Following are excerpts from a What\u2019sApp message I received from a family member (let\u2019s call her \u201cMiriam Cohen\u201d) who resides in the United States:<\/p>\n
Please explain to me how obliterating Gaza helps Israel.\u00a0 If we are horrified by what Hamas did to us, we must be horrified at what we are now doing to hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Gaza.\u00a0 Israel just made 300,000 people homeless, killed I don\u2019t even know how many thousands of people, the hospitals can\u2019t function without water and electricity.\u00a0 These are war crimes.\u00a0 How does this make us better than the Hamas terrorists?\u00a0 I feel less safe in the US, in my own community, because of these actions.\u00a0 I have to face my non-Jewish coworkers tomorrow knowing that my people are now committing these atrocities on another population.\u00a0 One million people need to evacuate in 24 hours.\u00a0 Where are they supposed to go??\u00a0 I am sick to my stomach.\u00a0 I can\u2019t even bear to face my neighbors, my coworkers.\u00a0 Please explain how this helps Israel, how it helps Jews around the world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n
Here is my response, sent from Israel to which my wife, Rachel, and I immigrated over a year ago:<\/p>\n
For Rachel and me, recognizing the divine image in all human beings is axiomatic.\u00a0 That recognition has been repeatedly expressed in our decades of activity in Long Island\u2019s interfaith\/interethnic human rights community and in the values we taught our children.<\/p>\n
As an extension of that consciousness, we also recognize when the divine image has been desecrated, as it was this past weekend when Hamas launched an indefensible blood orgy throughout the State of Israel \u2013 the stomach-turning details of which I needn\u2019t remind you.\u00a0 Kohelet taught us a profoundly sad and inconvenient truth: just as there is a time for peace, there is a time for war (Ecclesiastes 3:8<\/a>).\u00a0 Unfortunately, especially for those who live in our region of the world, this is a time for war.<\/p>\n
Let me spare you the century-old history of numerous Jewish\/Israeli attempts to achieve peace and prosperity with the Palestinians.\u00a0 I trust you are well familiar with it.\u00a0 As you will recall, Golda Meir once said of the Palestinians, \u201cThey\u2019ve never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.\u201d\u00a0 That\u2019s not just a sardonic observation without practical consequences.\u00a0 Every time the Palestinians have chosen to miss an opportunity, it has cost Jewish lives.\u00a0 We will not forever sacrifice Jewish lives by affording the Palestinians additional opportunities they will choose to miss.<\/p>\n
What is true of the Palestinians as a whole is most certainly true of the Gazan subset.\u00a0 In 2005, Ariel Sharon gave them an opportunity to demonstrate that in light of the full Israeli withdrawal, they had the chance to show the world they could build a state that would live in happy partnership with Israel.\u00a0 He called the initiative \u201cGaza First\u201d \u2013 meaning that if the results of the experiment were favorable, he would apply the same approach to Judea and Samaria.\u00a0 But instead of choosing to build their own state, the Gazans chose to destroy the Jewish one.\u00a0 In the years since then, Israel has repeatedly tried to arrive at some accommodation, even with Hamas.\u00a0 But all such efforts were in vain, culminating in this past week\u2019s atrocities.<\/p>\n
Albert Einstein, who knew something about scientific experimentation, once said, \u201cInsanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.\u201d\u00a0 Israel has emerged from its well-intentioned insanity.\u00a0 Its citizens \u2013 right, left, and center; religious and secular; Ashkenazic and Sephardic \u2013 have, however belatedly, arrived at a consensus.\u00a0 This time, they do not plan to simply clip Hamas\u2019s wings and await another bloodbath two years hence.\u00a0 They are intent upon destroying Hamas once and for all.<\/p>\n
