By Rabbi Ben Kamin
SAN DIEGO — When the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, unsuccessfully pleaded for a state at the UN last year, many of us in the Jewish community noted with some bitterness: he failed to even mention either the historic Jewish association with the region of Palestine or the horrific Jewish suffering of the twentieth century that directly led to the establishment of Israel by the UN in 1947.
While we in this community are expected to acknowledge, annotate, apologize, and repatriate for the anguish of the former Jordanians, Egyptians, and Syrians who are now known as the Palestinians (and both Jewish and Israeli individuals and agencies of all kinds have done just that), little expectation is in the air that Palestinian—or Arab—leaders will also take a more reflective view of the Jewish experience.
Let me say, in fairness to reality and sensible anticipations, this dreadful conflict, now painfully overdue for some kind of resolution, is never going to be adjudicated via apologies. There just isn’t enough time in any given day for such a listing and neither side will ever be satisfied this way. But why did a Hamas spokesman in Gaza take the time this past week to excoriate a Palestinian official from the rival Palestinian leadership, Fatah, who had the audacity to be moved by the genocidal Jewish misery he felt in his heart while visiting the former German death camp at Auschwitz?
1.5 million people, children and adults, were gassed, butchered, and/or burned to death in at Polish murder compound during the Second World War. The vast majority was Jewish; a total of six million Jews, including nearly two million kids, were exterminated by the Nazis and their many European collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Ziad Al-Bandak, an adviser to Palestine Authority President Abbas, paid his respects at a memorial at that site. So have countless human beings of all nationalities, from commoners to prime ministers, all of whom were unable anymore to draw a distinction between the prevailing humanity we all share at the end of the day.Al-Bandak was immediately criticized by a Hamas official, Fawzi Barhoum, for betraying the Palestinian people. He also took the occasion to reiterate the Hamas position that “the Holocaust is a big lie.” We will look for hope somewhere else.
*
Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in San Diego. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com