After the pogrom in Israel, the angel of death is licking his lips | Jonathan Freedland

The horror unleashed by Hamas has brought tragedy to Israel and devastation to Gaza - and fear to Jews across the world

The word pogrom was not meant to exist in Hebrew. In the new Israel, the very idea of Jews being murdered en masse, their children butchered before their eyes, was meant to have been banished to the realm of bitter memory. It was only in the eastern Europe of exile that Jews would have to flee from tormentors bent on killing them, only there that they would hide in the dark, trying to stifle their breath lest they make a betraying sound. Once they had a state of their own, where they could defend themselves at last, there would be no need to speak of pogroms, except in the history books.

But it was a pogrom that came to Israel last weekend, multiple pogroms in fact, as lethal as any that cut down the Yiddish-speaking Jews of the early last century or, in repeating patterns, the centuries before. Jews still remember the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, a calamity recalled in poetry recited to this day. At Kishinev, 49 Jews were murdered. Last Saturday, at least 1,200 were put to death, many of them in ways too sadistic to be recounted in a newspaper.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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