hostages by making them state their names, and they detained the 105 Jews aboard. Some of them were concentration camp survivors who had experienced that same kind of selection more than thirty years earlier. One of them, Pasco Cohen, was killed in front of his daughter. When the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was murdered by al-Qaeda in Pakistan, the Islamic terrorists forced him to say his name, then those of his father and mother, both Israeli citizens: “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.” In the grimmest photo, Pearl has his head lowered, a chain around his wrists. A man with his face covered is clutching him by the hair, pointing a pistol at his temple. In another, his bare feet can be seen, a bit of the chain dangling from his oversized sweatpants.
Those bare feet reminded me of a young man named Ofir Rahum, who lived in Ashkelon. One day, he received a message on his computer from an older Palestinian girl who lived in Ramallah. Without telling anyone, Ofir put on his best clothes and took the first bus he could. The girl came to pick him up in Jerusalem. He didn’t even realize when the car entered Ramallah, in Palestinian territory. It is difficult to describe what they did to him. He was Jewish, poor, naïve and innocent. That is why he was chosen as “wood to be burned in hell,” according to the propaganda of the Islamic fundamentalists. They assaulted and shot him. They tied his body to the car bumper and drove toward the city. Then they got rid of the body. That’s how life ended for one sixteen-year-old Jewish boy. Why has Ofir’s story never been held up as an example of what ethnic-religious hatred can do?
Why doesn’t anyone know the name of Eliyahu Asheri? He was eighteen years old, the son of an Australian convert to Judaism. He looked at life with a smile, and was hitchhiking home when they caught him. Whenever a Palestinian dies, even a suicide bomber, the newspapers fall all over themselves to publish his story and photographs. Eliyahu wasn’t even named in the newspapers; they just said “Israeli settler.” He was only a kid, executed with a bullet in the head on the day he was kidnapped. Then the murderers took his identification card and used it to extort money from his family.
If a Nazi officer in Auschwitz had filmed a Jew, before entering the gas chamber, in the throes of physical and psychological suffering, like Daniel Pearl, and had made him say “I am a Jew,” today that video would be shown to students all over the world to explain what racism is. But the stories of Daniel, Ofir, and Eliyahu have been forgotten. Daniel’s father, Judea, should be invited to speak at every school.
The history of Israel has been buried under a mound of falsehood: Israel from the beginning accepted the UN Partition Plan for Palestine and the Arabs violently rejected it. Israel generously offered territory through Ehud Barak’s and then Ariel Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal, and each time received the same response: that the solution isn’t land but Israel’s disappearance. All of Israel’s governments, right and left—from Menachem Begin, giving up the Sinai; to Yitzhak Shamir, attending the Madrid Conference; to Yitzhak Rabin, making peace with Jordan and signing the Oslo Accords; to Ehud Barak, retreating from Lebanon and going to the Camp David summit; to Ariel Sharon, withdrawing from Gaza—all have repeated the word that Israel’s neighbors never say: peace. For a large sector of the Islamic world, the cities, skyscrapers, hospitals, cinemas, and schools on this tiny sliver of land are merely real estate that will be restored to Islam once this malefic form is swept away.
Peace can come only with the recognition in the Middle East of Israel as a national state of the Jewish people; the addition of the State of Israel to all the maps used in schools in the Islamic world; the elimination of the extensive anti-Israeli propaganda campaigns in the Muslim media and schools; the promotion of interactions among scientists, scholars, artists, and athletes; the abandoning of the delegitimization of Israel at the United Nations; the outlawing of terrorist groups devoted to the killing of Israelis and the destruction of Israel; the end of the economic boycott against Israel; the institution of full diplomatic relations with Jerusalem as Israel’s capital; and last but not least, the proclamation of theological fatwas prohibiting the murder of “infidels,” Jews, and Christians.
In 1968, just months after Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, the American philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times in response to the proliferation of anti-Israel sentiment in the international community. His words now sound prophetic: “I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish the holocaust will be upon us.” The Jewish condition is again the focal point of an enormous battle of identities. Israel can be threatened existentially because it does not exist on the maps studied by generations of Arabs and Iranians. It can be assailed because its history is denied in Europe—denied as a human occurrence made up of immigration, wars against Arab rejection, the struggle for independence under the British Mandate; denied as a right sanctioned by the United Nations and sanctified by the dignity of its victims. How can peace be constructed in the Middle East if Israel’s victims are forgotten?
Two years ago, in Jerusalem, a terrorist killed eight young Jewish seminarians who were studying the Torah. Afterward, a survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research showed that 84 percent of the Palestinians justified the attack. Itamar Marcus, who has spent many years monitoring and exposing Palestinian anti-Semitic propaganda as director of Palestinian Media Watch, maintains that the heads of propaganda for Hamas and for the Palestinian Authority’s TV station—with their televised sermons, cartoons, comic books, and schoolbooks—have created a machine to incite killing similar to that of the Hutu journalists who fomented genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda. The Islamic movement describes the Jews as “children of monkeys and pigs” to be exterminated, just as the Hutu supremacists spoke of the Tutsis as “serpents” to be crushed. European countries first prosecuted hate speech on a par with war crimes during the Nuremberg trials of Nazi officers, and after this in the proceedings at an international court in Tanzania in 2003, when the Hutu journalists Hassan Ngeze, Fernand Nahimana, and Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza were found guilty of using Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines and a biweekly magazine to incite the extermination of Tutsis and publish lists of people to be killed.
Hamas and Hezbollah, two of the terrorist organizations that seek the destruction of Israel, call the Jews “pigs,” “cancer,” “garbage,” “germs,” “parasites,” and “microbes.” Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad uses the expression “dead rats.” This terminology is the contemporary version of the Nazi schmattes, Yiddish for “rags.” As the great historian Robert Wistrich has explained, “the Islamic movement calls the Jews ‘children of pigs and monkeys’ because dehumanization comes before genocide.” In Israel, terrorists have killed those who inherited the names of their parents and grandparents murdered in the gas chambers and in the forests of occupied Europe. When the siren sounds on Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, all Israelis stop wherever they are, like statues of pain, because living Israelis feel that they are the continuation of the Judaism that was cut off in Europe. They are linked by an invisible chain that explains to the whole world why Israel exists. It is no accident that the siren is the same one that warns Jews to take shelter in case of bomb attacks.
Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that it was words, not machines, that produced Auschwitz. The Palestinian historian and TV host Issam Sissalem said that the Jews “are like a parasitic worm that devours a snail and lives inside of its shell. We will not allow them to live in our shell.” This is the basic message conveyed by Palestinian sermons, academic lectures, and even performances for children. On March 12, 2004, in a mosque in Gaza, Sheikh Ibrahim Mudeiris, who draws a salary from the Palestinian Authority, declared, “We will fight the Jewish cancer.” Shortly afterward, dozens of Israelis would be blown up by suicide bombers. In February 2008, Wael al-Zarad, an ulema of Hamas, launched a televised appeal for the extermination of the Jews. A few days later, a terrorist gunned down eight Jewish students.
Al-Aqsa TV, controlled by Hamas in the Gaza Strip, broadcast an interview with two young children in March 2007. “You love your mommy, right? Where is she now?” “In paradise.” “What did she do?” “She chose martyrdom.” “Did she kill Jews? How many of them
