Celebrating after October 7th

This period in the Jewish Calender is always poignant. Last week (May 6th 2024) marked Yom HaShoah, the day in the Jewish calendar chosen to remember the victims of the Holocaust. Today (May 13th 2024) marks Yom HaZikaron, the day we remember the soldiers fallen in defence of Israel. It ends tonight when Yom Haatzmaut begins, the Israeli day of celebration marking the declaration of Israel's independence 76 years ago. We are reminded in one week of the cost of not having a state; the price we pay for having one and then, immediately, often at the end of an event to commerate the fallen soldiers, celebrate having one. Except this year feels a little different. Hamas still holds over hundred hostages. Men, women, babies (...yes, babies). How can you celebrate anything, let alone the freedom of having a country when so many are slaves in Gaza, not free and living in unimaginable conditions as modern day Nazis rape, torture and murder them.

I do not know the answer. But I am reminded of the Pesach Seder. I am reminded that admist the 'Yom Tov' (literally 'good day') celebration of not being slaves in Egypt any longer; a night when we have someone else pour our wine for us and recline while drinking as visual reminders that we are free, we are commanded (Exodus 13:8): 

וְהִגַּדְתָּ֣ לְבִנְךָ֔ בַּיּ֥וֹם הַה֖וּא לֵאמֹ֑ר בַּעֲב֣וּר זֶ֗ה עָשָׂ֤ה יְהֹוָה֙ לִ֔י בְּצֵאתִ֖י מִמִּצְרָֽיִם

And you shall explain to your child on that day, ‘It is because of what HaShem did for me when I went free from Egypt.’ [Emphasis added] 

How can this be? I was never a slave in Egypt; I never went free from Egypt. Yet the Torah commands us to explain the Exodus to our children in this way. This commandment is reinforced in the Hagaddah itself. Part of what is read is a story about five Rabbis who were retelling the Exodus for so long that they had to be alerted by their students that the time for the recital of the following morning's Shema had come. Those Rabbis were Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Yehoshua, Rabbi Elazar ben Azaria, Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Tarfon. None of their ancestors were enslaved in Egypt (of these five rabbis, four of them were from the tribe of Levi which was not enslaved and the fifth, Rabbi Akiva, was descended from converts to Judaism so his ancestors were never in Egypt) yet so engrossed were they in retelling the story, that they nearly missed morning prayers. We can learn from this how important that commandment to remember the exodus as if we were slaves and freed ourselves; it even applies to those of us whose ancestors were actually not enslaved. 

Maybe something similar is required. Celebrate but remind our children that we are slaves in Gaza, even though, of course, we are not. However, in a very important sense, until the hostages are released, none of us are truly free. Just like in the midst of the celebration of our greatest redemption, being led out of Egypt on the way to receiving the Torah and becoming an 'am', a nation, a people we must not just remember that we were slaves in Egypt but live that experience and tell the story as if HaShem is literally freeing us from Egypt as we tell it. We can celebrate our freedom while praying for the release of the hostages; we can hold these two contradictory truths in our hearts at once. That we are free, Baruch HaShem, we are not hostages in Gaza but we are also not free, because, some of us are hostages in Gaza. 

So on this Yom Haatzmaut, may we celebrate our freedom and remember all those things we have to be grateful for but may we also remember the hostages and pray for their freedom. 

עם ישראל חי

The Simple Question

There is a simple question that I invite everyone to consider:

Do you support Hamas? 

This is not a trap. This is not an implication that anyone does or does not support Hamas. A genuine question. Yes or no. 

If yes, then congratulations, you support genocidal, racist, homophobic, Nazi, rapist terrorists. You are not a serious person and we do not need to listen to you. Your opinion is garbage, worthless and should be ignored. You are excluded from rational debate and the marketplace of ideas. I do not need to engage with you. Goodbye.

If no, then why is the solution to this conflict not a ceasefire and the surrender of Hamas? If you do not support Hamas, why must Israel accept leaving in place a terror organisation whose position is the destruction of Israel and the murder of every Jew worldwide? If you want to save Palestinian and Jewish lives, why is this not the solution? Explain to me why Hamas should be allowed to survive; why do you not call for their complete surrender as well as a ceasefire? 

If you only care for Palestinian lives, then sure. A ceasefire that leaves Hamas in place to carry out an October 7th again and again and again, as it has vowed to do, will achieve the protection of Palestinian lives. It will stop a lot of killing. There is no question about that. But do not pretend your position is pro-peace, pro-life or pro-co-existence. Your position is that Palestinian lives are worth more than Jewish lives. Which is a position, I suppose, but own it. Accept that leaving Hamas in situ is a threat, a demonstrable and real threat to Jews living in Israel and across the world. Accept that these lives do not matter to you, that you are willing to risk more Jews dying if it stops the war. 

I can almost understand that position; war is horrific. Everyone should be against it and broadly in favour of no war. This should not be controversial. But sometimes it is not quite as simple as that. Sometimes wars must be fought. Sometimes wars are just (this may help explain). If your position is war is never justified, I am afraid you do not live in the real world. Ukraine, for example, should not surrender to Russia. Anyone arguing the contrary because 'war is bad' should not be taken seriously. However, while I can understand it, I do not agree with it. A ceasefire that leaves Hamas in place is not a serious option. Or at least, it should not be. A ceasefire that leaves Hamas in place is a ceasefire that says Jewish lives do not matter. They are worth risking. They just matter less. 

