The Israel Brief – 27 November 2023– Three groups of Hostages released and updates on The Israel Brief.
The Israel Brief – 28 November 2023– Where is Baby Kfir? Updates on The Israel Brief.
The Israel Brief – 29 November 2023– Hostages share what they have endured. Warning: upsetting content.
The Israel Brief – 30 November 2023– Updates on Israel’s war with Hamas.
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).
When a dramatic, highly significant, totally unexpected, and especially tragic event takes place, it is only natural for people to look for precedents from their own history. That is exactly what happened in the wake of the October 7 terror rampage launched by Hamas, in southern Israel. Numerous comparisons from Jewish history, some more recent, others more distant, were made.
Merchants of Death. They came to murder, rape, mutilate, burn and kidnap. A scene at kibbutz Be’eri following the Hamas attack on 7 October.
And since the Holocaust is by far the most horrific of them, the number of Jewish victims on October 7 the highest since 1945, and the extreme cruelty of the Hamas perpetrators which was utterly barbaric, there were several attempts to describe the crimes using Shoah terminology.
Thus, for example, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan came to a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly devoted to the events wearing a yellow star, reminiscent of the identifying patches Jews were forced by the Nazis to wear during the Holocaust. Erdan’s yellow star said “Never Again”, but was not the appropriate vehicle to convey that message.
After all, how can the murder of 1,200 people in a sovereign Jewish state be compared to the annihilation of six million practically defenseless Jews over the course of four years, in all of Europe (except Switzerland, Sweden, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland)?
Country Road. In tranquil rural Israel – the setting for the Re’im Peace Music Festival – Gazan killer squads on trucks and motorbikes descended on unsuspecting civilians killing all in their path.
Others chose to compare the Hamas massacre to the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, that shocked the Jewish world by its cruelty and whose victims numbered 50 Jews, an act of brutality that today almost pales by comparison.
Another issue was the goal of the attack, and what it achieved. Besides murdering (mainly) Israeli/Jewish men, women, and children of all ages with the most unimaginable, inhuman savagery, and sowing destruction in numerous local communities, there did not seem to be a practical goal to this rampage, other than terrorizing the inhabitants of the border areas adjacent to Gaza. The leaders of Hamas, however, thought differently. Those interviewed in the aftermath of the rampage, were ecstatic about the results, since in their words, it focused worldwide attention on the plight of the Palestinians.
This kind of thinking reminds me of two other examples of terror attacks, one military and another religious/political, which began with great success from the vantage point of the perpetrators, but ultimately proved to be the beginning of their total destruction and downfall. In both cases, the attacks were launched against the United States, which was immediately prompted to embark on a worldwide campaign to destroy the perpetrators, and did so with little concern for humanitarian considerations.
Lesson in History. Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor shocked the American people, defining the day as one “of infamy” and led to the complete unconditional surrender of Japan. Israel should accept nothing less from Hamas.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
The first case was the Japanese sneak attack early Sunday morning on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Japanese fighter planes succeeded in destroying or damaging 20 American naval ships, including eight battleships, and over 300 planes. 2,304 American personnel and civilians were killed, and 1,178 were wounded. In the wake of that attack, which was considered a great success in Japan, the United States declared war on Japan the next day, and three days later, Japan’s allies Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, which joined the war in Europe against the Nazis and their allies, more than two years after the beginning of World War II.
Who knows how that war would have ended without the highly significant participation of the Americans? The Japanese were forced into submission by two nuclear bombs, thus marking the end of the regime that attacked Pearl Harbor and facilitating the transition to democracy, which exists in Japan to this day.
Fates sealed. The attack on Twin Towers, Al-Qaeda though it might break the “paper tiger” weaking its global influence but instead unleashed US power and the ultimate killing by American forces in Pakistan of the Al-Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden. Hamas should expect no less for its leadership.
The second example is the attack launched on September 11, 2001, by the Islamist extremist group al-Qaeda led by Osama bin Laden. Four commercial airplanes were hijacked by Islamic terrorists, two of which crashed their planes into the World Trade Center in New York, while another attempted to crash his plane into the Pentagon in Washington, and a fourth plane crash-landed in the Pennsylvania countryside after passengers attempted to overpower the militants in the cockpit. Nearly 3,000 innocent people were killed as a result, about 2,750 in New York, 184 at the Pentagon, and 40 in Pennsylvania. Bin Laden’s motivation for the attack was that he believed that the United States was weak, a “paper tiger”, (based on its retreats from Vietnam in the 1970s, Lebanon in 1983, and Somalia in 1993), and that attacking America in a dramatic way would help bring about a regime change in the Middle East.
No Compromising with Terrorism. Following the surprise multiple attacks on the USA on 9/11 as seen here on the southwest corner of the Pentagon resulting in the deaths of 184 souls, America mobilized global support as it responded with uncompromising force.
Of course, that was not what happened. Just the opposite occurred, as the “paper tiger” mounted a serious campaign to destroy al-Qaeda and execute Bin Laden, both goals of which were achieved.
Those are the historical precedents that Israel should study carefully, and which we should compare to the Hamas operation of October 7. Not every Jewish tragedy should be compared to the Holocaust, or even to other calamities in our history. There are a lot of important lessons to learn from the tragedies of others, and hopefully, we will achieve the same successful results.
About the writer:
The writer, Dr. Efraim Zuroff is director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center Israel office and Eastern European affairs, and coordinator of the center’s Nazi war crimes research worldwide.
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO)
