8 Ways In Which Gaza is Not Like the Warsaw Ghetto

This is supposed to be a blog about theology - which is usually what's predominantly on my mind.  In the last few weeks (for obvious reasons) I've been rather distracted from that and as such have been thinking about other things.  I have seen way too many comparisons between Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto for my liking - one that strikes me as particularly pernicious and wrong.  As such, here are the first 8 ways that came to my mind regarding the great dissimilarity of the two populations.

1.  The Warsaw Ghetto was designed to lock Jews in.  In October of 1940 the Germans ordered the Jews of Warsaw to build (at their own expense) a walled off and barb-wired section of the city.  Anyone attempting to leave could be shot on sight.  Gaza has no such features as Gazans regularly come to Israel for medical treatment. Israel never required them to live there and would not protest if a Gazan desired to emigrate. 

2.  The Jews of the Ghetto lived on a starvation diet.  The average daily amount of calories consumed in the ghetto was 184.  Consequently, many Jews, including many children, died of starvation.  Gaza, on the other hand, receives thousands of tons of food and medical supplies from Israel itself through the Kerem Shalom crossing - even in wartime.  No one is starving.

3.  The Warsaw Ghetto received no international aid.  The Jews of Warsaw were on their own - which is why most of them died.  Gaza, however, is the recipient of extremely generous amounts of money.  In 2013, the US alone allocated 440 million. Sadly, much of this assistance seems to have been used to buy rockets and build terror infrastructure. 

4.  The Warsaw Ghetto was ultimately a way station to the extermination camps.  An estimated 300,000 out of a total population of 400,000 were either gassed in Treblinka, died in the ghetto uprising or died of starvation.  While the Jews were actual victims of genocide, there is (quite obviously) no such plan for Gaza.  In fact, if the Israelis are attempting genocide on the Palestinian population they are doing a very poor job as their population has actually increased by 2 million in the last 20 years.

5.  The Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto had no state sponsor of weaponry.  They were able to fashion some simple incendiary devices and smuggled in some guns and bombs which they used to stage their well known uprising in 1943.  The Hamas rulers in Gaza receive thousands of short and long range rockets, automatic riffles, anti-tank rockets and mortars supplied by the Iranians.  Many of their fighters have undergone advanced military training.  In short, Gaza has a professional army - one that the Jews in Warsaw lacked.

6.  The Jews in the Ghetto had no diplomatic backing.  There was no UN or EU or Arab League to stand up for them and decry their inhumane treatment.  The Gazans have the ardent backing of each of these organizations and many others and are able to parlay world sympathies into leverage for more favorable cease-fire agreements, increased funding and as a tool to harm Israel's international standing.

7.  The Jews in Poland didn't do anything to the Germans or Poles.  Polish Jews had been quiet and productive members of Polish society for 1000 years.  Hamas, by contrast, was founded in 1987 for the express purpose of killing Jews as is stated in their charter in 12 places.  So whereas there was no logic to keeping the Jews separate from the Polish population, there is excellent reason for the Israelis to maintain strong and high fences between themselves and Hamas.

8.  When the Germans attacked the Ghetto, they systematically annihilated it block by block until nothing was left standing.  When the Israelis counter-attack Gaza they do it though an unprecedented series of warnings via leaflets, phone calls, text messages and the like.  So while the Germans did everything they could to raze every building, the IDF exerts the same type of effort to preserve them. 

In short, Gaza is nothing like the Warsaw Ghetto.

Israel Haters and the Art Of Lying

Two days ago I made the mistake of responding to an anti-Israel tweet written by Glen Greenwald - a NYT's best selling author with about 63,000 Twitter followers.  I was surprised that he quickly responded - with another unreasonable tweet, but considerably more surprised by the hours long torrent of unhinged, antisemitic vitriol that landed in my Twitter notification box after that.  Here's a small sampling of what was said:

"Rabbi, one day will come we will come from Pakistan to kill your generation."

"you are a liar. Beaches and UN schools. Hospitals. Israel is targeting civilians. No weapons found."

