Catnip retweeted
There is no Woman of the Day post today but if there was, there would be two: funeral director Deborah Bambroffe and Dr Linda Reynolds, both of Manchester. In 1998, they were the first to raise the alarm about one of the most prolific serial killers in modern history.
The police did a cursory investigation and stopped looking. More died. Most of his estimated 284 victims were widows aged between 49 and 81. Yes, you know who I’m talking about. Harold Shipman.
Deborah Bambroffe, a member of staff at Massies' funeral directors in Hyde, was alarmed by the high death rate among his patients and noticed that the women always seemed to be dressed in their day clothes and he always seemed to be the one to find them dead. I mean, what are the odds?
She was especially concerned about the death of Marie Quinn, an active volunteer for the WRVS and a churchgoer. Marie died in November 1997 — a stroke, or so said the death certificate completed by Shipman.
“I was obviously worried because I had raised these concerns. I suppose I didn't want to believe those thoughts going through my mind - it seemed so ludicrous to the time.”
Nonetheless, Deborah took her concerns to Dr Susan May at the GP practice right opposite Shipman’s in Hyde. Dr May relayed them to her colleague, Dr Linda Reynolds, who already had her own suspicions. New to the practice, she was worried that he was engaging in widespread fraud, not murder.
Did you know that until 2024, GPs earned money for countersigning cremation certificates? It was a tidy little sum of £84 for each one, known as "ash cash". Oh, he had taken at least a little care to rotate his requests for countersignatures to GPs at the other practice (well, it only entailed crossing the road. No point in expending too much effort) but In 1997, those other GPs signed an average of 14 cremation certificates each. He’d signed 41. It should have stood out like a sore thumb.
Linda alerted Greater Manchester Police and the coroner despite her fears that it could ruin her own career if she was wrong but she “didn't have any doubts about it because it was the only course of action." The coroner also informed the police.
GMP didn’t assemble a team of officers to look for evidence. It didn’t open an incident room. No one checked Shipman’s criminal record, no one interviewed him, no one talked to the General Medical Council. No one even tried talking to the relatives of the dead patients. A detective inspector obtained copies of the medical records maintained by Shipman and deposited with the local health authority, and compared them with the death certificates; the ones also signed by him. Surprise, surprise. They tallied. I mean, really, what are the chances? And that’s where the cursory investigation stopped dead.
It later emerged that Shipman had falsified medical histories, but come on now, look at the evidence at the time. All boxes ticked. Nothing to see here. Case closed.
Shipman went on to murder three more women, including one aged just 57. He forged the will of his last victim by duping two other patients into witnessing it.
Sadly, Linda died in March 2000, aged 50. Deborah is still around, still a funeral director, otherwise they’d both be Women of the Day for risking their reputations and their careers for speaking up. Both women deserve huge credit for doing what was right.
Is there any particular reason why I’ve written about this today? Well, I’ve been mulling over the number of times that women, and often several women at the same time, somehow find the courage to speak up about the harm that just one man can cause in almost every sphere of life, and yet their voices are ignored or dismissed, and whole organisations or public bodies somehow find a way to sail past the overwhelming evidence rather than deal with the behaviour of the man.
Or perhaps I am the only one who’s noticed this.
Catnip retweeted
From @GuidoFawkes
Shadow Foreign Secretary Tom Tugendhat has caused a stir in the Commons by attacking Labour over the £800 million in aid to the Palestinian Authority. Tugendhat raised concerns about well-resourced Hamas operations…
Labour minister Melanie Ward shouted “shame on you” at Tugendhat. His comments about the aid:
“What have we seen for it? Well, we have seen the vile indoctrination of hatred, of the control of food and services to achieve dictatorial compliance. And we have seen the biggest network of tunnels built to prepare for war. But of course, it’s striking, isn’t it, that these air raid shelters were not built to protect the civilians. They were never allowed in. Palestinian women and children were never allowed in the tunnels…
I can see the lady shaking her head [in reference to Melanie Ward]. If she wants to side with Hamas, she’s welcome to. But if she wishes to stand with the Palestinian people, she should recognise what Hamas has done. Those who stand with the Palestinian people stand against Hamas. And again and again and again, we have sadly seen Hamas torturing and murdering so many…
We recognise that aid has been weaponized by the Hamas leadership that has been in control for more than 20 years. Again and again and again, it has chosen to hurt, to murder, to destroy its own people for the political benefit of its masters in Tehran and its vile ideology.”
