“We have an obligation to bear witness to suffering. Yet, if that witness is to have any meaning apart from passively registering the fact of the suffering, it must repudiate the violence that caused the suffering and speak against the power that deployed the violence. It is not enough to blandly remark that war is terrible – even those who advocate and embrace war as a worldview acknowledge this – we must explicitly repudiate war and violence to the extent that justice will allow.

Remembrance Day is approaching. Please remember.”

I posted this comment in social media earlier this week feeling overwhelmed by the violence and suffering in Gaza. With the approach of Remembrance Day next weekend – day of profound meaning for me, and for many Canadians – I reflected on the mounting cost of Palestinian lives. The number of Gazan victims climbed toward 10,000, more than 4,000 of whom were children. A dark part of my mind wondered if the State of Israel is seeking the biblical sevenfold vengeance (Genesis 4:24) on Gaza for the 1,400 Israelis killed in the Hamas attack. That would mean that, maybe the killing would stop when the dead numbered 9,800.

We reached that grim metric today. The killing continues.

No… There is no neat biblical analogy to be drawn here. This is merely the brutal, dirty, carnage of war. The numbers keep rising, and they will keep rising, and the endgame – and the point of it all – eludes me. Do Israelis and their Zionist proxies really believe that the State of Israel either can, or will “eliminate Hamas?” Will this slaughter really make Israelis safe and the borders of the State of Israel secure? Surely people cannot be so ignorant.

Yet, they clearly are, as was evidenced by the stunt pulled by Gilad Erdan, the State of Israel’s UN ambassador when he wore the Yellow Star to the UN. Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, agreed. Yet, as the bloodshed continued, with no sign of slowing, let alone ending, Zionists and Israelis paraded their ignorance with abandon.

One social media friend shared a meme by a Montreal beautician-cum-health entrepreneur named Francine Goldberg that not only made Erdan’s nauseating equivalency with the Shoah utterly explicit, but used it to justify slaughter.

What follows is the record of my social media commentary on the Gaza war for this week.

***

A legitimate argument can be made that the State of Israel was right to defend itself against the 7 October Hamas attacks.* However, what are the limits of that defense, or should it be unlimited? Once the attack was defeated, does that “legitimate defense” extend to the sustained bombing of Gaza that has claimed more than 9,000 lives, and a land invasion? The Israeli government claims that the invasion is necessary to rescue the hostages, but is that even possible, and is the invasion and bombing more likely to endanger the hostages. The State of Israel claims that the thousands of mostly-civilian Gazan casualties are collateral damage in its legitimate aim of hunting down Hamas militants who operate within civilian populations in one of the most densely-populated places on earth. Is that aim still legitimate if can only be met by killing thousands of civilians? Binyamin Netanyahu has said that his government’s goal is the “elimination of Hamas,” but does such a goal belong within the limits of legitimate self-defense? If the only way for the State of Israel to “eliminate Hamas” and ensure absolute security to to Israeli citizens is the complete obliteration and depopulation of Gaza, either by expulsion or mass murder, would that be within the limits of legitimate self-defense?

These are some of the things that I think about all the time, and I wish my Zionist and Israeli friends would consider. If you can step back for a moment, how do you believe this will end, and whether there are any limits on what you would consider to be legitimate defense? What will the continued escalation of the war accomplish that a ceasefire, negotiations, and a search for other means will not?

—

* This is a very simplistic argument, but one that I am willing to hear out.

***

One has to wonder when, in human history, attacking an entire community with overwhelming firepower, killing civilians, and destroying their homes, has ever succeeded in “eliminating” a terrorist organization, even one as ruthless, bloodthirsty, and vicious as Hamas. Such actions typically create common cause between the terrorists and the civilians suffering on their behalf and consolidate their support, which might have been waning up to that point. The violence suffered by civilians usually serves as an object lesson that the terrorists’ methods are justified, and that the “oppressor,” as the terrorists call them, cannot be reasoned with, and must be utterly destroyed with the most uncompromising means available. The violence of the effort to “eliminate” the terrorists is the propaganda that the terrorists need to thrive.

