Viewpoint: Children of Gaza
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| Entrance to the Yad Vashem Children's and Deportees Memorials |
In 2007, on a Kilcullen parish pilgrimage to the Holy Land, I walked through the Museum of the Holocaust at Yad Vashem outside Jerusalem, writes Brian Byrne. The first part was a section about the million and a half Jewish children who perished in Adolf Hitler's genocidal madness. It was excruciatingly sad. None of us came out of it without tears. The other areas, taking us on a timeline with stark graphics, news reports and photographs and sad personal mementoes, were no less terrible, but were already in our consciousness from history we had learned and documentaries we had seen. One could not come away from the place without feeling deep empathy for the Jews of Europe who had lost six million of their people and also homes and livings where they had been for generations.
In these last few months we are watching a similar horror. Except that this time the genocide is being perpetrated by the state of Israel, the nation established as a homeland in the Middle East for those who had survived Hitler's Holocaust, in the part of the world where the Jewish faith originally developed. That it was carved out of a place called Palestine which already had its own people is part of the problem of today. The new state of Israel displaced Palestinians who have remained refugees in their own homeland for many generations.
The state of Israel has treated those generations badly and continues to do so. That was also something we could see at first hand during that parish pilgrimage in 2007. In a very distressing irony, the giant Separation Walls erected to divide and control the movements of Palestinians are reflections of the Nazi ghettoisation of Jews in occupied eastern Europe during WW2. To visit Bethlehem, we had to walk through security gates and board a second bus on the other side. Today, the continuing Israeli settler issue in occupied territories, forcibly displacing more Palestinians, is well documented and further evidence of the state's attitude of colonising entitlement.
The attack by Hamas on 7 October 2023 was a truly horrific act that killed 1,139 people — 695 Israeli civilians including 36 children, 71 foreign nationals, and 373 members of the security forces. About 250 hostages were also taken. Evil is evil, and that particular evil was compounded by the majority of the victims being civilians. That Israel should seek to retaliate was understandable. But a civilised state would measure its response to ensure that it was the perpetrators of the atrocity committed against them that were specifically targeted. A highly technological nation, Israel has the capacity to do this — their intelligence capability is legendary, even if it did fail them on the night of the Hamas attack.
But what Israel has been doing for the last six months, in a rage of revenge led from the top by their Prime Minister, is deliberately to target a population. That the 7 October terrorist attack had been carried out by people who lived within that population, and indeed govern them to a degree, was not a valid reason to target the civilian population of Gaza in a blitzkrieg of artillery, aerial and rockets destruction.
Even if the state of Israel utilised the Biblical 'eye for an eye' principle, they would have stopped when around 1,300 people were killed. But in very short order that number rose to some 30,000 dead, mostly women and children, and continues to rise. The Israeli government has expressed serious regret over the 'grave errors' that led the recent deaths of a small group of foreign aid workers, but a reported 30,000 Palestinian civilians dead don't seem to matter so much in their calculation of morality.
In that children's section of the Museum of the Holocaust, the hardest part to bear is the quiet voices, in a dark dome with pinpoints of light representing each child, constantly reading out their names and where they came from. Our guide on the day commented, "the first thing you do when you want to annihilate a nation, is kill their children."
Nobody is reading out the names of the annihilated children of Gaza.
READ: Suffer the children
READ: A trip through the wall
LISTEN: Genocide - Explaining is Sacred
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