A sobering point…
Catnip retweeted
1/ In a criminal trial a jury can ask questions by sending notes to the Judge. Here are 10 jury notes that would derail a Conversion Practices trial:
"I am gender critical and do not believe in transgender identity which is just really gender identity, can I sit on this case?"
Catnip retweeted
I am an expert in child protection procedures, dealing with domestic abuse, elder abuse and the risks to the many vulnerable individuals in care homes and similar social facilities. It was my job for about 35 years.
‘Safeguarding’ is ‘keeping people safe and guarding them against identifiable risks’. The clue is all there in the word itself.
Hence, there is a safeguarding protocol that requires all social workers to have enhanced criminal record checks before they are employed and at regular intervals thereafter. That’s because they come into contact with, provide services for and develop professional relationships with vulnerable people, with whom they are often alone and over whom they can exert considerable control.
We don’t want serious criminals as social workers so we have safeguarding checks. That DOES NOT MEAN THOSE OF US WHO THINK THIS IS A GOOD IDEA THINK ALL SOCIAL WORKERS ARE CRIMINALS.
Exactly the same rules apply to teachers and many other professionals, including lawyers who represent children in care proceedings.
In all of these cases, safeguarding is about managing the known risk posed to vulnerable individuals by the surrounding circumstances of their situation, including, but by no means limited to, those where there are criminals who set out to target the vulnerable.
This is why men are excluded from women’s spaces where the circumstances make women particularly vulnerable - toilets, changing rooms, prisons, hospital wards, sports teams, rape crisis groups to name but 6.
Men pose a significant risk to women in such circumstances - bullying, harassment, voyeurism, rape, sexual assault, intimidation, coercion, control and other abusive behaviour. This doesn’t mean we think all men are rapists!!
Trans identifying men are excluded alongside other men because men are the risky group and they are men who pose similar risks to other men. I say ‘similar’ and not ‘the same’ because the evidence shows they are, in fact, a greater risk. Male trans convicts, for example, are sex offenders at much higher rates than other men.
Trans identifying men are men and therefore excludable as such for the same reasons as other men.
You say that you ‘understand’ safeguarding, though you have failed to demonstrate that. I hope the above has clarified it for you. Only someone who is as thick as pig shit doesn’t understand this very simple concept.
My guess is you understand the issue very well - you’re just a prize idiot/clown/wanker/troll.
Catnip retweeted
Unbelievably, Iran (yes, Iran) has just been elected to the UN Committee that sets the priorities for women’s rights, counter-terrorism and peacekeeping. This, the country with an almost uniquely violent record of brutalising women, executing peaceful female protesters and of course sponsoring very widespread terrorism.
Equally unbelievably, the UK nominated Iran and although the voting is secret, we must assume it subsequently voted for Iran in the General Assembly. This is the same UK that is nominally run by PM Andy Burnham who declared only a few weeks ago that “we will always stand with the underdog and take what action we can to support them.”
If the young women of Iran who dare to remove their headscarves, or sing, or engage in peaceful protest to press for basic democracy aren’t the underdog in their battle with a vicious and murderous regime… who then is an underdog?
I can’t exaggerate how ashamed I am of my country. I’m sickened and repulsed by what it has become. I barely recognise it. Burnham should hang his head in utter shame.
And as for the UN, it has come to embody institutional corruption and gaslighting on a global scale.
It put China, Qatar and Cuba in charge of the body charged with protecting human rights worldwide.
It put China, Cuba, Nicaragua, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan (all of which crush/ban NGOs in their own countries) in charge of the body that decides which civil-society groups and NGOs get UN accreditation and access.
