On the 7th of October 2023 in the early morning, around 3,000 soldiers breached the fences around Gaza and entered Israel. They were armed to their teeth with almost every type of weapon you can think of.
Guns, machine guns, anti-tanks, hand grenades, armed vehicles, including chemical weapons and bombs that are designed to generate fires that raise the temperature to over 3,000 degrees Celsius (5432 Fahrenheit) and much more. They had lots of supplies to allow them to stay for a long period of time and conquer towns, villages and military bases.
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These soldiers, trained by the Iranians for over a year had carried out the most barbaric, inhumane, vicious assault on these innocent citizens and soldiers, decapitating heads of infants, slaughtering women, men, babies, raping them repeatedly (even toddlers in front of their families) while breaking their limbs, torturing them and finally, burning families and children alive beyond recognition. In some cases they even slashed a pregnant women’s bellies and beheaded their fetuses in front of their eyes. They also burned dogs and cows with them. They shot thousands of people in a party celebrating peace. They also kidnapped over 200 people, again – women, children and elderly.
Among the kidnapped and murdered there are Holocaust survivors which woke up to see that the horror they had in their past came back to haunt them almost 80 years after. Most of their actions were filmed by the attackers themselves and published on social media terrorising many more. Ultimately they apparently killed over 1,410 people and injured over 4,834 (the numbers are not yet final because many bodies or body parts, or in many cases body remnants haven’t been identified yet). This is the equivalent of 161,815 Americans or 32,816 British or 33,021 French citizens being impacted by a terrorist attack. This is also equals to 35 Kristallnachts and 7 times the Palestine riots of 1929.
The main question that many people started asking themselves was: Why? Why did they do that and why did the innocent people of Gaza didn’t prevent it.
I humbly believe I have the exact answer to these questions but for that we’ll need some background first.
After the horrific scales of the atrocity done by the Nazi Germany during WWII became known and its unimaginable proportions were revealed, especially after realising the various methods by which they tortured and killed over six million Jews, annihilated around a half of all the Jews globally, people begun to ask how is that the most civilised nation in the world such as the Germans who were a synonym for culture would be capable of committing the largest genocide ever done in history.
Several answers were given to this question. Some say that the S.S officers and members did what they did because they new they will be killed or that some harm will come to their families. Others say that the masterminds behind these evil plans arranged them in such a way that every individual taking part in it will be aware only of a small part of the plan leaving them unable to resist to do their tasks.
The critical problem with such explanations is that they assume that the enemy is just like me and you. They are simply not. They are nothing like you and me.
After analysing many testimonies by Holocaust survivors and also former Nazi officers, Prof. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen had reached the conclusion that the average Joe in the Nazi Germany was not forced to assist the regime in carrying out these horrific actions, they actually were eager and willing to assist in any way they could. This is all explained in much greater detail in his excellent, thought provoking book, titled “Hitler’s Willing Executioners – Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust”
The reason they did that was that the old, religious antisemitism from the middle ages hasn’t died when the world became more and more secular, like people expected it to. It actually continued to grow but it has lost its religious foundation and became a pure racist antisemitism.
Antisemitism thrived in many other countries throughout Europe over centuries because of many folk tales, poems and children’s books which blamed the Jews for all of the problems in our world. To that we should of-course add the attitude of the Church towards the Jewish people since its inception. The thing that turned this mostly dormant antisemitism to the Holocaust was the fact that the new administration by the Nazi party encouraged it and promoted it.
Writing of such books, blaming the Jews for all of Germany’s problems, especially for the problems that the first World War had created, continued in the 30’s in Germany and even increased. Probably, the most famous among these writers were the authors Elvira Bower, Julius Streicher and the caricaturist Philipp Rupprecht (Fips). Them, among many others, by writing children’s books. Some of them were meant to be used for teaching children to read, or as schools materials.
