Marci Shore, "The Jewish Hero History Forgot": Is The New York Times Questioning the Need for a Jewish State?

Go to "The Opinion Pages" (http://www.nytimes.com/pages/opinion/index.html) of today's New York Times, and there you will currently see on the upper left hand side of your computer screen a black and white rendition of people wading through a sewer together with a link to an op-ed contributor piece by Marci Shore entitled "The Jewish Hero History Forgot." The accompanying blurb by The Times:

"Not everyone who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising saw a Jewish state as the ultimate goal."

In her contributor op-ed piece, Ms. Shore, an associate professor of history at Yale University, writes of Marek Edelman, a commander of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising who remained in Poland after World War II :

"The Jews who found themselves sealed within the ghetto, like the millions of other Jews living in Eastern Europe, were deeply divided — by language and religiosity and class, by national identification and political ideology. Inside the ghetto were Polish speakers and Yiddish speakers; Orthodox, Hasidic, secular Jews; assimilated Jews and nationalists. The Zionists ranged from radical right to radical left. And most politicized Jews were not Zionists; some were Polish socialists, some Communists, some members of the secular socialist Bund. A debate raged between Zionists and the Bund over the issue of 'hereness' versus 'thereness' — and the Bund believed firmly that the future of the Jews was here, in Poland, alongside their non-Jewish neighbors.

. . . .

Edelman, who had survived by escaping through the sewers, was the last living commander of the uprising. After the war, in Communist Poland, he became a cardiologist: 'to outwit God,' as he once said. In the 1970s and ’80s he re-emerged in the public sphere as an activist in the anti-Communist opposition, working with the Committee for the Defense of Workers and the Solidarity movement. He died in 2009, and to this day, he is celebrated as a hero in Poland.

He is remembered with more ambivalence in Israel. 'Israel has a problem with Jews like Edelman,' the Israeli author Etgar Keret told a Polish newspaper in 2009. 'He didn’t want to live here. And he never said that he fought in the ghetto so that the state of Israel would come into being.' Not even Moshe Arens, a former Israeli defense minister and an admirer of Edelman, could persuade an Israeli university to grant the uprising hero an honorary degree."

And yet, on Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day, less than two weeks ago, Israeli television broadcast the movie "Defiance" concerning the Bielski partisans, a group led by three Jewish brothers who saved Jews and fought the Nazis in Belarus during the Second World War. Both Tuvia Bielski, the commander of this partisan unit, and his brother Zus Bielski, made their homes in New York after the war. They are heroes in Israel, notwithstanding the fact that they did not make "aliyah," i.e. immigrate to Israel.

I have no beef with Ms. Shore's piece. She is entitled to her opinion. But I can assure her that Edelman's decision to remain in a Communist, anti-Semitic Poland after the war (42 Jews died in the Kielce pogrom in 1946) is now a non-issue in Israel. Israel is too concerned with existential threats emanating from Iran and its proxies, Hezbollah, which has 60,000 rockets and missiles pointed south, and the crumbling Assad regime in Syria, which still controls one of world's largest arsenals of chemical weapons.

Jews may soon be fighting again for survival.

On the other hand, what does the Gray Lady mean when it writes "Not everyone who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising saw a Jewish state as the ultimate goal"? Is The Times hinting that notwithstanding a rising level of global anti-Semitism, there is today no need for a Jewish state?

Given the rising level of anti-Semitism that has slithered its way into The Times in recent years, I think there is reason for concern regarding the ulterior motives of this newspaper, which disregards its own ethical guidelines as regards Israel (see, for example: http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.co.il/2013/03/sodom-and-gomorrah-plagiarism-and.html).

Gaza, Today's Warsaw Ghetto?

Several months ago, UN rapporteur Richard Falk asserted with respect to Israel's Operation Cast Lead in Gaza: "To lock people into a war zone is something that evokes the worst kind of international memories of the Warsaw Ghetto". Falk's hollow similitude spawned a new genre of twaddle, particularly popular among closet anti-Semites. What better than to turn the Holocaust upon the children of its victims? As such, a day does not go by without online comments referring to Israel as "The Fourth Reich", labeling Cast Lead as a "Blitzkrieg", and condemning Israel's actions vis-a-vis the Palestinians as "genocide".

