This is Stories of Our Times. I'm Josh Glancy, editor of the Sunday Times news review section.

And this episode will sound just a little bit different to usual.

The events of October 7th were in many ways the worst Jewish nightmare realized.

What we saw happen in southern Israel, this state that was built out of the ashes of

the Holocaust, whose very reason for being is to protect Jewish lives, to allow them

to flourish and safety, had its armor pissed, and death and savagery came for 1300 Israelis.

For British Jews these are our family, our friends, and our people.

And it triggered something quite deep in all of us, the young dancers massacred at a rave.

I've been to those raves in the negative desert. The kibbutz dwellers peacefully going

about their business, slaughtered, in whole families.

It felt like not an echo of the mechanized slaughter of the Nazis, but actually the pogroms

of the 19th century, when Kossak Horseman would rampage barbarically through Jewish villages

in the pale of settlement across Russia. It was chilling, it was terrifying, and I don't

think any Jew I know will forget where they were when they first heard the news.

And then there was the fear of what comes next, of course Israel would retaliate, what would

that look like? And how many more civilians would die because of it? And how would that

play out on our streets and around the world?

As British Jews we sit in this awkward position, related to and affected by a country that

is not ours, where we do not vote or shape its politics. Yet however we feel about Israel,

and I assure you that at any one moment there are a wide range of emotions towards the country

in my own head, never mind across the Jewish community. We are tied to it by bonds of

blood and history. Around half the world's Jews now live in Israel, and we cannot ignore

...