HERZLIYA, Israel — Yom HaShoa began on Hitler’s birthday. Two
groups of people were mindful of this dark coincidence. All
Israelis — or at least everyone I talked to — knew about the
overlap. They thought it was both poetic justice and divine
intervention. Hitler didn’t just want to destroy the Jewish
people; he wanted the world to remember us. He envisioned
creating a museum to house our corpses and conquered religious
treasures — torahs, talmuds, menorahs, tallit (prayer shawls),
etc. to make eternal mockery of a people who believed in a G-d
and way of life in which the absolute worth of each individual
was the eternal foundation of society, behavior and technological
progress. And of course the opposite has happened. Hitler is now
a re-run on the History Channel and the Jewish people thrive and
remember and are a reminder of both the mindless hatred of our
enemies as well as our determination to fight and thrive as a
nation.
The other group of people was of course the clueless in the
mainstream media. They were the audience the President of Iran
played to by speaking — on Hitler’s birthday — at a
UN-sponsored Geneva conference on racism rigged to engender more
hate and promote the destruction of the Jewish state. As
Ahmadinejad spoke European delegates to this conference on racism
walked out in protest. Yet many of their own countries were party
to canceling Holocaust Remembrance ceremonies in various cities
to “protest” Israel’s military operation in Gaza in response to
both rocket attacks from Hamas and its continuing project of
establishing medium and long range missile capacity against major
cities in Israel, courtesy of Iran. The irony of siding as a form
of protest with those who want to eliminate the Jewish state was
lost on these nation states. Similarly, the willingness to abet
militant Islam in meaningless international conferences and
expect to be congratulated for walking out on the speech of a
monster…well, now that I think about it, that’s something the
students at Columbia University didn’t do!
Once again history and the future of the Jewish people appear to
be on a collision course. Throughout the world lip service is
paid to our “right to exist,” as if this is some sort of special
gift from the family of nations and not something Jews — mostly
Israelis in the past 60 years — have had to defend with their
lives almost yearly. The promise of “Never Again” is uttered but
in Europe and in the halls of Congress and the mainstream media,
attacks on the Jewish lobby are now part of the conversation.
Sometimes I fear the world is slouching from indifference back to
eon-old habits. Modern day blood libel (the Gaza operation) is
now the grist for playwrights who explore the Jewish soul and
conclude it is dark, violent, and racist to the core. England has
become a cesspool of anti-Semitism. Many in the American left are
following suit. Some include the disgusting M.J. Rosenberg of
TPMCafe who
has become the agent of the anti-Israel crowd in
Washington. And what to make of those illuminati such as
Martin Peretz who shilled for Obama only to be
horrified that the man who called Israel a stalwart ally
appointed Charles Freeman, an outright anti-Zionist, to head up
his National Intelligence Council? What will Peretz say now that
Obama has found ways to avoid meeting Israel’s Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu but had no problem embracing Hugo Chavez whose
own regime has harassed Jews and Jewish establishments to curry
favor with Iran! Where is the outrage from the Jewish left?
Apparently it is too busy lobbying the White House to press
Israel into direct negotiations with Hamas and Syria.
Yet I believe Israel will prevail and the Jewish people will
thrive precisely because of days such as this one. In Israel at
10 a.m. sirens wailed, traffic stopped, people stood still. For a
minute the entire nation as one remembered, not just as a
collective reminder of what preceded the establishment of Israel,
but to show that one nation carved out of national tragedy will
eternally bear witness to both the evil that nearly consumed the
world and to our capacity not only rouse the conscience of others
but to defend our existence the next time such evil rises again.
We pause in silence. Not just to remember, but also to underscore
our willingness to set aside “normal” life and do what is
required to survive, thrive, and contribute to the world.
