Why, this Remembrance Sunday, I’ll be wearing a poppy – and a Star of David

For years, I refused to wear a poppy and boycotted two-minute silences – but if ever we needed a moment’s break from the hysterical shouting and toxic name-calling prompted by Hamas’s terrorist attacks on Israel, it is now, says Mark Honigsbaum

Paul Cummins’s ‘Weeping Window’ of poppies, at the Tower of London (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

According to the art critic Arthur Danto, “we erect monuments so that we shall always remember, and build memorials so that we shall never forget”. But what of an edifice that is both a monument and a memorial? That is the mystery and – to my mind – the magic of the Cenotaph.

Dedicated to “The Glorious Dead” of the First World War and others, the Cenotaph can be seen, on the one hand, as a symbol of heroism and sacrifice, and on the other, as a reminder of the terrible toll that wars exact on soldiers and civilians alike – something we should “never forget”.

But, as became evident in 1920 – when, during the acute political tensions that culminated in the General Strike six years later, an estimated 1.2 million Britons flocked to the Cenotaph to pay their respects to the war dead on the second anniversary of the Armistice – the Cenotaph is also the closest thing Britain has to a national holy site.