"The reason u can justify this is because u r not a man of God, u have no soul. A disgrace to real Jews"

"U are ethnically cleansing Palestine!"

"Sorry to say this but You are no different than the Terrorists."

"No believes the thoroughly discredited shtick that "Israel kills innocent civilians by accident."


These individuals are lairs, or they have swallowed lies hook line and sinker and either lack the ability or willingness to see straight anymore.  They have had lies hammered into their heads for so long by the other side - one that is so brazen, so wholly audacious about the lies it tells - that it has managed to fully invert the truth so that good is now seen as evil and horrible, cruel and malicious depravity is seen as a reasonable response to the "crimes" of the Jews.

Hamas and their ilk are truly consummate, pathological deceivers.  If they were Pinocchio their collective schnoz would extend around the sun and back.  They would lie about the time of day.  They would happily lie to their grandmother's face if it helped "the cause."  They probably lie to themselves in order to justify their sick, repulsive and cruel barbarity.

So, sadly for anyone who values life, truth, justice or any value of the civilized world, they have managed to cause - among other things - people to believe that Israel (ie: the Jews) is guilty of:

Ethnic Cleansing

There is a cruel irony in this one in that the only people who the Jews actually did ethnically cleanse from Gaza were...Jews - uprooting each and every one of them (8,000) in 2005.  No credit of any sort is given for this intensely painful concession and strangely, despite Gaza being Judenrein for nine years, Jews are still saddled with the charge of:

Occupation

Despite the fact that Palestine was solely the name of a geographic region and one given by the Romans specifically in order to distance the Jews from the ancestral homeland and despite the fact that there has never existed a Palestinian government or leader that governed or even controlled that area, we are routinely led to believe that this people has been peacefully dwelling there for thousands of years - until the arrival of cynical, displaced Jews from Europe who stole and usurped that aboriginal people's rightful ownership.  This one sticks like Crazy Glue.  Despite the fact that there has always been a Jewish presence there, despite many cubic tons of archaeological evidence linking our presence there to three millennium ago, despite the fact that the land was largely uninhabited swamp land and sand until the Jews began reclaiming it in the 19th Century, despite our being "given" the land by the UN in 1948 and subsequently defended (and expanded) in various defensive wars we are told time and again that it is not ours and that our very presence there is a crime.

Genocide

Astounding.  The only people on this planet that have actually been the victims of a true genocide (a plan set in motion to eradicate an entire innocent nation) are now accused of perpetrating one.  Never-mind that the numbers don't come remotely close to other groups who commit "megadeath" - who kill huge numbers of people such as the Hutu's, or the Syrians or the Cambodians or the Turks, never-mind that it is abundantly obvious that the Israelis don't want to kill anyone and do everything in their power to prevent it and wring their hands over each and every death - amazingly, they are sold and the new Nazi's - a comparison so odious, so vile and so nauseating as to leave one recoiled and sputtering in shock.  And yet there it is - sold and bought by millions the world over.

It's a sad time for the Jews and for the world though I take some solace in knowing that it is our light and goodness that so incenses these people.  When pure evil points its hand and accuses others of wrong-doing, there is no better indication of the great meritoriousness of the accused.  Evil is coming for us - and no other.

"You know friends, sometimes it makes me sad, but sometimes it makes me happy; Israel has no friends in the world.  The Holy Land, the Holy People of Israel are all alone.  But you know what we have?  We have one Friend in Heaven - Yisrael B'tach BaHaShem!"

- Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach

Israel in Gaza: No Less Than the Battle Between Good and Evil

For many Jews and their supporters around the world, it is highly disturbing to see and hear so many clear demonstrations of near total moral befuddlement.  I'm not sure how a conflict could be any more clear - one side loves life and desires to preserve it (on both sides!) and the other openly admits that it "loves death" and is happy to bring it to both sides as well.  Despite that, millions of people around the world rally to the side of this cult of death. How can this be?