Since 1936, every child who reached the age of six (!) received a gift from the country. A school bag packed with colourfully illustrated pamphlets and books teaching the child how to march like a soldier, how to camp and generally – how to become a good soldier in the Führer’s army. Among these books there were few others which taught the young children how to detect Jews, why they should never trust them (as the title of one of them implies: “Trau keinem Fuchs auf grüner Heid und keinem Jud auf seinem Eid” – Never trust a fox hiding in the green grass and in the promises of a Jew) and books that were written to make the young children feel fear and disgust whenever they encounter anything related to Jews. These books included “Der Giftpilz” (“The Poisonous Mushroom”) and of course “Mein Kampf” (“My Struggle”). Many of these books used illustrations such as these:
Such books This is best described in Prof. Goldhagen’s own words and in the words by Melita Mashmann which he quotes below:
In Germany during the Nazi period, putative Jewish evil permeated the air. It was discussed incessantly. It was said to be the source of every ill that had befallen Germany and of every continuing threat. The Jew, der Jude, was both a metaphysical and an existential threat, as real to Germans as that of a powerful enemy army poised on Germany’s borders for the attack. The character, ubiquity, and logic of action of German antisemitism during the Nazi period is captured brilliantly by Melita Maschmann in a confessional memoir written to her lost, former childhood Jewish friend. A devoted member of the girls’ division of the Hitler youth, Maschmann was not the progeny of country bumpkins, being the daughter of a university-educated man and a woman who had grown up in a prosperous business family. She begins telling of her youthful understanding of Jews by observing that the regnant conception of “the Jews” had no empirical basis.
Those Jews were and remained something mysteriously menacing and anonymous. They were not the sum of all Jewish individuals … They were an evil power, something with the attributes of a spook. One could not see it, but it was there, an active force for evil.
As children we had been told fairy stories which sought to make us believe in witches and wizards. Now we were too grown up to take this witchcraft seriously, but we still went on believing in the “wicked Jews.” They had never appeared to us in bodily form, but it was our daily experience that adults believed in them. After all, we could not check to see if the earth was round rather than flat—or, to be more precise, it was not a proposition we thought it necessary to check. The grownups “knew” it and one took over this knowledge without mistrust, They also “knew” that the Jews were wicked, The wickedness was directed against the prosperity, unity and prestige of the German nation, which we had learned to love from an early age. The anti-semitism of my parents was a part of their outlook which was taken for granted….
For as long as we could remember, the adults had lived in this contradictory way with complete unconcern. One was friendly with individual Jews whom one liked, just as one was friendly as a Protestant with individual Catholics. But while it occurred to nobody to be ideologically hostile to the Catholics, one was, utterly, to the Jews. In all this no one seemed to worry about the fact that they had no clear idea of who “the Jews” were. They included the baptized and the orthodox, yiddish Aid speaking second hand dealers and professors of German literature, Communist agents and First World War officers decorated with high orders, enthusiasts for Zionism and chauvinistic German nationalists…. I had learned from my parents’ example that one could have anti-semitic opinions without this interfering in one’s personal relations with individual Jews. There may appear to be a vestige of tolerance in this attitude, but it is reallyjust this confusion which I blame for the fact that I later contrived to dedicate body and soul to an inhuman political system, without this giving me doubts about my own individual decency. In preaching that all the misery of the nations was due to the Jews or that the Jewish spirit was seditious and Jewish bloody.. corrupting, I was not compelled to think of you or old Herr Lewy or Rosel Cohen: I thought only of the bogeyman, “theJew.” And when I heard that the Jews were being driven from their professions and homes and imprisoned in ghettos, the points switched automatically in my mind to steer me round the thought that such a fate could also overtake you or old Lewy, It was only the Jew who was being persecuted and “made harmless.”Maschmann account conveys, better than any scholarly analysis of which I know, the central qualities of German antisemitism its hallucinatory image of the Jews; the specter of evil that they appeared to Germans to be casting over Germany; Germans’ virulent hatred of them; the “abstract” character of the beliefs that informed the treatment which its bearers accorded real Jews;the unquestioned nature of these beliefs; and the eliminationist logic that led Germans to approve of the persecution, ghettoization, and extermination of Jews (the evident meaning of the euphemism “made harmless”). Maschmann leaves no doubt that antisemitism in Germany was, for many, like mother’s milk, part of the Durkheimian collective consciousness; it was, in this woman’s astute account, “a part of their outlook which was taken for granted.” The consequences of these views, of this ideological map, can be seen in the wild success of the unfolding eliminationist antisemitic persecution that began with the Nazis’ assumption of power.
