It’s unsurprising. Dmitry lived through the entirety of the month-long Battle of Bucha. Russian forces entered the area in late February and captured the city on 12 March, occupying it until the Ukrainian army forced them to retreat almost three weeks later. Dmitry remembers the day the Russians rolled in. He had gone to a family apartment in the city that had been shelled. It now had a huge crater where the living room wall once stood, and looking down into the surrounding streets, he saw two Ukrainian men running from Russian soldiers who were shooting at them. Dmitry had served with the Kyiv territorial defence at Irpin just 5km away and guessed that the men were soldiers: they were in civilian clothes but running in the irregular patterns the military teaches people to avoid gunfire. It made no difference. The Russians shot them down.

They were the first people Dmitry saw killed in Bucha, but not the last. “They were,” he tells me, “the only people I ever saw the Russians kill who weren’t unquestionably civilians.”

Dmitry describes the invasion without a hint of emotion. One morning, he woke up to find a Russian armoured column of roughly 250 vehicles trundling through the city. Most of the territorial defence had retreated to Kyiv because they had nothing but hand grenades left — certainly not the javelins or British NLAWs needed to fight tanks. But he decided to stay in his hometown: he thought he could be of more use there.

And so began life under occupation. Using his phone, he was able to talk to the outside world, which was crucial given food supplies were perilously low. One woman who had fled the city told him to go to her chicken coops where he would find fresh eggs. Another called him to say where she had stored sugar, and so on.

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During these daily trips, Dmitry had to cross a number of Russian checkpoints. A garrulous and energetic man, he made sure to always chat to the Russian soldiers at each crossing (the officers, on the other hand, just looked at him like he was dirt). It was nothing major, just small talk. But it all helped to create a bond so he could move freely about the city. He also always took his dog with him to make sure he was recognisable even from a distance.

During these trips, Dmitry was able to get up close to the Russian army — and he was shocked by what he saw. “They were desperate,” he told me. “They’d been given enough food and cigarettes to last two weeks when they entered Ukraine and then been basically abandoned. They had to find everything themselves. They had nothing.”

Dmitry thinks the army may even have entered the city solely because they were so desperate for supplies. When they rolled in, he watched tanks break down garden fences and drive right up to houses and apartments. The soldiers would then just get out and go inside, emerging shortly after with what they needed. “They just went in and took whatever they wanted,” he told me.

The war crimes began almost immediately. One of the first things the Russians did was to find Ukrainian soldiers who had fought against separatist forces in the Donbas in 2014. There were eight of them. The Russians rounded them up and executed them by the glass factory in the suburb of Stekolka.

When it became clear that the Russians didn’t intend to bury their victims, Dimitry stepped in, digging graves in nearby fields as the Russians wouldn’t let them use the cemeteries. But alongside Ukrainians, Russians were also being killed — indeed, the more this happened the more brutal the soldiers became. “I offered to bury them as well,” he tells me. “‘We will bury them – they smell bad,’ I said. But they refused. They just put them in piles. They didn’t even take them when they left.”

Speaking to Dmitry, what shines through is the overwhelming sense of impunity. Norms of society and decency were not suspended or ignored — they were willingly trampled upon. In the first days of the occupation, Dmitry saw Russian soldiers approach apartments and toss grenades into them. They murdered civilians without any care, or for any reason. They shelled buildings and shot up cars for fun. They did all this every morning — these boy soldiers, many of whom were not more than 20. It was Lord of Flies, but with heavy artillery.

***

Arkadiy Koval, a 64-year journalism professor who spent five years at the Ukrainian Humanities Institute in Bucha, almost broke down when he saw the columns of Russians invade the city. From his 20th-floor apartment, he filmed the vehicles snaking through the city centre. He, too, saw the desperate state of the invaders: he saw them throwing grenades to destroy the casing around the electricity generators they needed.