Yes, the Jewish State has reluctantly concluded that it must treat its bloodthirsty adversary as the enemy it is \u2013 without apology.\u00a0 Eighty years ago, America and its allies rightly defined Germany, Japan, and Italy as mortal enemies of human civilization.\u00a0 The Free World\u2019s leaders at the time instinctively understood the ancient rabbinic maxim that those who are kind to the cruel are ultimately cruel to the kind (R. Elazar at Tanhuma, Parashat Mezora, 1<\/a>; R. Joshua b. Levi at Yalkut Shimoni, I Samuel, Chapter 121<\/a>).\u00a0 Toward the end of that global conflict, faced with considerably less palatable military choices, they even viewed the civilian populations of Dresden (25,000 dead), Hamburg (37,000 dead), Hiroshima and Nagasaki (up to 226,000 dead combined) as legitimate war targets.\u00a0 It is easy to second-guess those extreme choices from the safe distance of 80 years.\u00a0 But the Allies\u2019 readiness to vanquish their adversaries at virtually any cost is what finally emboldened Italians to lynch Mussolini, the Emperor to surrender unconditionally, and the Fuehrer to put a bullet through his own head.\u00a0 These are all exceedingly grim historic facts.\u00a0 But on a forward-looking note, the Allies\u2019 unambiguous, non-negotiable victory is what opened the way to five generations of Americans, Germans, Italians, Japanese, and the rest of the Free World enjoying only friendship, cooperation, progress, and prosperity with each other.\u00a0 As much as it breaks the heart, it took all out war to win a sustainable peace.<\/p>\n
Tragically, there will be rough days ahead in Gaza.\u00a0 But Israel will not be cruel to the kind by being kind to the cruel.\u00a0 Rest assured, the Jewish State will not opt for the ultimate measures chosen by Roosevelt and Truman.\u00a0 However, they will take a cue or two from World War II America on effectively waging a war in pursuit of a sustainable peace.\u00a0 Given history and the current circumstances, this is not a time to second-guess the actions the Israelis will take.\u00a0 It is a time for all friends of Israel to cast away illusions \u2013 a time for their rock-solid support.<\/p>\n
Given his recent statements, President Biden seems to fully understand this.\u00a0 He is prepared, at the moment, to let Israel do the right thing and eradicate Hamas.\u00a0 But his resolve might weaken as disconcerting images from Gaza shift public opinion.\u00a0 This is precisely what Hamas was counting on from Day One.\u00a0 In order to scuttle normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel \u2013 and the promise of an ever-widening circle of peace throughout the Middle East \u2013 Hamas embarked on a deliberate, cold-blooded strategy of necessitating an Israeli response that would be condemned by a world too far removed from World War II to remember its lessons.\u00a0 Don\u2019t be suckered by that strategy.<\/p>\n
This war will not be easy or pretty.\u00a0 No war is.\u00a0 Please remember that part of the Allies\u2019 victory for all humanity was the overwhelming support they received from those who remained stateside.\u00a0 The American home-front not only prayed for the safe return of its soldiers, but for their victorious <\/em>return \u2013 wresting unconditional surrender from the world\u2019s enemies to open the path of peace for all mankind.\u00a0 In an earlier text message, Miriam, you wrote with pride of a community gathering that had been organized by progressive Jews on behalf of the Israeli hostages in Gaza.\u00a0 In my view, such a gathering is good.\u00a0 But it is not good enough.\u00a0 Over the millennia, there have been an excess of crocodile tears shed for suffering Jews.\u00a0 Right now, we need rallies explicitly declaring the necessity of wiping out Hamas and cheering the Israeli soldiers who are risking their own lives in pursuit of that objective, so that responsible Arab actors in the region will have the confidence to step forward and sign peace agreements with the Jewish State.<\/p>\n