Arab Palestinians in Israel and in Gaza have been identifying with the Nazi party ideology even before the second world war. Their leaders during the 1860s till the 1970s were Mohammed Tahir al-Husayni and his son Mohammed Amin al-Husseini which even met Adolf Hitler himself and even offered to assist in Germany’s “Final Solution” to the “Jews Problem”. The book “Mein Kampf” is still to this day a best seller in Lebanon, in Arab villages in Israel and in Gaza.
When you add to this the fact that unlike the Germans of the 1930s, the Arabs, especially the ones who subscribe to the Islamic faith which, among others orders the Jihad, a religious war against all those who are not Muslim, this comes as no surprise that there is no such thing as “innocent citizens” in the Gaza strip. As we have recently understood there aren’t many such Arab citizens even within our borders. As explained by Dor Shachar, who was born and raised in the Gaza strip and about ten years ago had converted to Judaism said in the interview below (in Hebrew): “We, the citizens of Israel have convinced ourselves that they (the people of Gaza) are peaceful… I’ll do them a favour and say that less than 1% are okay. All the rest of them, 99% of them are people endorsing Terror (against Israel and the Jews). In the first Intifada there were lots of Terror attacks, busses were exploding, In Netanya, at the first evening of Passover families were killed. Who was behind it? Fatah, PLO. Never forget that the children of Hamas’s, Fatah, Tanzim, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, all of these populations are studying in the same schools, I learned there, we were taught to kill Jews, that the Jews took the land of your grandfathers, everyone who kills a Jew will enter Paradise and is called “Shahid”. They are all murderers.” You can see everything in the video below:
Just to illustrate what the Quran is teaching the Muslims, here are some quotes from the Quran itself:
1. “Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture – [fight] until they give the Jizyah willingly while they are humbled.” (Sura 9, 29)
2. “Allah has heard the saying of those who said: ‘Allah is poor, and we are rich. We shall record what they have said, and the fact of their slaying the Prophets unjustly, and we shall say to them: Taste now the torment of the Fire” (Sura 3, 181)
3. “I heard Allah’s Apostle [Muhammad]saying, “The Jews will fight with you, and you will be given victory over them so that a stone will say, ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew behind me; kill him!'” (Sahih al-Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 56, Number 791)
4. “The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.” (Sahih Muslim Book 41, Hadith 6985)
You can read even more about these “innocent” citizens here: https://www.israelhayom.co.il/news/geopolitics/article/14739477
I believe it is evident to you as it is to me that although the people of Gaza only look somewhat similar to you and me physically, they are vastly and incomparably different than us, just as an American educator who was intimately familiar with Nazi schools and youth cautioned in 1941. “Nazi schooling”, he averted, “produced a generation of human beings in Nazi Germany so different from normal American youth that mere academic comparison seems inane and any sort of evaluation of the Nazi educational system is extremely difficult.”
As such, I’d recommend that anyone trying to understand the society in Gaza and in other Arab villages in Israel should not assume the people there are exactly like him but instead should adopt a very different anthropological approach just as Prof. Goldhagen suggested that will be done for understanding the Nazis:
IN THINKING ABOUT German antisemitisrn, people have a tendency to make important, unacknowledged assumptions about Germans before and during the Nazi period that bear scrutiny and revision. The assumptions are ones that people would not adopt for investigating a preliterate group in Asia or fourteenth-century Germans, yet which they do for the study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany. They can be summed up as follows: Germans were more or less like us or, rather, similar to how we represent ourselves to be: rational, sober children of the Enlightenment, who are not governed by “magical thinking,” but rooted in “objective reality.” They, like us, were “economic men”
Sadly enough – THEY ARE NOTHING LIKE US.
