Howard Epstein – THE CULT OF THE NAZIS LIVES ON
“Israel survived the Yom Kippur War. Now it only has to survive its present government”. These were my closing words in this column two weeks ago. The extreme right-wing government that Binyamin Netanyahu built to protect his personal interests was due to be replaced last Monday by a Government of National Unity. The title alone conveys something of the disaster that has overtaken Israel. Its scale, and the accompanying cruelty, are of another dimension entirely.
Vile, vicious, venomous and bestial – all epithets properly applied to the way the Germans – SS and Wehrmacht soldiers alike – treated Jewish men, women and children as they swept across Poland and Ukraine in World War II. Regarding Jews as untermenschen (subhuman), they had no compunction about dashing a Jewish baby’s head against a wall, forcing the father to dig a ditch and then pushing him and the baby’s mother into it, to be covered with quicklime and water for a slow painful death (source: How the Holocaust Began, BBC2, Holocaust Memorial Day, 27 January 2023). They would kill a cockroach without a thought, so why not Jews?
We had believed that in our times, those of Israel, our modern and moral state, fully signed up to humanitarianism, reason and the Enlightenment, with the human and technical strength to defend our people, the days of our infinite and most base torment were over.
We were wrong. We had overlooked the fact that there are still those who regard us as vermin, and treat us accordingly. We found last weekend that Hamas terrorists have a capacity for hatred and cruelty to match that of WWII Germans.
We had also thought that right-thinking people, for example those who set the news agenda for that same BBC, would appreciate that there is no moral equivalence between Hamas – proscribed by the UK government as a terrorist organisation – and the Israel Defence Forces, which exist to defend its citizens. But no. According to the BBC, Hamas fighters are “militants” (not terrorists) and Israel should not retaliate in case defenceless civilians in Gaza are maimed and killed.
In other words, whilst the USA could initiate its War on Terror after 9/11, with Britain alongside it, Israel should remain supine after its own 9/11. And that what was started on Simchat Torah, last Shabbat, near Gaza, should go without an Israeli response.
Do you imagine that if, at some date in the far (and hopefully imaginary) dystopian future, an independent Scotland should rain terror down on England, and dig tunnels under Hadrian’s Wall, through which English teenagers could be dragged into captivity, much time would be spent at 10 Downing Street seeking to calibrate a limited and proportionate response? No. And neither should Israel be held to such impracticable standards.
There are parallels between America’s 9/11 and that of Israel. The intelligence failures in each case are massive. The book on those of Israel will not be written for some time. The shocking truth about the whole litany of missed opportunities of the American security agencies to prevent death from the skies in 2001 is fully laid out in “Triple Cross: How Bin Laden’s Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets and the FBI” (Peter Lance, Harper Press, 2006). Read that and you will appreciate how the strongest military power in the world – and that of the Middle East – could have been blindsided. (And there are none so blind as those who do not wish to see. We will come back to Netanyahu’s disastrous government by and by.)
In World War I, 880,000 British servicemen died, along with 2,000 British civilians. World War II produced a different pattern of mortality. British servicemen lost were a “mere” 384,000 but civilian losses, after the ravages of the Blitz (1940/1) and the V1 and V2 attacks (1944/5), aggregated a massive 70,000.
So it has proved for Israel. In the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, nearly 3,000 Israeli service personnel died and a handful of civilians. This week… well, we shall not know the full horror for some time but, in the opening phases alone, the civilian death toll seems likely to be at least as high as the military dead and will possibly climb much higher.
This is Netanyahu’s Golda Meir moment. The Yom Kippur War was the beginning of the end for her and for left-wing government in Israel for two generations. For King Bibi the countdown has already begun. At zero hour, a year or two from now at most, Israel is likely to enjoy full democracy again under a centre-left coalition; Netanyahu and his right-wing, would-be protectors will be swept from power; and those who fiddled whilst their Rome was about to be burned, will be amongst the most despised of Israeli politicians for all eternity. Putting self-interest before the security of the people was despicable.
The hope now has to be that this is not the start of something even bigger. Iran’s imprimatur is all over the Hamas aggression. The north could yet explode and the conflagration would then be massive. Yet, reportedly, some 50 jet fighter/bombers of the IAF have been in operation over Gaza since hostilities began this week. The IAF has over 250 attack aircraft to deter Hezbollah and Iran. So, fingers crossed….
The known horrors at this writing will be dwarfed in the days and weeks ahead. We must brace ourselves for very much worse, and continue to believe in and support Israel. Without it, no Jew is safe.
© October 2023 – Howard Epstein www.howard-epstein.com