I am under no illusion as to how quickly that will happen.\u00a0 In fact, let me offer a reality check on the actual number of \u201cpeace loving\u201d peoples in this region.\u00a0 First, note that on Saturday, October 7, before Israel undertook any military response to Hamas\u2019 depravity \u2013 at a time when the whole world knew about the music festival killing fields and the kidnappings of children and the frail elderly (because Hamas proudly distributed video footage of such) \u2013 not a single Arab country condemned the barbarity, nor did a single influential Islamic authority declare the atrocities war crimes according to Islamic law.\u00a0 And they haven\u2019t since.\u00a0 They should have been mortified by the behavior of their brethren and co-religionists.\u00a0 They were not.\u00a0 Nor were their counterparts throughout the world \u2013 including those who signed anti-Israel letters and demonstrated on American Ivy League campuses against the Jewish State.\u00a0 All too many rationalized or even celebrated the barbarity, recasting it as a form of heroism.<\/p>\n
Then there are the Palestinians themselves.\u00a0 What happened this past weekend was not an aberration.\u00a0 It was of one piece with their terrorist history: slaughtering school children in Maalot<\/a>, taking the Israeli athletic team hostage in the Munich Olympic \u201cPeace\u201d Village<\/a>, tossing wheel-chair bound Leon Klinghoffer overboard the Achille Lauro<\/a>, etc., etc. and turning the perpetrators into national heroes \u2013 all before Hamas was founded in 1987.\u00a0 \u00a0It should come as no surprise that in poll after poll, Hamas has done very well among the entire Palestinian population \u2013 not only among those living in Gaza (64%), but among those in Judea and Samaria (58%)<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 Needless to say, the rest of their respective populations are hardly pro-peace.\u00a0 Rather, they spread their loyalties among Islamic Jihad, Fatah, and other Jew-hating political parties.\u00a0 Moreover, as indicated by the polls, the younger the Palestinians, the more radical their views.\u00a0 Accordingly, the overwhelming majority of Palestinians are complicit in both regimes’ perverse crimes.\u00a0 Though some Palestinians might be better than the state-trained and dispatched butchers who overran southern Israel just over a week ago, most have wanted the leadership they’ve got, celebrated and funded the terrorists they’ve raised, and embraced the ideology that drives them. \u00a0Accordingly, they are suffering the consequences of their own choices for themselves and their children.\u00a0 They are not innocent.<\/p>\n
As to where this complicit population should go, let\u2019s remember that when \u2013 for no defensible reason \u2013 the Arab states of the region expelled their millennia-old Jewish populations in the late 1940\u2019s and \u201850\u2019s, the cash-strapped, fledgling Jewish state welcomed their 800,000 refugee Jewish brethren.\u00a0 The much better situated Arab world \u2013 with its vast territories, natural resources, and indescribable wealth \u2013 could do the same for their own.\u00a0 Do you know why they don\u2019t and why Hamas deliberately chose this strategy?\u00a0 Because they knew that only Miriam Cohen and Bruce Ginsburg would stay up at night worrying about it.\u00a0 That is our nature as Jews.\u00a0 And I take pride in it.\u00a0 But that strength is also our weakness.\u00a0 The worst threat now \u2013 not only to Israel\u2019s existence and the potential for world peace \u2013 might well be the Hand-Wringing and adoption of moral equivalence as an \u201cethic\u201d among progressive American Jews.\u00a0 Such self-flattering responses might well weaken the crucial moral resolve of our non-Jewish friends.<\/p>\n
Miriam, we need your support and, for the sake of American Jewry, you need to provide it.\u00a0 If Israel doesn\u2019t emerge from this war as the undisputed victor \u2013 prompting the Arab world to abandon its eschatological fantasies and start working toward a sustainable peace \u2013 American Jews are going to have a lot more to worry about than how they explain the Jewish State\u2019s conduct to their colleagues and neighbors.\u00a0 If for whatever reason, you feel awkward explaining Israel\u2019s position to your associates, show them this response to your inquiry.\u00a0 If they don\u2019t weigh what I\u2019ve written seriously and with an open mind \u2013 believe me, they are not your friends.<\/p>\n
I conclude where I began: May all those created in God\u2019s image unite in defeating wanton cruelty, so that together we can live in fellowship and peace!<\/p>\n
Bruce Ginsburg<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n
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