***

I see a great many people who support the Israeli invasion of Gaza because they are worried about the hostages. I am desperately worried about the hostages too. They really believe that the IDF will save them. But I have to wonder if they have taken the time to stop and think about what an invasion of Gaza will mean for the hostages. Their only value as live hostages is as bargaining chips. Once the invasion begins, they will lose that value, and there will be no reason for Hamas, under pressure from an Israeli invasion, to keep them alive. And even if some hostages somehow avoid being murdered under these circumstances, one has to wonder how they will survive the escalation of an Israeli offensive that has already killed 8,000 Gazans.

The survival of the hostages can only be ensured with a ceasefire and negotiations. I know that many people believe that “never negotiate with terrorists” is the 11th commandment and came directly from the mouth of Adon Olam. What they fail to understand that this is a strategy and a policy, not a moral law. And sometimes, policies and strategies must change to meet new exigencies.

I don’t want to have to say kaddish for the hostages, as I have been saying kaddish for the almost 10,000 people who have already died in this war.

***

Commenting on: Netanyahu reprimands Israeli minister over Gaza ‘nuclear option’ comment (The Guardian)

Binyamin Netanyahu suspended Amihai Eliyahu from his cabinet post in the Israeli government for publicly speculating that the use of nuclear weapons in Gaza (and thus, the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians) was an option for the State of Israel. Netanyahu, uncharacteristically, perhaps, did the right thing, although I would be more impressed if it was an absolute dismissal, and Netanyahu hadn’t qualified the suspension as “until further notice.”

However, the thing that we should all be talking about is the fact that this comment, which appears to advocate a nuclear massacre, came not from some marginal voice, but from a member of the Israeli government. That indicates that such thinking is well inside the main stream of Israeli thought.

I have to wonder what maximalist Zionists (like Francine Goldberg, who equates the 7 Oct Hamas attack with the Shoah because it was motivated by “the same poisonous hate” would say about members of the State of Israel’s government advocating for nuclear genocide in Gaza.

***

The State of Israel bombed an ambulance. Let that sink in. It is an explicit war crime to intentionally target medical personnel and facilities, including ambulances, under the Geneva Conventions of 1949, to which the State of Israel is a signatory.

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross: “This rule is implicit in common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which requires that the wounded and sick be collected and cared for, because the protection of medical personnel is a subsidiary form of protection granted to ensure that the wounded and sick receive medical care. The rule that medical personnel must be respected and protected is explicitly stated in Additional Protocol II. In addition, under the Statute of the International Criminal Court, ‘intentionally directing attacks against … personnel using the distinctive emblems of the Geneva Conventions in conformity with international law” constitutes a war crime in non-international armed conflicts. In addition, this rule is contained in other instruments pertaining also to non-international armed conflicts.”

The ambulance was clearly identified with a Red Crescent, and representatives of the State of Israel have admitted that they knew that it was an ambulance, and targeted it accordingly. The IDF’s fig-leaf is that Hamas was using the ambulance, making it a legitimate target. (Note that these ambulances are run by the Gaza Health Department, which is a government department in a place where Hamas is the government.) That is a very thin fig leaf, since (a) the State of Israel has produced no evidence and (b) it is nonetheless STILL a war crime to intentionally target medical personnel and facilities under international law. Fifteen people were killed and 50 wounded in the attack. All of them were civilians.

***

The idea that we should never compare any historical event to the Holocaust is absurd. What we should never do is EQUATE any historical event with the Holocaust. And we can only understand the violence of such equation by doing a comparison. For example, we know that it is offensive and demeaning to the memory of the Shoah to equate the 7 October Hamas attack on the State of Israel by comparing the two events.

What happened on 7 October was a brutal attack on the State of Israel by a band of violent terrorists that was beaten back after a few days. It left 1,400 Israelis dead and Hamas took more than 200 hostages, including 30 children. The State of Israel is not under any immediate existential threat, and has retaliated with overwhelming force.

The Holocaust was the intentional and systematic extermination of six million Jews, 1.5 million Roma, and as many as two million others in purpose-built death camps, concentration camps, and work camps. This followed almost decade in which Nazi Germany progressively stripped Jews and Roma of their civil and human rights, stole their property, and forced them into ghettos, from which they were led to the killing fields of Aktion Reinhard and the death camps. Every single Jew and Roma within the territory controlled by Nazi Gernany was in danger of being murdered.

The Jewish population of Europe in 1933 was 9.5 million; by 1945, it was 3.5 million. That means that the Nazis murdered 63 percent of Europe’s Jews, and subjected most of the rest to inconceivable suffering and misery. They murdered more than two million in 1943 alone and, had the war not ended when it did, it is very likely that they would have murdered the entire remaining population of Europe’s Jews. This accounting does not even address the horrific conditions in the camps, or the barbaric experiments performed by Nazi doctors.

