I was chatting up a handsome Egyptian, he looked like Montgomery Clift’s better-looking brother, when I said that I’d left London seven years ago to move to Tel Aviv. Within a minute he said it was too cold and moved inside. I hesitate before I connect these two moments, and, really, the night air was cool, and I was boxing above my weight, but was my revealed Jewishness the real reason he walked away?

You may accuse me of paranoia, but since 7 October antisemitism has been liberated from the shadows, it is now too easy for people to express their hatred of Jews, and there are unsettling echos of the 1930s. Rather than showing sympathy for the torture, murder and abduction, the world is baring its teeth at Israel.

My father was an inmate of concentration camps, in Hebrew they are called death camps, which seems a more honest name, and was the only survivor of his family. Three years after his liberation he fought for Israel in the War of Independence. He once told me that he’d seen brutality done by the Arab army that shocked him, even after life in the camps. I didn’t press him for details, but I think we can now imagine the sort of things he meant, as awful as that is.

When I was 14 I was taken to Yad Vashem, near Jerusalem, Israel’s memorial to the murdered 6 million, and over fifty years later I’m still haunted by the enlarged photographs of mountains of shoes, and eyeglasses, and emaciated corpses. I push them out of my mind with only partial success, they are part of my history, embedded in Jewish DNA. So when terrorists inflict such violence on us a deep shudder runs through our bones, a mixture of fear, horror and sadness, and is another layer to their cruelty. We are never distant enough from people who want to kill us, and are reminded of this too often.

On that terrible Saturday it didn’t take long for the contrarians and doubters to pipe up, the morally vacuous defending the indefensible. First that the barbaric attack was a lie, there had been no violence. Then, once the snuff films had been seen many millions of times, that it wasn’t Hamas, but Israel murdering its own, using actors to portray the victims, or that Israel had brought this on itself, the actual perpetrators forgotten, and without blame.

Many thousands march in Central London, New York, all over the world, chanting “Death to Israel,” and, “Death to Jews.” They call for my extinction, yet they haven’t heard even one of my jokes. They illustrate well how anti-Zionism and antisemitism are synonyms as they demand a world-wide intifada, and show no shame for doing so.

They complain that the Israeli offence is dispropotionate. But there are 15 million Jews in the world, 0.2% of the population, and one tiny Jewish nation, and 1.8 billion muslims, with 49 countries just for them, which seems disproportionate in itself. Is the decapitation of babies proportionate? What’s disproportinate is their ugly hated of Jews.

I said to my friend David, who isn’t Jewish, that I take it all personally. “Me, too,” he replied, as any decent person would, and I love him for saying it.

Philippe couldn’t stop his Jewish friend Bruno telling him some of the awful details of 7 October, less than a month ago. He turns off the radio whenever a report of it comes on, and I really can’t blame him. I wish I hadn’t watched the clips or read the reports, I wish I didn’t know. The acts are the stuff of nightmares, ostentatiously cruel, and deeply upsetting.

Olivier, who is 70, a nice man, and not stupid, asked me if Christians can live freely in Israel. “Of course,” I said, surprised by his question, “as can Arabs, Druze, Hare Krishnas, anyone peaceful. Indeed, there is a working mosque in the middle of Tel Aviv. They can marry who they like, become judges, or doctors, or street sweepers if they want.” I don’t know if Olivier was entirely satisfied by my answer, such is the power of the antisemites’ poison.

So many lies and distortions are told about Israel that I’m not surprised people don’t know what to think. The anti-Zionists accuse it of things that they themselves are guilty of, and the world is ready to believe them. The lies have caught on at universities and in progressive circles. Clips of furious, pink-haired people ripping posters of hostages from walls make me despair. I’m sure they think they’re doing the right thing, that they consider themselves virtuous, but humming along to Imagine is not the same as working for peace.

I don’t wish for the death of anyone, not even those men who threw a baby into an oven before turning it on, or tied peoples’ hands behind their back before setting them alight, and then called home to tell their families what they’d done, and were greeted by their fathers with pride, like they’d won a football match, or something.

The pictures of Israeli military action in Gaza are terrifying, and I fear for the lives of the hostages, as well as Palestinians, even if they celebrated the atrocities, praising Allah as they handed out sweeties. To them, it was a good and just action. If they can call murdered babies ‘settler-colonialists’, I don’t see why we can’t call them ‘genocidal terrorists’, but name-calling helps nothing.

I meant this post to be about how I left London for Tel Aviv on 2 November 2016. I believe in Israel, and will always support it, but living there didn’t suit me. Exactly a year later I left there expecting to live in London again, but I couldn’t settle. Then on 2 November 2018 I moved to Paris. Thursday will be my fifth anniversary of living here, but I’m not in any mood to celebrate.

These are dark, frightening times. I feel anxious all day, for myself, for Israel, and for the world.

The other evening an American tried to argue ‘both sides are bad’ with me. He didn’t want to offend anyone, yet his attempt at even-handedness wounded me. If Gaza is an ‘open prison’, they have shown us why the fences are necessary. I cannot see how there is, in any way, moral equivalence between border controls and murdering young peaceniks at a music festival, and I have had enough of people saying there is.