Perhaps Yom HaShoah in Israel is a time to take up the issue of comparing the Hamas attack on Israel on Shabbat Oct. 7 Simchat Torah to the Shoah. First it must be said that the Shoah, the Holocaust of Jews in Europe during WWII, was a crime sui generis. It was an attempt to annihilate a whole race of people, unarmed civilians, that led to the coining of the word genocide. The final toll of Jews murdered over a period of 5 years was ca. 6 million, a third of all Jews in the world before the war. Given the relative scope of the Shoah and the Hamas massacre of 1,200 Israelis and the taking of 253 hostages, clearly there is no comparison.
There are two things that the Shoah and the Hamas attack have in common, one is the intention of the attackers to murder, rape and destroy as many Jews as possible, including babies and children. The second was the source of their hatred, a variation on anti-Semitism, evil hatred of Jews, although the sources may have been a bit different, they share that hatred in common. There were no written orders to the terrorists of Hamas to try to establish a Palestinian state, no their orders were purely and simply to kill as many Jews as possible.
But there was a fundamental difference in that while the Shoah was largely successful during war time in Europe with many collaborators of many nations, the Hamas attack had limited success. This was because there was immediate resistance, Israeli Jews with guns fought back, men left their homes with guns and shot Hamas terrorists. IDF units and police forces fought back.
For example the furthest the terrorists penetrated into Israel was to Ofakim, a small town about 10 km from the Gaza border and 5 km from Beersheva. About 30 terrorists reached there, and although they also killed about 30 civilians there, the local police, with a female commander and some IDF soldiers, killed them all. If they had not been stopped they would have been followed by more more terrorists and they might have reached Beersheva and if they had encountered me they would have killed me and I would not be writing this.
Although it took many hours for organized resistance to appear in the form of IDF units, they soon destroyed all the Hamas terrorists in Israel, estimated at some 1,500 (less those that escaped back to Gaza). Israel then defended itself by counter-attacking Hamas in Gaza. It should be noted that the first action of the Israel-Gaza war was initiated by Hamas, Israel was not expecting nor seeking such a war. I and many others wish that the IDF had not stopped its advance south in Gaza months ago and had gone directly into Rafah to finish Hamas off. It was mainly President Biden who withdrew support for Israel to “finish the job.” He bears responsibility, despite his support for Israel, for weakening Israel’s position and delaying the Rafah operation, that will cause many more Israeli casualties because of the delay.
Its true that there might have been more civilians casualties, but the Hamas estimate of 34,000 civilians killed that the media keeps touting as if it were fact, is a gross propaganda number. Israel estimates that it has killed some 13,000 Hamas and other terrorists, and that the civilian casualty count is less than 10,000. Some of you may think this is a high number, but it is small compared to other wars, for example, the US killed an estimated 2 million civilians in Vietnam, 100,000 in the Iraq War and ca. 70,000 in the war against ISIS (the Islamic State). Assad’s forces killed 500,000 civilians in the Syrian civil war, and in the Sudanese civil war it is estimated that 1 million have been killed and according to the UN some 20 million are in danger of starvation. Not only is everything relative, but why is there a double standard, one for Israel and one for the rest of the world including the US?
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