"This is NOT Genocide. The Holocaust -- THAT was Genocide. This is NOT that."

Why are so many Jews stuck on this point? What is it about what we Israelis are doing in Gaza that feels like it can't be compared to the Holocaust?

I feel like we should parse this out.

Here are some of the things I’ve heard — from other people and from inside my own head.

"The Holocaust was INTENTIONAL destruction of a people."

Well, so is what we're doing in Gaza. We are ALSO acting intentionally. Our government has laid out entire strategies for doing this. Years and years of strategizing and funding and budgeting. And now it is carrying these plans out. On purpose. Purposeful starvation. Purposeful squeezing out. Die or leave. That's the strategy. They say it out loud. These plans are not even a secret.

"It's a whole other scale. That was six million, this is only 50,000".

First of all, scale is relative. Second, it's still going on. We're not done yet...Third, every single Gazan is a target. Every single Gazan.

Also, 92% of the homes have already been wiped out. As one indication of scale.

Plus, in terms of numbers, we won't know final numbers for a long time b/c so many bodies are in rubble. Palestinians report not even being able to bury all their dead b/c there's no time and no safe place.

Don't focus on the numbers. Focus on the actions and the impacts.

"The Jews did nothing to deserve this. The Gazans had October 7."

October 7 did not happen because of 2.2 million Gazans. The 2.2 million Palestinians are just people. Like you and me. October 7 took place because of, say, 5000 terrorists. Yes, terrible ugly monstrous terrorists. But that is NOT the population of Gaza that Israel is currently starving out and bombing and displacing and killing. We are creating this massive collective punishment for the acts of the worst among them. We are targeting 2.2 million people most of whom had nothing to do with October 7.

I would ask you to dig deeper on this: Should an entire people be condemned to death and destruction because of the actions of the worst among them? Is that it -- you're guilty by being part of the same ethnic or religious group? I'm wondering how that thinking would work out for us. I'm wondering what would happen to Jews if we were all judged and condemned to mass punishment based on the actions of, say Bernie Madoff or Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey Epstein. And, my god Jeffrey Epstein had a hell of a lot of Jewish men in his black book. Doing terrible things. By this logic, maybe all Jews should be punished for that. Maybe, by this thinking, it's a Jewish thing....

"Well, they are all complicit. All Gazans are guilty. They voted for Hamas."

Okay, WHOA so first of all, 20,000 children did NOT vote for Hamas. So that is just, well, sick. Sorry to be so blunt. (Not sorry). Kids are ALWAYS innocent and do NOT deserve to be killed.

And again, collective punishment -- being willing to kill 2.2 million people for the acts of some -- is deeply immoral. So deeply immoral.

But also, are we in the business of blaming an entire people for the actions of their leaders? Even if they were voted in? If that's the case, you know, we have also had some really bad leaders (still do) and then maybe we should all be punished for that too. Should we all be punished for the things that Ben Gvir and Smotrich say and do? They openly call for entire population transfer, they refer to Palestinians as animals or worse or whatever, and their people regularly chant "Death to the Arabs". I mean, that's pretty bad stuff. And they were VOTED IN. So was Bibi, by the way, again and again.... So by that logic, we should all be punished and bombed and starved because we have violent racists in our government.

And by the way, we all know by now that Bibi is fully responsible for keeping Hamas funded all those years. So where does that put US in this equation, the ones who kept voting in Bibi while he funded Hamas? Who should be held accountable exactly?

Also, you know, I'm just putting out there that America has democratically voted for trump. Twice now. Do you think that hundreds of millions of Americans deserve to be punished for the horrible, violent things that the Trump administration is doing? I'm just asking. Who is responsible for those who have died or have had lives ruined by trump? The wrongly arrested, deported, or attacked? Women dying in pregnancy b/c of the overturning of Roe? Who is responsible for that? The people who voted for Trump? or maybe all Americans?

"It's not genocide. This is part of war. It happens everywhere."

Um, no. Not like this. And when it does, it tends to get called out as such. Rwanda. Serbia. The Rohingya. Even if justice doesn't always have its day, the history books know the truth.

And anyway, the whole purpose of the international court is to talk about these things. To set standards. And they are. And Israel doesn't care! Bibi openly expresses complete disregard for human rights and international standards of ethics. Israeli leaders openly say that they don't care what the world says about morality. That we answer to ourselves. So the idea that somehow Israel is adhering to international standards of morality in war (itself something of an oxymoron) is patently ridiculous.
Plus, see my previous posts on whether Israel is the "most moral army" in the world. (Spoiler: we are not)

"Still, Jews did nothing to deserve the Holocaust. It was just a random hate thing. But the Palestinians? It's not the same."

