken in by decent English people whose hearts and consciences had been touched by their plight, it was possible to see an unbroken line running from those who had stood up then for basic human decency to those who last Friday shed tears of sympathy for the elderly survivors who once had been those children finding refuge in Britain from genocide.

In mourning an entire culture that had been lost, it was suddenly possible to see that the best of England’s culture has not been lost – not yet — and indeed lives on in at least some of its children.

Beth Shalom was set up to apply to today’s challenges the lessons of memory. Those on Question Time who equated the victims of genocide with its would-be perpetrators have yet to learn the lessons of memory. They represent one Britain, an ugly, ignorant, irrational Britain, a Britain that isn’t new but tragically is growing. Beth Shalom, however, shows us that there is still another Britain, the Britain that was once a byword for quiet and stolid decency – the Britain of my memory.