The serious shortages of food, electricity and medicine swiftly became a problem as his 22-year-old daughter Darina was eight-months pregnant and recovering from an operation last year to remove a brain tumour. It was terrifying. The first week was simply a question of survival; they were under constant bombardment, and they hid in the basement of the building when they weren’t scavenging for supplies. Later on, though, a neighbour told them that the Russians had come in and killed one of the people hiding there, leaving the body there to rot. So they avoided it: choosing to cower in their apartment instead.

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“Every day my son-in-law and I would go looking for food,” he tells me. “We would drive onto the Warshavske highway and each day we saw cars that had been destroyed by shells — we saw several that had white flags on them. Every day there were more and more destroyed cars — many contained dead people.”

The Russians ordered civilians to wear a piece of white fabric on their shoulder — people would generally turn their Covid masks inside out — to signal they were residents. Failure to do so would mean being shot in the knee or the foot, though one day a few soldiers shot at Andriy, Arkadiy’s son-in-law, just for the hell of it. The family needed Lamictal for Danera and fed the request along to some volunteers but heard nothing. Later, they found out the volunteers had been killed.

***

Things were getting worse for Dmitry, too. Stekolka, especially the glass factory, had gained a reputation as a place where evil things happen. One day, he went with a friend to pick up some wooden pallets to turn into firewood — and ran straight into a bunch of Russian soldiers. With them stood 25 shiny, brand-new vehicles, clearly something they were not supposed to see. The soldiers grabbed the two of them and shut them in the cupboard that houses the factory fire extinguishers. They were held there for 16 hours, within earshot of the soldiers who were radioing their commanders to ask what should be done with their two prisoners. “Do whatever you want,” they were told.

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In the end, the soldiers let them out and told them to run, but not before a soldier asked Dmitry: “When are you Ukrainians going to overthrow your government? Ukraine started this war.”

“It’s amazing,” he told me. “They thought that if we can only overthrow our president the war will end.” He continued: “These soldiers looked about 20 years old. This means they were 12 when the war in Donbas started. They’ve grown up listening to Russian propaganda. They’re totally brainwashed.”

For now, though, the Russians have gone. Ukrainian soldiers walk through the streets of Bucha once more. The city is liberated, but the fear remains. “Don’t use my real name for the article,” Dmitry tells me as he says goodbye. “Just in case the Russians come back.”

A similar anxiety struck me with the recent borrowing of the term “apartheid” to describe Israel. “There is an undercurrent of disrespect directed to African people coming from the pro-Palestinian groupings, through the appropriation of our culture and lived experiences” claims South African, Vuyolwethu Mkhuseli Xulu. “The term ‘Apartheid’ has been taken from us with its true meaning being lost in translation.” He concludes: “Each people’s struggles should be addressed in their specificity and not blended with the experiences of others.” Well said.

On Tuesday, the broadly well-respected human rights organisation B’Tselem declared Israel to be an “apartheid regime”. “B’Tselem has come to this conclusion with a heavy heart and the utmost seriousness. After 32 years, it is not easy to make a paradigm shift. We live and work within Israeli society, we are an integral part of it, and we are well aware of the recoiling and revulsion that this word evokes in the public discourse,” writes B’Tselem board member, Orly Noy.

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“Apartheid” used to be a taboo word that was only employed on the extreme Left, by those whose intention was to de-legitimise the very existence of Israel. And there will be those who will see the same aim at work within B’Tselem. But whether or not this is the case, it is also worth asking what is so different now, such that a body like B’Tselem has felt moved to change its language so dramatically and after over three decades of involvement in the region?

There is no doubt that the situation within the occupied territories continues to be desperate for Palestinians. “Israel may not have Jews-only benches, but it does have Jews-only roads in places like Hebron,” writes Noy. Within the occupied territories, very different laws apply to Jews and Palestinians, different rules about travel, different rules about where you can live. The occupation is a tragedy.

But the situation can be explained thus: Israel is a flourishing, fully functioning democracy for all its citizens within the Green Line, the historic internationally accepted borders of the state, plus an unfortunate occupation of the Palestinian territories — sadly needed for security reasons. Israel has a right to protect itself from external, existential threat, and occupation is a short-term — albeit overly long — pending situation waiting for a two-state peace settlement where both Israel and Palestine can exist secure within their own borders. In other words: Israel good, occupation bad. This is the story that many Israelis, especially progressive ones, have told themselves about their home. I subscribe to it myself.