By comparing these two events, it becomes clear that the Hamas attack of 7 October and the Holocaust are not, in any way, equal. Moreover, to equate the 7 October attack with the Holocaust is to reduce the systematic extermination of Europe’s Jews to a very brief, if violent, terrorist incident in which one tenth of one percent of the population of the State of Israel lost their lives, and in which the security of the remaining 99.9 percent of Israelis was restored within two days.

Thus, equating the 7 October attack with the Holocaust greatly minimizes the enormity of the latter. This is a type of Holocaust denial, similar to the claims by anti-maskers during the height of the COVID pandemic that mask mandates were “like the Holocaust” and public health officials were “Nazis.”

Zionists and Israelis who equate the 7 October attacks with the Holocaust are thus Holocaust deniers, no different in that respect than Ernst Zundel and David Irving. We should treat these Holocaust deniers with the same respect and consideration.

***

Please note that I consider equating the Israeli offensive in Gaza and/or the 7 October Hamas attack on the State of Israel with the Holocaust to be a form of Holocaust denial. If you do either of these things, or approvingly share such content, I will unfriend you.

***

Commenting on: Blinken meets Palestinian Authority President Abbas in West Bank amid growing settler violence (CNN)

While this is weak tea in some ways – I would have been much more impressed had President Biden made this visit – it is nonetheless significant. The President probably could not have made the trip himself (for a variety of security, protocol, and political reasons), but sending his Secretary of State to meet with Abbas, apparently spontaneously, does send a message to the State of Israel. Washington is still unable to say the words “cease fire,” but Blinken’s visit says to Netanyahu that “you are not the only fish in the sea” and, I am sure, it was interpreted thus in Jerusalem.

***

There is a considerable amount of media handwringing about a rise in antisemitic incidents in the US (and Canada) related to the Gaza war, especially on campus. I teach at an institution with a significant Muslim student population – in fact, one of the universities with the largest proportion of Muslim students – and I have experienced an antisemitic incident once. That incident was directed at me by a white, presumably Christian woman. I should note that I am identifiably Jewish; I am a bearded man who wears a yarmulke, and that has not, as far as I can tell, elicited even the slightest interest from most other passersby on campus.

Some students are wearing keffiyehs and “Free Palestine” T-shirts and hoodies (as is their right). There are posters, signs, and handbills on campus about the war, Palestinian statehood, and Israeli policies in the Occupied Territories. There was one sign with an image of the Palestinian flag, and bearing the slogan “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea” (which I will discuss in a later post), but that was removed after a day.

Significantly, while I have been the target of abuse since the war began, virtually all of that (apart from the white, presumably Christian woman who saw my yarmulke and shouted “shame on you!”) has come from my fellow Jews. And this has not been an isolated incident. I have received so many private messages from Jewish Zionists and Israelis, comments on posts on my timeline and in Jewish social media groups, and even a couple of emails, excoriating me as a “self-hating Jew,” a “fake Jew,” and even as a “kapo,” that I have lost count. (I can count, should I wish, since although I delete public comments of this nature, I do keep the private messages.)

So, I have to wonder why all of the hand-wringing about antisemitism is not accompanied by some concern for how eagerly – and savagely – some Jews are abusing fellow Jews who don’t fall in line with the Zionist party line? Is this just something that we find acceptable – that it is entirely normal for a Zionist to accuse someone who expressed concern for Gazan civilians of being a “kapo?” Is this just intramural, so it’s okay?

I am not convinced that all of this abuse is spontaneous and un-directed, either. Maybe we should be talking about that.

***

… And it worth noting at this point that, while there are a number of genetic studies that indicate that most Ashkenazi Jews have Middle-Eastern ancestry through the maternal line, that conclusion is based by comparing the genomes of contemporary Jews with contemporary populations in the Middle East. That is, they didn’t dig up Yonatan ben Yehuda from 100BCE for the comparison, but used blood samples of contemporary Middle Easterners, mostly Arabs. What this means is that, if Zionists are using these genetic studies to claim indigeneity to Eretz Yisroel, then they must also acknowledge the indigeneity of Palestinians to Palestine. If it is our homeland, then it is their homeland, too.