Those of us who stand vigil every Saturday morning in Coleford Town Centre see a substantial increase in drivers tooting their support for Gaza.

Some sections of the British Media are now beginning to report what is happening. This underlines the power of the media – and its negligence in allowing this disgraceful genocide to go on so poorly reported.

Criticism of the Israeli Government from Britain, Canada and France has led to the Israeli Prime Minister calling Kier Starmer a ‘supporter of Hamas’ and (predictably) an ‘antisemite’! This while Britain still supplies Israel with arms and the RAF fly’s its spy planes every day over Gaza providing targeting information to the Israeli air-force!!

It is a great irony that those of us in Jewish Voice for Labour have been accused in the past by Starmer of being ‘antisemites’ precisely because we have criticised Israel! The allegation is a slur used to shut people up. Now he knows what it feels like!!

Starmer had kowtowed to the pro-Israel lobby. He had their full support as he expelled tens of thousands of Labour Party members as ‘antisemites’ because they dared criticise Israel! The Tory Party and others – out of ignorance and opportunism – joined in as did the establishment media.

The genocide in Gaza has silenced them. It is the worst slaughter that has happened since the end of the second war filmed in real time - concentrated in an area of land a lot smaller than the Forest of Dean on 2 million people. Horrific numbers of children have been maimed and murdered.

In Germany – the country that perpetrated the Holocaust – no discussion even faintly critical of Israel has been allowed but now even there the genocide in Gaza is forcing itself onto the agenda.

In the USA, where the pro-Israel lobby funds politicians right across the whole political spectrum, President Trump supports the levelling of Gaza and the ‘liquidation’ of its people without shame. Pictures of slaughtered children are dismissed as pro-Hamas propaganda. Despite this, what is really happening is getting through and hundreds of thousands of people – many of them Jews – demonstrate against it.

Israel has always sheltered behind the memory of the Holocaust. The Victim card is played ruthlessly and repeatedly to stifle any criticism of it alongside the allegation of ‘antisemitism’. It markets itself as the Land of the Jews and what it does as being in the name of Jews. It justifies its slaughter of Palestinians as being necessary for its survival. It is nonsense. We need to stop the slaughter and bring to justice the thugs responsible for it.

The iconic pictures of the starving survivors of Belson and Auschwitz will now be displayed next to those of the starving and slaughtered children of Gaza. The people that gave rise to the slogan ‘Never Again’ will forever be marked as doing to another people what the Nazi’s did to them.

And those of us who watch this horror vacillate between rage and tears.