Genocide, Not

PHOTO: ABED RAHIM KHATIB/FLASH90

Iassume that my custom of immersing myself in Holocaust literature on Tishah B’Av is widely shared. While that experience may not help me to fully understand what was lost with the destruction of the Beis Hamikdash, at least it puts me in touch with the consequences of that destruction and the history of our long exile.

And because I have read so many Holocaust memoirs, as well as a good deal of the scholarly literature, such as the two volumes of Rebbetzin Esther Farbstein’s Hidden in Thunder, there are few things that so anger me as the accusation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza today. Do any of those making the charge have even a glancing knowledge of what was done by the Nazis and many willing collaborators throughout Eastern Europe to the Jews of Europe?

Of the Jewish populations of smaller towns executed in mass graves they were forced to dig themselves? Of the train cars from larger Jewish centers, in which it was nearly impossible to draw a breath of the air rancid with the smell of human refuse, much less to lie down or even sit, headed toward the death camps in which as many as 10,000 Jews a day were gassed? Of the sadistic tortures conceived by the SS commandants — e.g., the four-hour early-morning roll calls in freezing weather, with only the most threadbare uniforms for protection, and under the ever-present threat of a clubbing or a shot in the head for the slightest untoward movement?

Surely those flinging the charge of genocide know nothing of the systematic destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis, or they could not employ the term “genocide” first used by the Jewish jurist and Holocaust survivor Raphael Lemkin to describe the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group” with reference to Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza. Are Palestinians in Gaza being rounded up and slaughtered in cold blood?