But let's get down to brass tacks: Is there a basis for comparing the Warsaw Ghetto with the Gaza Strip? True, the Warsaw Ghetto was, and the Gaza Strip is, overcrowded. The Nazis herded 450,000 Polish Jews into an enclave, which, at its largest, measured 3.5 square miles. However, the Gaza Strip, where 1.5 million people live, measures 139 square miles. There seems to be a significant difference.

By comparison, Manhattan, which also has a population of some 1.5 million, occupies an area of 23 square miles. Are the Jews to blame for Manhattan's population density, which far exceeds that of the Gaza Strip? Many neo-Nazis would answer in the affirmative.

But there is another reason for the density of population in the Gaza Strip. According to the CIA World Factbook, in Gaza there are "5.19 children born/woman (2008 est.)". In contrast, in Holland there are "1.66 children born/woman (2008 est.)". Hence, the population explosion in the Strip from under 600,000 in June 1967 upon Israeli occupation after the Six Day War, to some 1.4 million in August 2005 when Israel evacuated Gaza. If Israel is attempting "genocide", it is doing a very bad job of it.

In the Warsaw Ghetto, countless Jews starved to death, but is this also happening in Gaza? Again, let's have a look at the numbers: According to the CIA World Factbook, the average life expectancy at birth in Gaza is 73.16 years (2008 est.). This differs markedly from the life expectancy of an infant born in the Warsaw Ghetto, whose life expectancy could be measured in days as opposed to years.

What about talk of "Greater Israel" which is again making the rounds in blogs and online comments and sounds much akin to the Nazis' lust for "Lebensraum"? Israel long ago returned Sinai to Egypt and offered all of Gaza and almost all of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, to Arafat in exchange for peace at Camp David in 2000. Re Gaza, Israel has no territorial aspirations whatsoever; every square inch was unilaterally handed over to the Palestinian Authority in 2005. No negotiations: "Take it, it's yours." On the other hand, Hamas is calling for the obliteration of Israel (preamble of its charter) and avers that Jihad is the only solution for the "Palestinian problem" (article 13 of its charter).

Did Polish ghetto Jews call for the extermination of Germans or lay claim to German soil? Not to my recollection. Nor did they target civilians of any creed. Gazans, however, overwhelmingly elected Hamas to manage their affairs, which, according to article 7 of its charter, calls for the murder of Jews: "The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: Oh Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him."

Does Hamas indiscriminately attempt to murder Jews? More than 10,000 missiles, rockets and mortar rounds were fired from Gaza at Israeli civilian targets between 2001 and the conclusion of Operation Cast Lead. Suicide bombings? Probably the most heinous occurred in 2002 when a Hamas operative blew himself up at a Passover Seder in the Park Hotel in Netanya, leaving 30 dead and 14o wounded. These suicide bombings led to the closure of the border to thousands of workers from Gaza, who crossed daily into Israel to support their families.

Internal politics in the Gaza Strip and the Warsaw Ghetto? Arafat's Fatah Party was corrupt, the Palestinians sought "change", and "change" they got, in much the same way that Germans democratically voted Hitler into power. Not only did they vote Hamas "in" and Fatah "out", they also watched as Hamas, after the 2007 civil war with Fatah, executed Fatah supporters. Muhammad Swairki, a cook for Abbas's Presidential Guard, was thrown off a 15-story building. In comparison, there were many different political factions in the Warsaw Ghetto, but there was never internal bloodletting of this kind.

In short, although the suffering of Gazans is real, and steps can be taken by Israel to alleviate their pain, it is also self-imposed by Hamas and its patron, Iran. Any comparison between the Gaza Strip and the Warsaw Ghetto is a canard, which joins Jew-haters from the left and right as bedfellows.