It put Syria (under Assad) in charge the body that promotes education, culture, and press freedom.
How long must this continue? The UN has no credibility whatsoever and should be stripped back to the basics- a debating chamber for the big global issues of the day. And nothing more.
How can anyone defend this?
Catnip retweeted
For three years I was told to keep quiet. This morning my case was raised in Parliament.Asked in the Commons whether the BBC needs an independent inquiry into antisemitism, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, @lisanandy said she has discussed my case with the Director-General and will meet me in the coming weeks. I’m looking forward to that conversation.“We all have to step up and be counted,” she said. I agree. So many people, including former colleagues, have been in touch to say they wish they’d known what I was going through so they could have helped. Sadly, most have also said they’re not surprised by what they’ve read and heard. One called it straight out of the BBC playbook. It's time to rewrite the playbook. Change doesn’t happen because you say you’ve changed. It happens when you listen to the people the system is failing, and act on what they tell you.I believe in the BBC. It should hold itself to the standards it holds everyone else to
#BBC #Antisemitism #SpeakingUp
Catnip retweeted
The Failure to Protect Gaza's Children: 12-year-old Mennah, the daughter of my friend Na'ama, was denied entry today to a makeshift educational tent in Gaza's humanitarian zone because teachers deemed her clothing insufficiently "modest" and demanded she wear a full head-to-toe covering. When she refused, they allegedly accused her of lacking morals and good behavior, then punished her by forcing her to remain outside in the sun until her mother could be contacted.
This is not education. It is coercion, humiliation, and ideological indoctrination imposed on a child. It is especially alarming that such spaces may be supported, directly or indirectly, by international humanitarian funding provided by Western governments and taxpayers. No child should be excluded from learning, shamed, or disciplined for failing to conform to extremist interpretations of religious dress.
These educational tents must be subject to rigorous monitoring, safeguarding standards, and independent oversight to prevent the abuse, neglect, and radicalization of children. Gaza's children need safe learning environments that promote dignity, tolerance, and opportunity, not fear, intimidation, or ideological conformity.
There is little hope for meaningful educational recovery if children remain exposed to actors who prioritize dogma over their welfare. The international community should focus on creating secure, professionally supervised educational spaces with clear child-protection standards and accountability mechanisms, ensuring that every child can learn free from coercion and abuse.
Shame on any government, NGO, aid agency, or donor that funds educational programs without demanding transparency, oversight, and robust child-protection safeguards. Humanitarian assistance should protect children, not enable environments where their rights and dignity can be violated.
Catnip retweeted
REVEALED: The scandal surrounding Gaza's failed winterization efforts lays bare a grim reality: Hamas obstructed attempts to protect Palestinian civilians before the devastating winter storms that flooded tens of thousands of tents.
Palestinian Authority employees inside Gaza have reported that professionals from the Ministries of Public Works and Relief Affairs were intimidated, summoned, and coerced by Hamas into signing pledges not to undertake humanitarian projects without the group's approval. According to their accounts, those who defied Hamas risked so-called "field justice," including beatings and worse.
Several officials, including Najla Hammad, Ihab Al-Bahtiti, Khaled Abu Safiya, Wiam Aboul-Nasr, Dr. Adnan Hamouda, and Ahmed Abu Zaiter, have publicly stated that efforts to build more durable fiberglass housing and improve conditions for displaced civilians were blocked.
Another example was a proposal that was put forward to demolish several heavily damaged towers which were at risk of collapse from rainwater after extensive bombardment. According to those involved, Hamas blocked the removal of the “Bank of Palestine Tower” in Gaza City's Rimal neighborhood, reportedly arguing that it would "collapse from the rain anyway." The terrorist group did not show any concern for the civilian lives that would be lost when the tower eventually collapses on its own, because it wants dead Palestinians and news of tragedy to keep Gaza in the news cycle and to gain global sympathy, hoping for more incoming resources and donations for the Strip’s humanitarian and reconstruction needs that it could siphon.