That's a little true. This war is not a stand-alone thing. It's part of a century-old war. All of us have events in our history that were violent and awful. This definitely complicates things. It's hard to have compassion for the other when you feel attacked by the other. That's true.

But I would argue that this is really important for us to -- that is, to disentangle past and present. To not be looking at current actions in the lens of things that happened long ago. Not to call Palestinians Amalek, for example, as Bibi recently did. (They are NOT). Not to say things like, "Halakha, Esav sonei at Yakov" -- fact, Esau hates Jacob, things also heard everywhere meant to justify very bad behavior based on things that happened 3000 years ago. We need to disentangle. We should not be looking at the 20,000 kids we have killed in Gaza and saying, "Well, their grandparents were terrorists" or whatever. I wouldn’t want to be punished for things my ancestors did. Would you?

Still, I understand how hard this can be sometimes. But this is exactly the work we need to be doing. To look at things as they are. To look at people as they are. Not through a manufactured lens with impenetrable narratives of violence.

And this is why. We have to retain our own humanity. Because, again, there is this issue of collective punishment and the condemnation of an entire people for the acts of a few or the acts of people in the past.

And also, this bad thinking can go both ways, not to our favor. We have ALSO done some very terrible things to Palestinians throughout our history. So if you're going to justify violence against an entire people based on the historic actions of some of them, then perhaps we deserve to have violence meted against all of us too.

For the record, I'm against ALL of that. I'm against collective punishment, generalizations, vengeance, tribalism, and using violence as a form of justice. On ALL sides.

Mostly, I would like to see us STOP this thing of trying to justify the unjustifiable. Call a spade a spade. Look at the way things are, straight up. And not seek out reasons to kill.

"They deserve this. They brought it upon themselves."

This type of thinking, that our bloody actions are somehow "inevitable", is very problematic. (I did a whole take-down of this "a war of no choice" narrative in my book, In My Jewish State.)

So, first of all, this whole "they brought it on themselves" it's victim-blaming. These 20,000 kids died and well, they brought it upon themselves? Really Awful....

Second of all, we are washing our hands of our own actions. It's trying to absolve ourselves of responsibility. Like, be an adult. Take responsibility for your actions. It's like the abusive parent who whips their kid to a bloody pulp and then said, "Well, you brought it on yourself." So unbearably abusive.

I would also like to offer a thought experiment about the whole "They deserve this" mantra: Why did so many Germans THINK that Jews deserved this? They were fed all kinds of lines about Jews and money or whatever, of us being vermin and all that stuff. They ALSO thought that they were doing the "right" thing by exterminating the Jewish people .

What if, for argument's sake, the Bernie Madoff thing had happened in, say, 1932. What would have happened then? How would the discussions in 1933 have gone about Jews and money? How might it have affected whether Germans thought that they were totally justified in their beliefs that Jews were exactly what Hitler said we were? What if people would have said, "But look -- Madoff!" the way people today say, "But look -- October 7!"

I'm saying, what if we have been so led to believe all the things we were indoctrinated to believe about "what Palestinians are" that we can't even see what we're in. What if we, too, are completely sunk in this massive dehumanization about an entire people -- to such as extent that we think it's okay for us to wipe them all out?

And just to be clear, again, we have many government members who speak in this language. All the time. Out loud. As do many Israelis.

Just a thought experiment.

One last thing

I went to the Rwanda Genocide Museum (I recommend it to every human being), which offers a systematic and intelligent analysis of how Genocide happens. The museum has a whole section on the Holocaust, and in fact is based in large part on Yad Vashem and had many Jewish and Israeli consultants in its creation.

How genocide happens is an awful question — but the answers are so important. Because just as Germans so easily turned on their Jewish neighbors and sent them off to gas chambers, so did Rwandans turn on their neighbors, seemingly out of the blue. One day barbecuing together, the next day taking a machete to your friend’s head. Like that. That’s how it seemed to so many people.

But it wasn’t quite like that. The museum shows very clearly that it was only able to happen because of decades of dehumanization of the other. For so long, media personalities and radio hosts — think Rush Limbaugh — used their voices to paint one group as “vermin”. Just as Nazis did of Jews. Just as Trump does to immigrants and many others. And….. just as so many Israelis do to Palestinians.

If we are ever going to be able to live in peace here, it must start with this crucial step: We need to STOP DEHUMANIZING the other.

First and foremost.

Stop saying things like, “Palestinians all lie”, or “They don’t value life like we do,” or “They are all terrorists”, or worse… Our own leaders say these things time and again.

We need to take responsibility for our own part in this process. We need to all check ourselves and stop doing this. Stop dehumanizing the other, stop generalizing the other.

No more of that.

If we will ever have peace, we must start by seeing the human being in front of us. As a human being. Just like you and me.

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