Just before World War II, the world watched and did nothing except chatter as Nazis turned a section of Warsaw, Poland into the “Warsaw Ghetto.”
In November 1940, 380,000 Polish Jews were sealed inside this ghetto. 80,000 died as a result of the inhuman conditions, overcrowding, lack of medical care and starvation (the event is chronicled by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center located in Jerusalem). This calculated atrocity was one part of Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem” — the planned industrialized extermination of the entirety of remaining Jewish people, and other vermin, in Europe.
However, after World War II, surviving Jews emerged from this existential ordeal with newfound toughness and a vision of their own new/old nation, to be reborn in “their” ancient homeland of Israel.
Uh, never mind their Arabic successors in the British Protectorate of Palestine (Trans-Jordan), the now-indigenous 2000-year inhabitants of “their” Land of Palestine. In similar fashion as abused children who somehow grow up to abuse their own children in turn, the “new” Israelis have treated the unfortunate Palestinians much as they themselves had been treated throughout their diaspora. They have thereby incurred the flaming, undying hatred of virtually all their neighboring Muslim societies, a people already “known” by Western Judeo-Christians for their “innate” volatile propensity for hating (Westerners!).
Love-hate relationships between Americans and all things (and peoples) Jewish constitute a phenomenon probably unique in history. American society contains both virulent antisemitism and a cherished if unspoken belief among Christians of sharing or fulfilling the “God-chosen” role with the modem descendants of the Biblical Israelites. For whatever reason, this ‘hold’ upon the mind-set (or treasure chest?) of the American people and government dominates our policy toward Israel today. No politician dares oppose AIPAC excepting the politically suicidal, retiring or “left-wing marginals.” Our fixated posture of unconditional support for Israel might have been explained by Kissinger in pragmatic terms of a broader Middle Eastern context, always and unfailingly involving oil interests in the region, the Tail that Wags the Big Dog all the way to extinction.
So long as Benjamin Netanyahu has been in, outside and around Israeli governance, he has steadfastly opposed the relatively moderate Palestinian Authority in its advocacy for an independent Palestinian state by overtly and covertly supporting their bitter adversary, the much-more radical Hamas party—affiliated with Hezbollah and allied with Al-Qaida, Islamic Jihad and the Islamic State (ISS). Netanyahu knows as well as Hamas how to radicalize both friends and enemies.
Though no love was ever lost between “Bibi” and Hamas, they both shared and still share the common purpose of preventing any possibility of a successful two-state ‘solution’ to the ‘Palestinian problem.’
Hamas’s object is recruitment of thousands of hatecrazed fighters leading to the apocalyptic extermination of the Israeli state and people; Netanyahu’s is the removal, expulsion or elimination of all Palestinians from the Sacred Land of Israel. As a developer, he wants the real estate. A fair and pragmatic bargain for both? How so?
Israeli intelligence and defense were mysteriously asleep as Hamas prepared its monstrous incursion into Israel for many months before the action. Israeli Intelligence did have several detailed warnings, yet willfully ignored them. (Shades of 12/7/1941, 9/11/ 2001, and 1/6/2020?)
For pragmatist Netanyahu, wasn’t it worth the investment of a couple hundred unsuspecting Israelis calculatedly massacred, raped, abducted and tortured by Hamas—and then what’s ten, fifteen thousand or so pulverized Palestinians to a mutually profitable outcome? Hamas has its bumper harvest of recruits ready-radicalized and Bibi gets his way in Gaza and the West Bank.
It’s a win-win deal for both parties in this evil tryst.
The resulting calculated atrocities burn the brains of all sentient people anywhere. Who can ever forgive, either side the other? What peace? What drivel! Kill!
Kill all Palestinians, kill all Israelis! let the Lord sort’ em all out! Thanks, Hamas! Thanks, Bibi! Now we’re all great haters. So everybody hates everybody and peace gets no chance ever in the Mideast.
Bibi’s own reward—who knows? At least get the Israeli courts off his back for his three corruption prosecutions, and cling on to power. (Sound like anyone else we know?)
Israel’s present regime doesn’t want to hear about the Warsaw Ghetto anymore. Recently, the State of Israel, with the abject complicity of the Biden administration, has made Gaza a ghetto, doing the same to the Palestinians of Gaza that was done to the Jews of Warsaw by the Nazis. For Israelis with their missiles, it’s been like shooting fish in a barrel, to obliterate what is left in the north of Gaza and then decimate what remains in the south, to render Gaza uninhabitable, to drive its 2.3 million people out in a massive campaign of of ethnic cleansing via infrastructure demolition, starvation, terror, slaughter and infectious diseases. This is not a war against Hamas. It’s a bonanza for Hamas, just as they planned. It’s a combined war against the Palestinian people, just for their ‘being there’ as ready targets and tools.
U.S. President Biden has been the ardent enabler of Israel as it has conducted its genocide on Palestinians in Gaza and still terrorizes Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Were Biden not already the U.S.’s. designated point person (or fall guy), his ferocious Republican rivals would tumble all over one another, frantic to farthest outdo him in craven complicity with this “Final Solution.”
“When good men see evil and say nothing, they as well do the evil themselves” — as well as ‘not-so-good’ men or women. And so who’s which? Which are we? Does it matter? I say, if we say NO, we label and libel ourselves — each just another enabler of evil.
Bill Cornelison is a Bandera County Resident.
