I'm finding it all to be a bit too upsetting to look at, to be honest. I mean, look at me, non-religious person getting all upset about something that barely concerns him. But what else can I do but express myself on here when I'm looking at images from over 1,000 miles away that are just so terrible, and are now having ripple effects in the UK like I've never seen before. Last week Suella Braverman was rightly trounced for saying we're a failed multicultural society but I worry so much that a lot of the reasons she was wrong 10 days ago are about to be contradicted.
My fiancée and her family are Muslim (fiancée is non-practising) and live in north London, where things are awfully tense right now. Three Jewish schools in their area have had to shut down. There's Muslim women ripping Israeli missing posters off the wall in Mornington Crescent. My Muslim work colleague has been deeply affected by this all week. I've got other work colleagues who are Jewish, Israeli, Muslim, you name it, who stand on all sides of this issue have done for years - even Jewish folk who are pro-Palestine and Muslim friends who can't stand Hamas.
But this could be the moment everything goes past the point of no return. Since I've been following events in Gaza, I've never known it get like this before, and now the effects are really spreading throughout the diaspora. I've known my friends and colleagues for years and they're just ordinary people who go about their lives. My Muslim and Jewish colleagues chat to each other every day, we all support City and sit together at City sometimes, we chat and eat lunch and work together. Now I don't know if they're all going to be able to look each other in the eye.
What we're seeing this week has been so long in the making that once it blows up we might not be able to go back to how it was before and any hope of proper peace - which was already unlikely - has been squandered. I really don't know what the solution is. Is it possible to make sure people from the south of Gaza can be granted safe passage into northern Africa? Can a temporary ceasefire be arranged so that the families of those killed at the music festival can observe shiva for their loved ones? What happens after this big flashpoint calms down?
I like to think I could do something but, what?