Additionally, Hamas has also been accused of obstructing construction projects intended to create safer communities for displaced Gazans in southern Gaza, prioritizing political control over humanitarian relief.
This is a reminder that Gaza's suffering is not only a consequence of war. It is also the result of a fascist and ruthless governing power that repeatedly places its own interests above the welfare of the people it claims to represent. The same terror group that helped bring catastrophe upon Gaza continues to obstruct efforts to mitigate its consequences.
As floodwaters sweep through displacement camps and families endure another winter in misery, the question is unavoidable: how many Palestinian lives could have been spared had Hamas allowed humanitarian, housing, and reconstruction efforts to proceed unimpeded?
Catnip retweeted
In just the past two weeks, the pro-Palestine movement tried to burn down my neighborhood synagogue and organized a boycott of Jewish-owned businesses in Philadelphia on the eve of Kristalnacht.
So please, spare me the “anti Zionism isn’t antisemitism” nonsense. Yes, it is.
Catnip retweeted
“the individual who deleted the files could not be identified by any investigation”
-This has got to be the biggest scandal heard from the same Trust that breached medical notes of our children from Nottingham attacks.
- We found data breaches and now systematic and planned data deletion. This is totally scandalous.
I have long said the Sec of State for Health needs a total management replacement at this hospital immediately……..
Sec of State you are sleeping on the job…..get on with it.
This Trust has got to be the most scandal ridden in the country.
“Get Nottingham right, get the country right”
@YvetteCooperMP @DHSCgovuk @KemiBadenoch @DamianHinds
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cmly…
Catnip retweeted
Stonewall's grubby finger prints are all over the tyrannical conversion bill. The fact they still enjoy government access despite consistently misrepresenting the law and pushing for mad gender nonsense is frankly appalling.
telegraph.co.uk/gift/8acf1db…
Catnip retweeted
Whistleblower warns that Labour's conversion therapy ban would have been used to suppress scandal at NHS gender clinic for children trib.al/q6vdb0n
Catnip retweeted
Thank you everyone that came to parliament today. Labour voted down our amendments to protect our female athletes right to fair & safe sport away from males in international competition on Uk soil. But we won’t give up!
Catnip retweeted
Abdul El-Sayed won't condemn the IRGC.
He won't condemn the Islamic Republic.
A Persian whose cousin was hunted for her hijab asks him to speak.
His answer: Iranians should choose their own leaders.
Choose?
Under an Islamist dictatorship that lashes, hunts, and kills them?
And this is the same voice that never stops lecturing America about Israel.
Non-intervention for Tehran.
Endless interference for the Jewish state.
That's not principle.
That's a tell.
Catnip retweeted
Ten years ago I wrote about my experience with my trans-identified daughter, who desisted. If the Conversion Practices Bill goes ahead, much of what I did & said back then would be criminalised.
#BinTheBill
lilymaynard.com/a-mums-voyag…
Catnip retweeted
Joe Rogan just passes on any ol' lie he finds in the deepest holes of the internet, even when the lie is raw hate from beginning to end.
Israel allows genetic testing. Almost all clinical tests and prenatal tests are actually covered under our national health insurance.
And you absolutely can get ancestry testing in Israel. 23AndMe specifically, which Joe mentions as outlawed in Israel, ships to Israel. Go to their international website and try it before you spread this dumb, mean lie. Also FamilyTreeDNA and some others.
And once you get your raw DNA information through 23AndMe and others, you can upload it to every other ancestry website for analysis.
In fact, Ashkenazi Jews, including Israeli Ashkenazim, are some of the most genetically studied populations on the fucking planet, you racist dolts. (Oops, just realized I'm kinda pissed.)
There are even Israeli studies by Israeli researchers of Israeli Jewish genetics. Nature has published studies using Israeli genetics databases. Here, for example: nature.com/articles/nature09…
So what does Israel actually restrict, and why is it so severe about it?
Two words: Parentage and obsessive privacy rules.
Parentage tests are as tightly controlled as heroin.
