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A Jew Who Escaped the Holocaust Decries the Horrors in Lebanon (Leiter)

How could any morally decent person not?  An excerpt:

As a Jew who escaped the Holocaust by moving with my family to America
in 1938, I turn on the BBC at night. And what I see are clouds of black
smoke, explosions; the dead and the dying – children crying bitterly,
cities in ruins. Only yesterday, these piles of rubble in Lebanon were
home to thousands. Now, the cars roll out onto the highways, white
flags attached to the windshields and doors. More than half a million
are homeless.

The Israelis told them to leave, but then
strafed one convoy from a helicopter. The military people exert their
force without pity. They win their wars proudly. They are the masters
of force.

Using
the most modern weapons the United States can supply to search out the
Hezbollah guerrillas, the Israeli soldiers destroy Lebanon. They wreck
all of Gaza, seeking to murder the leaders of Hamas.

Many American Jews gather proudly to cheer them on. The face of the
American president remains blank. A patter of platitudes issues from
his lips. He is not interested in peace. He is happy to see Israel do
the dirty war for him. Diplomacy is a word not in his dictionary….

[I]t goes without saying, loyal Jews must talk about the Holocaust.
Ignore the images of today’s dead and dying, and focus on the grainy
black-and-white pictures showing the death of Jews in the villages of
Poland, at Auschwitz and Sobibor and Bergen-Belsen. We are the first,
the only true victims, the champions of helplessness for all eternity.

No matter what great accomplishments were ours in the diaspora, no
matter that we produced Maimonides and Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn and
hundreds of others of mankind’s benefactors – not a warrior among them!
– look at the world of our long exile always in the dark light of the
Shoah. But this, in itself, is an obscene distortion: Would the author
of "Survival in Auschwitz," Primo Levi, or the poet Paul Celan demand
that we slaughter the innocents in a land far from the snow-clad
forests of Poland? Is it a heroic act to murder a child, even the child
of an enemy? Are my brethren glad of it and proud?

I am heartsick, and still I see a glimmer of hope (there must be that glimmer, to go on at 78 years).

The American peace camp reports a sudden massive increase in
membership. All over the country, Jews whose consciences have not been
crippled are writing in, speaking up, gathering, to raise their voices.
Is this not what we have always done? What we were brought up to do?
What – since the days of the Bible and the prophets – our forefathers
taught us? If Israel had worked for peace as hard as it has worked for
war, might it not all be settled now?

Three hundred British
Jews took out an ad in the Times of London to ask the question, "What
is Israel doing?" This question has now been taken up by Jewish Voice
for Peace, and by Alan Sokal and Bruce Robbins who, some years back,
placed an ad in The New York Times, that read, "Not in Our Name."

The time is long overdue for Jews to return to their role as the
world’s conscience, who come to the aid of the dispossessed, the
wretched of the earth. Once again, we must join those who demand the
end to unjust wars – in Iraq as well as Lebanon – and an unjust
occupation in Gaza. We must honor the example of American civil rights
workers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, not that of the mass
murderer Baruch Goldstein or Yigal Amir, killer of Yitzhak Rabin.

And perhaps the day will come that we will be counted – by Jew and Arab
alike – as among the Just, perhaps even given a place at Yad Vashem,
the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, for the lives we helped to save in
a lawless, savage time.

This, indeed, is a "lawless, savage time," and many need to make amends.  I am confident, however, that they will not do so.

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