When a dramatic, highly significant, totally unexpected, and especially tragic event takes place, it is only natural for people to look for precedents from their own history. That is exactly what happened in the wake of the October 7 terror rampage launched by Hamas, in southern Israel. Numerous comparisons from Jewish history, some more recent, others more distant, were made.
And since the Holocaust is by far the most horrific of them, the number of Jewish victims on October 7 the highest since 1945, and the extreme cruelty of the Hamas perpetrators utterly barbaric, there were several attempts to describe the crimes using Shoa terminology.
Thus, for example, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan came to a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly devoted to the events wearing a yellow star, reminiscent of the identifying patches Jews were forced by the Nazis to wear during the Holocaust. Erdan’s yellow star said “Never Again,” but was not the appropriate vehicle to convey that message.
After all, how can the murder of 1,200 people in a sovereign Jewish state be compared to the annihilation of six million practically defenseless Jews over the course of four years, in all of Europe (except Switzerland, Sweden, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland)?
Others chose to compare the Hamas massacre to the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, that shocked the Jewish world by its cruelty and whose victims numbered 50 Jews, an act of brutality that today almost pales by comparison.
Another issue was the goal of the attack, and what it achieved. Besides murdering (mainly) Israeli/Jewish men, women, and children of all ages with the most unimaginable, inhuman savagery, and sowing destruction in numerous local communities, there did not seem to be a practical goal to this rampage, other than terrorizing the inhabitants of the borders areas adjacent to Gaza. The leaders of Hamas, however, thought differently. Those interviewed in the aftermath of the rampage, were ecstatic about the results, since in their words, it focused worldwide attention on the plight of the Palestinians.
This kind of thinking reminds me of two other examples of terror attacks, one military and another religious/political, which began with great success from the vantage point of the perpetrators, but ultimately proved to be the beginning of their total destruction and downfall. In both cases, the attacks were launched against the United States, which was immediately prompted to embark on a worldwide campaign to destroy the perpetrators, and did so with little concern for humanitarian considerations.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
The first case was the Japanese sneak attack early Sunday morning on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Japanese fighter planes succeeded in destroying or damaging 20 American naval ships, including eight battleships, and over 300 planes. 2,304 American personnel and civilians were killed, and 1,178 were wounded. In the wake of that attack, which was considered a great success in Japan, the United States declared war on Japan the next day, and three days later, Japan’s allies Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, which joined the war in Europe against the Nazis and their allies, more than two years after the beginning of World War II.
Who knows how that war would have ended without the highly significant participation of the Americans? The Japanese were forced into submission by two nuclear bombs, thus marking the end of the regime that attacked Pearl Harbor and facilitating the transition to democracy, which exists in Japan to this day.
The second example is the attack launched on September 11, 2001, by the Islamist extremist group al-Qaeda led by Osama bin Laden. Four commercial airplanes were hijacked by Islamic terrorists, two of which crashed their planes into the World Trade Center in New York, while another attempted to crash his plane into the Pentagon in Washington, and a fourth plane crash-landed in the Pennsylvania countryside after passengers attempted to overpower the militants in the cockpit. Nearly 3,000 innocent people were killed as a result, about 2,750 in New York, 184 at the Pentagon, and 40 in Pennsylvania. Bin Laden’s motivation for the attack was that he believed that the United States was weak, a “paper tiger,” (based on its retreats from Vietnam in the 1970s, Lebanon in 1983, and Somalia in 1993), and that attacking America in a dramatic way would help bring about a regime change in the Middle East.
Of course, that was not what happened. Just the opposite occurred, as the “paper tiger” mounted a serious campaign to destroy al-Qaeda and execute Bin Laden, both goals of which were achieved.
Those are the historical precedents that Israel should study carefully, and which we should compare to the Hamas operation of October 7. Not every Jewish tragedy should be compared to the Holocaust, or even to other calamities in our history. There are a lot of important lessons to learn from the tragedies of others, and hopefully, we will achieve the same successful results.
The writer is director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center Israel office and Eastern European affairs, and coordinator of the center’s Nazi war crimes research worldwide.