Mennonite Weekly Review

Rabbi Irving Greenberg wrote the following rule for discourse on the Holocaust: “No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children.” A picture I saw this week of a baby’s corpse burned from bombs Israel dropped on Gaza brought that phrase to mind.

Kathleen Kern, of Rochester, N.Y., serves with Christian Peacemaker Teams.

Comparisons of the Israeli government to Hitler’s regime make me uncomfortable. I do not judge the suffering Palestinians who are trying to make sense of why Israelis humiliate Palestinians and crush their hopes, of why the world thinks it is OK for Israel to kill Palestinians.

When they resort to Holocaust imagery, I listen sympathetically, but gently suggest that the cruel military occupation they have lived under since 1967 is not the same as the deaths of 11 million people in concentration camps and other atrocities of the Third Reich.

For the non-Palestinians involved in Palestinian solidarity groups, I am more assertive when they accuse Jews of “doing to Palestinians what the Germans did to them.” I have argued that such statements cheapen the suffering of all the people concerned.

I note that one could compare more appropriately the sufferings that Jews experienced in 1933-38 Germany to the persecutions that Palestinians living near settlements have endured for decades.

These Palestinians have seen their human rights eroded, abilities to move curtailed, their lands confiscated. Israeli settler thugs and their supporters have harassed them, beaten them up and even killed them with legal impunity.

(A Palestinian who was showing us villages in the Bethlehem area that will be cut off by the apartheid/annexation wall told me of an encounter with Israeli settler women. He was trying to help an elderly Palestinian woman they had knocked down, and one of them hit him in the back with a rock. The police refused to arrest the settlers. Our guide protested, saying that if he had even touched one of the settler women, the police would have arrested him. The police officer in charge said, “Good. You understand the situation. Bye.”)

But nuanced analogies fail me now as I look at this picture. An ambulance technician, mouth distorted with horror, anguish, or both, holds the charred remains of a Palestinian infant. One thighbone extending from the pulpy mass that was child’s pelvis is all that remains of his lower half.

The media can speak of the Qassam rockets Hamas militants have fired into Israel, not caring whether they hit military or civilian targets. Of the three Israeli civilians killed in the three-week Israeli assault on Gaza and 84 wounded. It can replay ad nauseam politicians and pundits, Democrats and Republicans, asserting Israel’s right to defend itself.

I can quote statistics showing the higher percentages of Palestinian civilians versus combatants killed. I can calculate that 1,300 Palestinians killed in the Israeli invasion and 4,336 wounded works out proportionally to 260,000 dead and 1,064,000 wounded Americans.

But both the political drivel and my calculations seem paltry when I look at this picture of the scorched baby, here in Palestine, in the first month of 2009. And the genocides of the last century, the burning children, no longer seem so far away or so inapplicable.