And to be honest, we already knew this. Jews have learnt this the hard way throughout history. We have been failed with horrific consequences in virtually every century. Millions and millions of us have been murdered, tortured, raped, exiled, kidnapped, targeted, boycotted, expelled, discriminated against simply because we are Jews. There have been pogroms, Holocausts, forced conversions, ghettoisation, blood libel, racist show trials, and restrictions on our freedoms throughout history. The World writ large has failed the Jews and continues to fail the Jews. Nothing truly changes; we just do not matter. I make no apologies if that seems harsh. You may protest, of course, you will I am sure, that you just want the killing to stop. And I believe you. But forgive me if I do not think you want the killing of Jews to stop. And, for what it is worth, forgive me if I also think you do not care much about Palestinians; Hamas is as much a danger to Gazans as it is to Jews. They murder their opponents, murder homosexuals, murder dissidents, steal aid and much worse beyond. Caring about peace, an end to the bloodshed and prosperity for Palestinians and Jews depends on the destruction of Hamas. 

And it really is as simple (and as complicated) as that.

When is genocide not genocide?

Genocide is a relatively new term. It was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Holocaust survivor, in 1944. Interestingly, at the time, there was concern that 'genocide', as a term, would fail to capture the full horror of such crimes because it would focus on the targeting of a group potentially at the expense of the individuals murdered. Six million Jews murdered is bad not (just) because they were Jews, but also because of the sheer number and focusing on the 'Jew' part may undermine the 'six million' part. The unique horror of the holocaust lies not just in the fact that Jews were targeted, but that six million of us were murdered. The counter-argument is that there is something uniquely awful about murdering individuals because they are members of a specific group; the Holocaust's horror is precisely because of the systematic mass murder of Jews and the attempt to exterminate every last Jew. And so 'genocide', formed by combining the Greek genos meaning race or tribe with the Latin suffix cide meaning killing, so literally, the killing of a race/tribe was coined. Its definition is codified in Article II of the Genocide Convention:

"In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such

• Killing members of the group;
• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

The intent to destroy is the mens rea component and the five bullet points are the actus reus of the crime.  Both are necessary to make out the crime. In addition: 

Importantly, the victims of genocide are deliberately targeted - not randomly – because of their real or perceived membership of one of the four groups protected under the Convention (which excludes political groups, for example). This means that the target of destruction must be the group, as such, and not its members as individuals. Genocide can also be committed against only a part of the group, as long as that part is identifiable (including within a geographically limited area) and “substantial. (See here)

It matters what genocide is. It matters because genocide is bad. Obviously. It is so bad that if something is genocide, debating the topic is not just futile but actively offensive; there is (rightly, of course) no justification for genocide. But I am not writing to debate whether Israel is committing genocide. It isn't, but the most sophisticated legal arguments won't convince the people who believe the contrary. Facts do not matter, it seems. It is not worth anyone's time to engage with such absurd and deliberately offensive comments. Instead, I want to spend some time considering why the accusation of genocide is levelled at Jews. It is not because there actually is a genocide. But it is also not by accident. 

It is a deliberate attempt to bait Jews; to use our past against us in the most horrific and cruel of ways. Jews, perhaps unique in our millennia of persecution, pogroms, hatred and actual genocide, know what genocide looks like. It is, unfortunately, in our DNA. So our opponents use the word genocide. They accuse Jews of genocide deliberately to undermine the meaning of the term, to rid it of any significance because they hate Jews. It is a win-win. Either Israel is found guilty of genocide (and bashing Israel is all these antisemites really care about) or they succeed in watering down the meaning of genocide. It's soft Holocaust denial, attempting to label everything you do not agree with as genocide. 

The Genocide Convention was part of the world's response to the Holocaust. It was part of the world's response to abandoning the six million Jewish victims of the Nazi regime; of the Red Cross having more compassion for Nazi soldiers than Jewish victims (oh how history repeats itself); of Western powers knowing about the gas chambers and not lifting a finger to help the Jews. It was part of Never Again; a pledge meant to protect against the crimes perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th. It is now being cynically and deliberately abused by South Africa and its cabal of human rights-abusing dictatorships to attack Jews. The legacy of Nelsen Mandela, a proud defender of Zionism (and Palestinian nationalism), is being destroyed by a racist government that hates Jews. There is no other explanation. They do not care about Palestinians; this political stunt will only make their lives worse as the crimes of Hamas are sanitised for consumption by the world's useful idiots.

Let's be clear. Genocide is the brutal, systemised mass murder of six million Jews. It is the murder of between 1.5 million and 2 million Cambodians or the mass rape and murder of up to 400,000 Darfuris. The slaughter of 800,000 Rwandas. I could go on. The odd thing is none of these resulted in state accusations of genocide; I wonder why. Throwing around 'genocide' as if it has no meaning, as if it is not the most heinous of crimes, just because you do not agree with Israeli policy or attempts to defend itself against the closest thing to genocide in this entire conflict is to deliberately offend Jews. Jews must suffer the double crime; an actual genocide perpetrated against us and the constant and deliberate undermining of the horror of that genocide. 

South Africa and the Hamas cheerleaders gleefully supporting this case should hang their heads in shame. History will judge them much like it judges the Nazis; as an antisemitic rabble that added no value whatsoever to the world. 

The Jewish people, however, will live on.