But the so-called “paradigm shift” described by B’Tselem is that this explanation is now increasingly regarded as a cover story for what is, in effect, a one-state “solution” in which Israel is now the de facto government of all the land between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan, and a government that does not allow equal rights to all those who live within this extended territory. B’Tselem argues that the rules under which Palestinians live are not a temporary measure driven by the needs of security, but a permanent situation and becoming more obviously permanent every day. In effect, B’Tselem is formally calling time on the two-state solution.

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I remember, several years ago, the American Palestinian political activist and businessman, Sam Bahour, explaining a conversation he had with his daughter. She admonished him for the failure of his life’s work to achieve a separate Palestinian homeland. “Never going to happen, Dad,” was the guts of her response. And she didn’t much care about what name was given to the place in which she lived or the flag that flew over her government buildings. Not interested in Palestinian nationalism, she just wanted the same access to medical care and freedom of movement as her Jewish Israeli neighbours. In other words, she wanted to transform the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a nationalist one — the two sides seeking to become self-determining national governments — into a human rights struggle within a single state. And it is in this context that a word like “apartheid” begins to have increasing purchase.

An example of the daughter’s healthcare point is now being made with respect to Covid.

Israel is leading the world at vaccinating its citizens. But “Palestinians excluded from Israeli Covid vaccine rollout as jabs go to settlers” was the Guardian’s take. And yes, the Israelis are indeed vaccinating Israeli citizens — all of them: Jews and Arabs — and not others, not those in a separate political dispensation. And this latter point really matters. If the Palestinian Territories are indeed a part of Israel, then the fact that Palestinians in places such as Nablus are not being vaccinated by the Israelis is a terrible business. But if the Palestinian territories are their own authority, then it is a rather different thing.

Yes, an occupying force does have responsibilities to those under its control. And Israel has indeed offered to help the Palestinian Authorities, whose legal responsibility it is. As one Palestinian official put it: “We are not dependent on the Israeli Defence Ministry. We have our own government and Ministry of Health, and they are making huge efforts to get the vaccine.”

Again, it all turns on the question of whether Israel is the government of all the territory or not. And most Israelis do not want a single state from the river to the sea, not least because such a state would contain an inbuilt Palestinian majority. The problem has often been put like this. An extended, greater Israel can be only two of these three things: 1, Jewish; 2, Democratic; or 3, Safe. If it chooses to be wholly multi-cultural, it can be democratic and safe. But given the demographics, this inevitably means that Israel will end up no longer being a distinctive homeland for the Jewish people. But if it wants to maintain the dominance of the Jewish population, it can only be safe if it becomes some version of an apartheid regime, imposed by force. Or it can give up on the idea of a greater Israel.

“I have a single word argument against the one-state solution”, Ari Shavit, the Israeli writer for Haaretz, explained to the Guardian editorial board, back when I was a member: “Iraq”. By which he meant that no state with such massive internal tensions between rival ethnic or religious groups could possibly survive. A one state solution would be a recipe for civil war. It would rip itself apart.

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The two-state solution may not be going anywhere fast. But it is not dead because the alternative is far worse. And whatever one thinks of Benjamin Netanyahu — and I am not a fan myself — it has to be acknowledged that the recent peace deals with the UEA, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco have changed the situation in ways that would have seemed inconceivable until very recently.

“There is no solution for Israel other than a two-state solution. It does not exist,” says the incoming US President, Joe Biden. He is right. And those of us who love the place will continue to hold out the hope that others are listening — or can be made to do so. Because the real lesson of Kristallnacht is that Jews have a need, and every right, to a place of safety — the man who invaded the Capitol building wearing a shirt proclaiming “Camp Auschwitz” is a chilling reminder of that. And the place of safety is called Israel.