The reason is peculiar to our tradition and may be hard for outsiders to understand. In Jewish religious law, a "mamzer," someone born of the mother's adultery or from incest, lives a restricted life in some ways, including limits on who they can marry under traditional laws. And their religious status is heritable. These are ancient laws, but they matter in a basically conservative and religious society.
To protect children from ever becoming saddled with this status, parentage tests require a family court order, even if both parents consent to the test. Because the child has to be protected. Rabbinical courts have often forbidden testing almost across the board, including in divorce cases. In one case I once read about, the rabbinical court quashed the father's genetic test and demanded that he adopt the child to avoid any doubt. This was to protect the child in that particular case. The court refused to release the father from responsibility for the child and refused to examine evidence into the child's actual parentage.
Is this a weird cultural artifact born from a specific feature of the Jewish tradition? Yes. Feel free to make fun of it over in the secular West. I make fun of it myself over here. But inasmuch as old traditional rules are an unavoidable part of our big-family, tightly-knit society, I'll take this weirdness, and the never-ending effort to cleverly circumvent the damaging parts of the old traditions, over what's happening in your neck of the woods.
Is it all an attempt to hide the 2000 years we spent in Europe? No, you dolt. What the hell is wrong with you?
And then there's privacy. Pay attention to this one, because you'll wish you had some of our rules in your own country.
This is the only real limit on ancestry kits.
Your genetic information is totally, utterly private. Your employer and your insurance company can never discriminate against you based on your genetics. Even just attempting to get their hands on your genetic information is a felony. Labs and genetic counselors are closely regulated.
In the age of AI, even just the leaking of a *relative's* genetic information can hurt your employability and your insurance premiums. And it's not some crazy fear. Ancestry kit companies are bought and sold by commercial investors all the time, and they're the owners of customers' data. A data breach of 23AndMe in 2023 put the genetic information of millions on the internet. You're telling me insurance companies didn't scoop it up? Israelis are more protected from that dystopian new reality than most of the rest of you.
And importantly, the law's prohibitions are on the commercial companies, not on the customer. Giving someone your own genetic information isn't a crime. The company buying and selling it commercially within the jurisdiction of Israeli law is committing the crime.
That's why the one company that's actually hampered in any meaningful way from testing Israelis is MyHeritage, which is Israeli. To bypass Israeli jurisdiction and that massive privacy regime, Israelis just order a kit from a company in Texas.
So why do literally hundreds of millions of people believe the lie that Israel has a blanket restriction on genetic testing to avoid anyone ever finding out that Ashkenazi Jews come from Europe?
At its core, at its most basic: because they want to create the permission structure to destroy Israel. They want to declare Israel a colonialist, imperialist interloper doomed to be felled by the noble indigenous Arab of the land.
So they declare that Israel is hiding this great, terrible secret that nobody has ever hidden and nobody could ever hide -- that it doesn't actually belong here.
Never mind the fact that every study of Ashkenazi Jews shows that they have origins in the Levant -- isn't it a bit odd that this argument never grapples with the millions of Israeli Jews who spent the past 1,800 years in places like Iraq and Yemen, Jews who were expelled and fled to the last man, woman and child to Israel, and who make up half of Israeli society today?
You'd think if this was actually about Israeli "genetics," that would be part of this conversation. But it isn't about any kind of reality, it's a bigoted, genocidal fantasy. So the millions of Jews who don't even come from Europe magically disappear from this conversation.
I don't think Joe Rogan dreams of our annihilation. I think Joe picks up garbage floating in the juices at the bottom of the internet's deepest garbage bins and launders it happily for clicks.
New: Joe Rogan reveals to comedian Sam Tallent that the real reason Israel restricts DNA ancestry testing is because most of the people over there aren’t Semites and are actually just European Jews:
ROGAN: “The real Semites are the Palestinians. Benjamin Netanyahu’s family is from Poland.”
CONTEXT: Israel does have restrictions on DNA testing.
