A Week After It Happened

“They want us dead. Please end it!”

These were words of anguish of a University of Washington student, a young woman pleading with a university administrator to do something as a mob in the background chanted:

There is only one solution
Intifada revolution!

One solution, indeed. A final solution. They want us dead.

People insist that, after a thousand depraved live-streamed rapes and murders, that nothing is to be done. No one may even make an effort to rescue the kidnapped survivors.

They want us dead.

A week has passed. They say the dead should be forgotten, the wounded should be quiet, the kidnapped should resign themselves to their fate. They send their thoughts and prayers.

They want us dead.

That young woman, pleading with the administrator for aid, echoed the pleas of women of Kishinev. Those women called for the police: the police seized their guns because disarmed Jews would cause less trouble as they died.

The University of Washington administrator — all university administrators — ought to think today on the Battle of Cable Street, when in 1936 the British Fascists planned to march through Jewish East London. Jews couldn’t depend on the Metropolitan Police for help: the Metropolitan Police fought for Oswald Mosley and the fascists. And yet, the fascists were stopped.

They want us dead.

Not just Hamas. A shocking number of people I thought friends are perfectly content to say they regret those dead Jews, but they condemn any step that survivors might take in order to continue to survive.

This has been a horrible week, one some will never entirely forget nor fully forgive. I deplore what I fear the government of Israel is about to do. I spent much of the week trying, as many of good will did try, to establish an atmosphere where some other course might have seemed safe enough to attempt, a world in which a grieving Israel would know that the nations of the earth would do what this young student begged: end it. Protect people against unspeakable evil. Forty dead babies. Hundreds of dead dancers. Kidnapped octogenarian peaceniks.

But no: we must be even-handed. But no: we must parse exactly how those forty babies were slaughtered, and we must accept that nothing can be done until after the Jews have atoned for everything.

There is only one sufficient penance. They want us dead.

They say: those kids ought to have danced somewhere else, not so close to the border. (Perhaps 40mi further west? Oh no! Another border! Perhaps these kids should not dance...)

They want us dead.

Fez 1033. Granada 1066. York 1189/90. Valencia 1391. Spain 1492. Poland 1648-1658. Kishinev 1903. Cossacks 1648. Proskurov, 1913. So very many more. Everywhere: 1932-1945. And now, a new pogrom: Sderot 2023. They said, “Never again.”

They want us dead.