Opinion: Never Again? Really?

Opinion: Never Again? Really?

If you really mean “Never Again,” now is the time to do something about it. If you choose to just sit back and watch, we in Israel will carry on without you.

By Naomi Ragen

It is not every day that a woman wakes up to find that her children and grandchildren have spent the night in a bomb shelter, bombarded by missiles launched by a vicious, anti-Semitic terrorist organization dedicated to murdering every last Jew on earth; missiles launched haphazardly at densely populated residential areas at the heart of the country.

I think about my in-laws, both survivors, one of Auschwitz the other of Hungarian slave labor whose wife and two children were gassed by Nazis. And here we are in 2021, and their precious descendants are once again objects of intensive attempts at annihilation as the so-called civilized world brays in unison in support of Hamas, the spiritual heirs to the Nazis.

Considering the extreme delicacy and almost fanatic regard for human rights hailed by this generation, who are devastated by the use of the wrong pronoun, who demand “safe spaces” where their delicate ears might not be assaulted by opinions differing from their own, I find this astonishing. Yet, the fact that the children and grandchildren of survivors, as well as the dwindling but precious and very much alive escapees of Hitler’s Final Solution, are obscenely being subjected to the fear and horror of existential assaults on their existence doesn’t seem to bother anyone, let alone move them to the kind of frenzied activity that, let’s say, a transgender storyteller denied access to small children in the library might.

In fact, if they decide to get involved at all, it has been to link arms in solidarity with Hamas terrorists and their supporters, incensed, they explain, by Israel’s “barbaric” treatment of the Palestinians in “occupied” Gaza, or because Israelis went up to the Temple Mount, Israel’s holiest shrine, plastered over to erect the al Aqsa Mosque. Let us examine this reasoning and apply some facts.

Gaza, an ancient city conquered and reconquered, was ruled by Jews as early as 96 BCE under Herod. Only seven centuries later, in 637 CE, did Muslims appear. In modern times, there was even a Jewish community in Gaza until its members fled Muslim riots in 1929. Egypt ruled the area until they launched the Six Day War. Jewish settlements in Gush Katif, encouraged by the Israeli government to keep Israel’s borders secure, succeeded in keeping rocket launchers further away from the border. With Israel’s unilateral withdrawal in 2005 following the Oslo Accords, this buffer was entirely destroyed, Jews thrown out of their homes, their synagogues and very graves uprooted, and their lucrative hothouses left behind, all in the name of peace.

What followed was anything but. First there were the internecine battles between the PLO and Hamas, both organizations committed to terrorism against Israel, until Hamas succeeded in winning the hearts of Gazans who elected them to rule.

The hothouses, donated by a generous American donor to the Gazans, were destroyed. Billions in aid from all over the world was used to build terror tunnels and build up missile sites. Gazans were terrorized by violent Hamas gangs into silence and poverty, Hamas’s only agenda to use them as cover in launching offensives against the Zionists. Mayhem soon followed, proving to Israel their hopes had been foolish and naïve.

In 2007, long-range missiles were fired at Ashkelon. In 2008, a Grad rocket landed two hundred meters from the neo-natal unit at Barzilai Hospital. In 2009, 571 rockets were fired. In 2010, 250 rockets. In 2011, 680. A mortar aimed at a school bus killed 16-year-old Daniel. That same year, Israel deployed the Iron Dome missile defense system and just in time because in 2012, 360 rockets tainted with poisonous white phosphorous were launched.

All this time, the Israeli navy was busy intercepting long-range Russian and Iranian missiles gifted to Gaza. In 2014, Hamas erected a loving monument to the M-75 missile in Gaza City bragging that “with its help they had managed to take the battle to the heart of the Zionist entity, Israel.” In 2014, 3,000 rockets were launched at heavily populated residential areas in Israel, rockets that cannot be aimed. Even Human Rights Watch, that anti-Israel mouthpiece, found itself obliged to register a protest.

Hamas is not concerned about civilians. Indeed, it places its own rocket launchers between apartment buildings, in mosques, schools, and hospitals, terrorists firing then running away in the hope that the IDF, the most humane army in the world, will not retaliate for fear of civilian casualties, or –even better—that they will, creating excellent propaganda photos for Hamas’ hate-driven agenda.

This scenario has continued uninterrupted, expanding to incendiary balloons that sparked millions of shekels in damage to peaceful Israeli farms along the Gaza border. Israel on the whole has chosen (disastrously in my opinion) to ignore Hamas rocket-fire except in the case of the actual loss of human life.

This is the poisonous terrorist swamp into which you have dipped your delicate little millennial toes, pronoun-huggers. To blame Israel for this conflict one must truly be like Hamas, a devotee and acolyte of Nazi-inspired hatred against the Jewish people.

Founding Father of Palestinian Aspirations: Hitler Ally

Like the founder of the Palestinians, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, you must truly be an admirer of Mein Kampf and Hitler, which Husseini was. During WWII he said: “Germany is the only country in the world that has not merely fought the Jews at home but has declared war on the entirety of world Jewry; in this war against world Jewry the Arabs feel profoundly connected to Germany.” Husseini visited Auschwitz with Himmler and begged the Germans to hurry up so that the half million Jews in Israel could be dispatched in a similar fashion. In 1944, Husseini launched a parachutist attack to poison the Tel Aviv water supply. A war criminal, he was harbored by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

He is the founding father of Palestinian aspirations. His followers include Yasser Arafat – who had Mein Kampf translated into Arabic and distributed in bulk to his followers; and Mahmoud Abbas, the “moderate” who wrote a doctorate declaring the Holocaust “a Zionist fantasy.”

Yet Hamas is even worse than the PLO. Their founding charter unequivocally proclaims their devotion to killing all Jews. Their ally, Hezbollah, led by Hassan Nasrallah, declared in 2002 that it was good that Jews were gathering in Israel because “it will save us from having to hunt them down all over the world.”

All those out there who have wept over Anne Frank’s diary, watched in stupefied outrage The Pianist, and visited Holocaust museums and memorials wondering how such things could have possibly happened in the modern world, need wonder no longer. If you really mean “Never Again,” now is the time to do something about it. Open your mouths, engage online, counter demonstrate, tell your politicians not to withhold aid from Israel in her attempts to protect herself. Arm yourselves and your communities against the new Brown shirts beating up Jews and burning down synagogues in your own hometowns.

Do not delude yourselves that by joining the chanting mobs you will somehow be exempt from what they have planned for every Jew in the world, not just Israelis. All of you now have a front row seat to Holocaust redux. If you choose to just sit back and watch, we in Israel, isolated by your indifference, your politics, and your cowardice, will carry on without you.

Never Again is now. Don’t say it if you don’t mean it.

Naomi Ragen is a Jewish American-Israeli novelist, playwright and journalist.