According to Israel's Ministry of Health, paternity and family-relationship DNA tests generally require a COURT ORDER, even when everyone involved consents.
And there's an especially surprising detail.
MyHeritage, an ancestry-testing company HEADQUARTERED IN ISRAEL that offers DNA kits internationally, explicitly lists ISRAEL among the countries where its consumer ancestry tests are unavailable.
But that does NOT establish Rogan's allegation about WHY these restrictions exist.
Israel's genetic-information laws address matters including consent, family relationships, privacy, and potential consequences for children.
There is no substantiated evidence that the restrictions were created to conceal the ethnic origins of Israel's Jewish population.
And when Rogan brings up Netanyahu's Polish family roots, he's referencing something with a documented historical basis.
Netanyahu's father, Benzion Netanyahu, was born in WARSAW in 1910, before his family immigrated to what was then British Mandatory Palestine.
But European family history doesn't automatically mean someone has no ancient Middle Eastern ancestry.
In fact, scientific research reveals a much more complicated story.
IMPORTANT NOTES: A major genetic study published in NATURE in 2010 found evidence connecting many Jewish diaspora communities to shared ancestral origins in the LEVANT.
And a 2020 study published in CELL examined ancient DNA from Bronze Age populations in the region.
Researchers found substantial genetic continuity between ancient Levantine populations and multiple populations living in the region today, including Jewish and Arab communities.
In other words, the evidence points to a history of shared regional ancestry, migrations, and intermixing. It’s not a simple genetic division between two populations.
Then Rogan takes the discussion even further.
He questions whether the term ANTISEMITISM should instead be called “anti-Jewish,” arguing that Palestinians have a stronger claim to being called Semites.
But there's another important historical distinction.
“Semitic” originally refers to a LANGUAGE FAMILY that includes Hebrew and Arabic, not a scientifically defined genetic race.
And the word “antisemitism,” despite its linguistic roots, has historically referred specifically to hostility or prejudice toward JEWISH PEOPLE.
Catnip retweeted
This is the most important post I have ever written
I’ll also add it as an article. It’s long but I think I’ve identified how this has happened.
Identity politics has produced the rush to eliminationist rhetoric against Jews and Israel because its binary logic cannot accommodate a group that was the paradigmatic victim who went on to acquire agency.
The three switches as detailed by M.S Hiebert are the mechanism by which the model has ‘corrected’ this anomaly.
The three switches as discussed by Maureen Hiebert in Constructing Genocide and Mass Violence describe how elites reconceptualise a group so that its continued existence becomes a threat that must be solved.
Switch one places the group outside the political community as foreigners.
Switch two recasts its mere presence as a mortal danger whose existence itself is the problem.
Switch three dehumanises the entire group so that ordinary restraints no longer apply.
These are not automatic features of conflict.
They are activated when a pre-existing ideational framework supplies the categories that make this reconceptualisation coherent.
Identity politics, as it consolidated in Western institutions after the 1960s, supplies exactly this framework.
It sorts groups into fixed categories of oppressor and oppressed according to historical narratives of colonialism, race, and power.
The sorting is not driven by present-day individual outcomes or by the internal complexity of any group.
It requires that the paradigmatic victim remain powerless, non-agentic, and structurally unable to improve its condition without external intervention.
Jews fail each requirement.
They were the central victims of the twentieth century’s most systematic genocide, yet in the postwar West they achieved high average socioeconomic outcomes and disproportionate representation in fields the framework treats as sites of power.
In the Middle East they were refugees from Arab countries as well as survivors of Europe, but they built a state that defeated repeated attempts to destroy it. Agency and success after victimisation are not supposed to occur.
When they do, the framework has two options:
Revise the model or reclassify the group so that its success is reinterpreted as evidence of original or ongoing guilt.
The second option has predominated, and the reclassification proceeds through the three switches.
Switch one follows directly.
Once Jews are no longer legible as pure victims, their presence becomes anomalous.
In the West they are coded as white or adjacent to whiteness, which places them on the oppressor side of the binary even though European antisemitism is recent and extreme.