1. The big lie still works: The most generous explanation is that these people have been duped. Decades of relentless lying have born abundant fruit for the Jihadi side as they have successfully managed to invert the perception of good and bad.  They freely tell enormous lies such as PA President's recent assertion that Israel was committing "genocide" in Gaza. Genocide is generally defined as killing a large number of people for ethnic reasons.  I very much doubt that the 400 people killed (most of whom Israel wished not to kill but who were in the wrong place at the wrong time) on their side would fall under the category of genocide but if it did then the 1137 Israelis killed by Palestinians in the Second Intifada was three times the "genocide" - and done on purpose.  Somehow I doubt that this crowd was overly concerned with that particular "genocide." So given the power of the big lie and how readily it's lapped up by various media outlets it's not hard to see how someone could walk away utterly misinformed.
2. Morality itself has collapsed: Dennis Prager wrote an important piece a while back called "A Response to Richard Dawkins" in which he demonstrates that in the absence of a belief in God, morality shrivels up and dies on the vine leaving us with nothing more than subjective preferences in place of a true moral code.  Could it be that large swaths of humanity simply lacks the template by which to successfully adjudicate between right and wrong?  Judging by the endless stream of unhinged tweets, governmental condemnations and violent street protests it would seem so.  If someone is incapable of distinguishing between accidental deaths and those committed with intent then that person has no moral compass.  The tallies that are so often bandied about are irrelevant and even if the number of accidental deaths were extremely high and the number of purposeful deaths very low it would not vindicate the purposeful killers.  They can't even be compared.  It's evil apples vs non-evil oranges.
3. The supporters are evil too: Israel, in all likelihood, is in the process of fighting the most morally conducted campaign in the history of warfare.  No army drops thousands of leaflets, or places cell phone calls or does "roof-knocking" to warn civilians before they attack.  No army continues to provide water, supplies and electricity to the enemy while they are in the process of attacking them. Few armies place their own soldiers at grave risk by going door to door in search of weapons caches, terror tunnels and rocket launchers when they could just carpet bomb, shut off the electricity and water or both and be done with it.  Conflicts like this one bring to a head who people really are and what they stand for.  Sides must be chosen.  One has to suspect that a good many people out there have chosen to align themselves with the forces of darkness and death.  Even if they are generally perceived as "religious" practitioners, in truth they are nihilists - people who have wholesale given up on life and who gleefully desire to take out as many as they can with them.  Their lives are without meaning and as such they have no use for them.  Anyone drawn after such people and who offer them succor or support in any fashion are of the same ilk and should be regarded as the amoral beings that they truly are. 

"If antisemitism is a form of racism, it is a most peculiar variety, with many unique characteristics.  In my view as a historian it is so peculiar that it deserves to be placed in quite a different category.  I would call it an intellectual disease, a disease of the mind, extremely infectious and massively destructive."

Paul Johnson 

Smart Money's On Isaiah - The Good Guys Will Win in the End

With the Nation of Israel under attack for the umpteenth thousandth time it is easy to lose site of the big picture - that the Jewish People are routinely reviled for their goodness and for the message of universal peace and spiritual transcendence that they have always promoted and stood for.  And the end, only these values will be left standing.

When Rabbi Akiva and his colleagues were walking past the ruins of the Second Temple, they started to weep while Akiva began to laugh.  When asked what possessed him to laugh at this terrible site of pain and devastation he replied that just as the prophecy that the Temple would be destroyed came to pass so too could they be confident that they prophecy that it would be rebuilt would come to pass as well.  They reflected on this a famously replied "you have comforted us Akiva."

As such, it seemed only fitting to boost our confidence in Toraitic prophecy at this moment of travail so that we could take comfort in the notion that some day Isaiah's vision will also be fulfilled:

"And it shall be at the end of days that the mountain of God's house will be firmly established at the top of the mountains and will be raised above the hills and all nations will stream into it.  And many people will go and say 'come, let's go up to God's mountain, to the house of the God of Jacob and let him teach us His ways and we will go in His paths' for out of Zion will the Torah come forth and the word of God from Jerusalem.  And He will judge between nations are reprove many peoples, and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.  Nation will not lift sword against nation and they will not learn war any more."

Here's my take on prophecy: