Collecting Postage Stamps

 AMONG THE various eccentricities that have remained with me for long, the one my friends consider the most peculiar is collecting postage stamps. I can’t claim to be an expert philatelist, and my interest in my multiple stamp albums is often sporadic. Yet, whenever I happen to be in London on a Saturday, I try to make my way to the Embankment Tube station and walk a short distance to a basement where stamp collectors, coin collectors and accumulators of military memorabilia gather to buy and sell. The Saturday fair is where I pick up bargains and the missing stamps of my George VI collection.

On October 11 (last Saturday), as I finished looking over the albums of the dealers and prepared to walk across to a restaurant in Aldwych where I was meeting my wife for lunch, I came across clusters of young people who had gathered for their Saturday ritual— demonstrating in London in support of Hamas in Gaza. These are the faithful who have been gathering each Saturday since that horrible day in October 2023 when Hamas invaded the part of Israel adjoining the Gaza Strip, massacred some 1,200 people who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, and abducted nearly 250 people as hostages. It is a commentary on their misplaced politics that throughout the past two years, these protesters never shed tears for those innocent Israelis (and a few foreigners) who were taken hostage by Hamas. Their sympathies were unequivocally with the followers of the late Yahya Sinwar who had masterminded the attacks of October 7, 2023 in the belief that the turbulence would lead to a mass uprising and a military assault on seven fronts against Israel.

That is history. However, on October 11, there was widespread expectation that the diplomacy of President Donald Trump—said to be in quest of the Nobel Peace Prize— was going to yield results and lead to the release of the 20 or so hostages that were still with Hamas. In other words, the prudent thing to do was to wait and watch and see what came out of Trump’s visit to Israel and Egypt the next day. Instead, London witnessed a huge turnout of people—estimates ranged from two to three lakh—who were in effect denouncing any peace deal and calling for the complete destruction of Israel. As I saw the (mainly) young people wearing the black-and-white keffiyeh as a statement of political fashion, it was apparent that these people wouldn’t last a day in the conflict zones of Gaza. Yet, these were the people shouting for more blood to be spilt. Their perversity was unbelievable.

Nor were these demonstrations in solidarity with modern-day expressions of the same impulses that had shaped the youth revolt against the US war in Vietnam in the 1960s. Many of those marching for Gaza were plain and simple anti-Semites. They had inherited a long tradition of anti-Semitism that was part of the European intellectual landscape and supplemented it with the distaste for the Jewish success story in both Israel and elsewhere. What else can explain the unwillingness of the demonstrators to suspend their protests by even a single day when a crazy jihadist of Syrian origin went berserk in Manchester and attacked Jewish worshippers outside a synagogue?

I don’t know if the Trump initiative that has led to the release of all those Israelis in Hamas captivity will guarantee enduring peace, or just four or five years of a breather. The Arab states have committed themselves to working with Israel to build a zone of prosperity in the Middle East. Given half a chance, the Arab sheikhs would quite happily embrace a peaceful future where they can enjoy their wealth. They have always regarded Palestinians as troublemakers. The problem is with a Palestinian leadership that has always been egged on by radical elements such as Colonel Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, the Assad family and the Marxist rabble in the West. Although most of the Arab dictators are now history, the pressure from the Marxist-Muslim alliance prompted countries such as the UK, France and Australia to quite needlessly recognise a bogus Palestinian state in the week prior to the peace accord. I hope these governments realise that they have ended up looking very silly.

Overall, I believe the world deserves a break from Palestine. Saturday with stamp collectors is preferable to Saturdays encouraging religious bigotry.