GAZA – Part 2

It’s one thing to read about World War II and the Holocaust. It’s just a story about something that happened a long time ago, as is all history. If you have visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, you may have a slightly better understanding of what actually happened, but even that experience is nothing like having lived through that period in our history, even if you were very young, as I was. What the Nazis did to the Jews, not only in Germany, but in every country they occupied, which was most of Europe, is so unimaginably horrific it would make the worst horror film you can ever imagine look like Barbie. And the worst part was that nobody, not the German people and not the rest of the world, did anything to stop them, at least not until the rest of the world was attacked by the Nazis or their allies, Italy and Japan.

In 1936, when the Olympics were held in Berlin and the Nazis refused to allow Jews to compete, the rest of the world left their Jewish athletes home, showed up and competed anyway. In 1938, while the Nazis were rounding up Jews, confiscating their property and sending them to ghettos and from there to concentration camps, British and French Prime Ministers Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier met with Adolf Hitler and signed the Munich Pact, which allowed Germany to annex Czechoslovakia, which they claimed would “guarantee peace in our time”.

After we had learned the true scope and horror of the Holocaust and the 6 million Jews who were enslaved, brutalized, used for experiments and murdered, the free world swore to “Never let that happen again.” However, in 1972, at the Olympic Games in Munich, West Germany, a dozen athletes and coaches on Israel’s Olympic Team were taken hostage by a group of terrorists affiliated with Black September, a militant offshoot of the Palestinian group Fatah. Israel asked permission to enter West Germany and rescue the athletes and coaches. They were denied permission. The rescue was botched by the West Germans and the terrorists killed all of the Israelis they held hostage and then themselves.

Even today, when you listen to Israel’s allies and the United Nations talk about what is happening in Gaza, it’s all about telling Israel what it should or shouldn’t be doing to end this crisis. Declare a cease fire. Allow more humanitarian aid.  They are acting as if Israel were the aggressor in this war and not the victim. Hamas is the elected government of Gaza and nobody is telling them what they should or shouldn’t be doing to protect and help the people who elected them. Stop using its citizens as shields. Stop stealing th humanitarian aid intended for its starving and injured citizens. If I were Israel, I doubt I would see this as a very balanced approach to the problem. It wouldn’t surprise me if you felt the same way.

I can understand if you still have concerns about the collateral damage being done in Gaza (non-combatants suffering, being injured and dying), If so, please consider the following facts:

·         The collateral damage numbers are being provided by Hamas and have not been verified by an independent third party.

·         The single most important factor contributing to collateral damage in Gaza is that Hamas is using Gazan citizens as a shield and stealing as much as they can of the humanitarian aid being sent to help the citizens of Gaza and using that aid to support their soldiers

·        And, as a matter of perspective, the absolute, all-time, work record for collateral damage belongs to us, the United States of America, and Israel is nowhere close to breaking that record. Let me remind you. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in1941, which is how the United States got into World War ll, they attacked the naval base there. They did not attack the surrounding community. In contrast, when we ended the war, we did it by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, neither of which had significant military installations. It is estimated our bombs immediately killed more than 100,000 people and injured at least another 100,000 people, the vast majority of whom were non-combatant men, women and children; and those numbers don’t include the tens of thousands of people who died in the months and years that followed from injuries sustained during the bombing or radiation poisoning caused by the bombs.  We did that so that our troops would not suffer the high casualty rate that would have resulted if they had invaded Japan to end the war. And you know what? Nobody accused us of genocide or war crimes. Again, if I were Israel, I would likely see that as a double standard and find it both demeaning and unfair. You probably would feel the same way.

Given this context, it should not surprise you that the Jewish people in Israel might not have a lot of confidence in the rest of the world acting in Israel’s best interests at this particular time. It might appear to them that the “advice” coming from its allies and the United Nations is based more on keeping the conflict from escalating and possibly forcing them to get militarily involved, than on what is best for Israel and its people. If that is what they are wondering, now that you know the context, you really can’t blame them because that is exactly what has happened to them several times before; and it didn’t work out very well for them any of those other times.

Despite the fact that the Jewish people have been among the most persecuted people in all of recorded history, their culture and religion have survived for a very long time, as evidenced by the fact that we are currently in year 5794 of the Jewish calendar. Their continued survival was seriously threatened by the Nazis and continues to be threatened by persistent, and in some places escalating, anti-Semitism, especially among its neighbors. As I mentioned at the end of Part 1of this post, these threats have forced the Jewish State of Israel to become a warrior culture in order to secure the continued survival of the Jewish people. They have become a nation and a people committed to doing whatever they need to do to survive, regardless of what the rest of the world may think. In other words, they have learned their lesson and will no longer rely on anyone else to save them.

Make no mistake about it. Hamas and the people who lived in what was formerly called Palestine, who continue to support Hamas, are “the bad guys” and they need to be stopped. Israel and its Armed Defense Force (ADF) are “the good guys” and they will stop Hamas, regardless of the cost in theirs or anyone else’s lives. If the rest of the free world doesn’t want to get militarily involved, that’s OK, but they need to, at least, continue to support Israel and stay out of their way.