“I could not believe that human beings were being burned in our time; the world would never tolerate such crimes.” - Night
Following the October 7, 2023, atrocities against Israel, founding Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, called for a Global Day of Jihad to show support for Palestine while praising Hamas terrorists who unleashed an attack so savage, even some of the most anti-Western activists expressed their contempt. Committing door-to-door combat, Hamas terrorists killed, raped, and kidnapped thousands of unarmed innocents, beheading and burning babies in their path. Described by some as a Sunni political and militant operation, Hamas is instead a terrorist organization, designated as such, by the US, in 1997. Known for constructing its bases under civilian buildings, along with their use of Palestinian citizens as human shields, its leaders live large in Qatar, on billions in aid money from international agencies and Western and Arab countries, neglecting the very people they were elected to serve.
Formed in 1987, as a spin-off of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’s training, funding, and weaponry are supplied primarily by Iran, Qatar, and Turkey. Their founding document revealed their true intent: to obliterate Israel and force its extinction, an antisemitic screed that promised the genocide of Jews. Although Hamas softened its language in a revised charter in 2017, Hamas continues to deny Israel statehood. After Israel’s voluntary withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2006, Hamas handily beat the more moderate Fatah, in elections held the following year. Now representing more than two million Palestinians, Hamas has unsurprisingly rejected any further elections. But it's their most recent attack, the targeting of Israeli civilians, that reminds us of darker times, long thought forgotten.
In Elie Wiesel’s 1958 book, “Night”, Wiesel honors both the dead and the living following his incarceration in concentration camps in Poland and Germany from 1944-45. A Jew of Romanian descent, Wiesel lost both his mother and sister to the gas chamber and his father to exhaustion and starvation just months before his rescue. To keep their memories alive, Wiesel hoped that the world would never again forget the inhumanity waged against the Jews and the undeniable reality of antisemitism. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian work in 1986, Wiesel lamented that Israel was the only nation whose existence was threatened because of its religion.
It was during the Second World War when European Jews were forced into ghettos, stripped of their possessions, marked with a yellow star, and eventually transported by cattle cars in the dark of night. Women were separated from men before the weak were stripped from the strong. Those who survived the first selection were branded, shaved, and forced into backbreaking work. Those who didn’t, including babies and children, were callously tossed into the flames, their lives exterminated. From 1941 to 1945, 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, a whopping two-thirds of the European Jewish population.
Antisemitism has been called “the longest hatred”, having earned the designation following the adoption of Christianity. Disdain for the religion eventually morphed into an ethnic and social hatred based on genetics, as Jews' economic status grew. With Jews representing less than one percent of the German population but nearly 20 percent of doctors, the Nazis used envy to create resentment towards them. While the Holocaust was initiated by European countries, armies, and citizens, events on October 7, 2023, prove the longest hatred lives on. What Europeans were able to keep hidden from international eyes during the ugly days of the Jewish genocide, is now openly laid bare for all to see.
In 1947, the United Nations drafted a partition to create a two-state compromise in the area now known as Israel. Coming on the heels of the slaughter of Jews during the Holocaust, the new land of Israel was to serve as a refuge for those displaced during their captivity. But instead of a resolution for a two-state solution, a war broke out and resulted in a land grab by the Israeli army. Under the international “rights of conquest”, Israel declared statehood in 1948, with 78 percent of the land, and not the 56 percent that had been originally proposed. The Palestinians and their Arab backers never accepted their loss of land, and the ensuing conflict continues to this day.
We can no longer wonder how the Holocaust came to fruition, when today, we are witnessing its unfortunate rebirth. To regain the faith of Israel and their Western partners, Palestinians must unhitch their wagon from their terrorist captors or go down with them. Elie Wiesel hoped that we would never forget. This time, we cannot fail the test.
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