In the Middle East the same group is coded as European settler-colonials, which erases continuous Jewish presence and the expulsion of roughly 800,000 Jews from Arab countries after 1948.
Either coding removes them from the legitimate circle of peoples entitled to self-determination.
The collective is redefined as an interloper whose membership in the political community is conditional, threatening, or fraudulent.
Switch two is required to preserve the model’s explanation of disparities.
The framework treats unequal outcomes as evidence of oppression by the powerful.
Jewish success demands an account that does not revise the binary.
The available accounts are that Jews (or Israel) exercise hidden control,
that their success is extracted from others and that their collective existence itself is the obstacle to justice.
The last of these is the switch: the continued presence of a Jewish state, or of Jews as a distinct people with agency, is framed as the reason other groups remain disadvantaged.
Policy disagreements are subordinated to the claim that the world or the region would be fairer if the Jewish collective did not exercise sovereignty.
This is the content of the eliminationism:
“If Israel didn’t exist the world would be better.”
Catnip retweeted
1/2 A note to Piers Morgan…
Within living memory, one third of the world's Jews were systematically exterminated. Six million people murdered, not in some distant, uncivilised corner of the world, but in the heart of Europe, where Jews had lived, worked, contributed and integrated into society for generations.
The Holocaust is not simply a chapter in a history book for Jews. It is embedded in our collective memory. It explains why we worry about our families' security, why we are cautious about whom we trust, and why we know that the veneer of civilisation can be frighteningly thin. Our neighbours turned against us. Others simply stood by and watched.
The re-establishment of Israel in 1948 was supposed to ensure that never again would Jews be dependent on the goodwill of others for their survival.
And this was no arbitrary piece of territory. It was our ancestral homeland, from which Jewish sovereignty had been extinguished by the Romans nearly 2,000 years earlier.
Throughout the centuries of exile, persecution and expulsion, Jews never stopped yearning to return.
The United Nations recognised that right to self-determination in 1947. But from the moment Israel declared independence, its neighbours sought its destruction. Despite the vast expanse of the Arab world, they could not tolerate a Jewish state on a sliver of land roughly the size of Wales.
And rather than help resolve the refugee crisis created by that conflict, the international community established a system through UNRWA under which refugee status could be passed down through generations, perpetuating the Palestinian refugee question rather than resolving it.
My own father was a Holocaust survivor from Poland. Yet I am not a refugee, nor would I dream of claiming to be one. Why should the descendants of Palestinians be treated so differently?
When British India was partitioned in 1947, millions were displaced. Yet the international community did not establish a permanent, hereditary refugee system to perpetuate that conflict indefinitely.
Israel, meanwhile, has spent nearly eight decades having to defend its very existence. Peace has been offered, rejected, negotiated and repeatedly undermined. Whatever the failures on both sides, the Jewish state's fundamental right to exist should never have been in question.
And this is what you, Piers, seem so spectacularly incapable of understanding.
When Israel comes under attack, Jews around the world don't simply see another foreign conflict. We see the potential destruction of the one place on earth that guarantees we will never again be defenceless.
When we witness the explosion of antisemitism, particularly online, so often disguised as righteous opposition to Israel, we recognise something terrifyingly familiar.
We've seen this movie before. We know how it ends.
The difference today is that Israel exists. Its people are armed, proud and determined. Jews will never again be marched helplessly to their deaths without the means to resist.
And the Islamist extremists who openly call for Israel's destruction make no secret of their wider ambitions. Israel is not their final destination. The West is next.
Yet you seem to treat all this as another opportunity for confrontation, controversy and clicks.
You present yourself as the fearless, impartial referee between competing opinions, but there is a profound difference between genuine journalism and providing a lucrative platform for those who demonise the world's only Jewish state.
Of course Israel can be criticised. Its government can be challenged. Its military decisions can be scrutinised. But there is a world of difference between holding a democracy accountable and relentlessly feeding a narrative that questions its legitimacy while ignoring the historical trauma and existential fears of the Jewish people.