Читать книгу A New Shoah - Giulio Meotti - Страница 7

The Beginning

There is no difference between the terrorism that kills Jews in Israel and the terrorism that strikes them abroad. In Rome, in 1982, the little boy Stefano Tachè was murdered by Palestinian terrorists. In Entebbe, in 1976, the Jews were selected on the basis of the names on their passports. On the ship Achille Lauro, in 1985, an American Jew in a wheelchair, Leon Klinghoffer, was picked from among all the other passengers and thrown into the ocean by Palestinian terrorists. In 1980, in Nairobi, a bomb devastated the Israeli-owned Norfolk Hotel, killing fifteen people. Five years later, in Sinai, an Egyptian policeman fired wildly on a group of Israeli tourists, killing seven of them, four of whom were children. Then there were the attacks on the airports in Rome and Vienna, with more than twenty killed. In 1986, in Istanbul, twenty-two faithful were killed in the Neveh Shalom synagogue. Between 1992 and 1994 in Buenos Aires, more than one hundred died in the Jewish schools. In Mombasa, in 2002, at a hotel used by Israeli tourists, guests were killed by a bomb in the hall. That same year, a suicide bomber blew himself up outside the ancient Tunisian synagogue of Djerba. And the list continues with the barbaric killing of Rabbi Holtzberg and his wife, in her fifth month of pregnancy, in Mumbai in December 2008.

Ilan Halimi, a young French Jew who worked at a cell phone shop, was kidnapped in 2006 in the heart of Paris and taken to a suburb where he was tortured and murdered. The neighbors heard him screaming, but no one intervened to stop the slow execution. The den where Ilan was held hostage resembled a “homemade concentration camp.” Until the trial, the French government pretended that nothing serious had happened. Almost thirty people participated in the torture of Ilan, who was seized in plain sight, passed from one tormentor to another, starved and then given nourishment, and killed slowly, over a period of three weeks. The killers, young Muslims from the banlieues, stabbed him, broke his fingers, burned him with acid, and finally set him on fire. Ilan did not wear a long black robe, or the ritual tassels, or even the kippah. The name he bore was enough for Ilan Halimi to be a marked man. It was the most serious episode of anti-Semitism in France since the Second World War.

Thousands of French Jews vanished in Nazi death camps with hardly a murmur of protest from their Christian country-men. Sixty years later, the chief rabbi of France, Rabbi Joseph Sitruk, advises Jews not to wear yarmulkes in the streets due to rampant anti-Semitism. It’s the same in Norway, where Jews are advised not to speak Hebrew too loudly on the streets. For the first time since the war, French Jews are afraid. Shmuel Trigano, professor of sociology at the University of Paris, has openly questioned whether there is a future for Jews in France. Sébastien Sellam, a young disc jockey at a Parisian nightclub, was killed in 2003 in an underground parking lot by a Muslim neighbor, who slit his throat twice and mutilated his face with a fork, even gouging out his eyes. The assailant announced to Sellam’s horrified mother, “I have killed my Jew. I will go to heaven.”

Anti-Semitism—and not only in the guise of anti-Zionism—is in vogue again at European universities, in labor unions, in newspapers, among the political and cultural elite. Shouts of “Death to Jews” have filled the streets, and the crocodile tears spilled for Jews killed during the Holocaust make it much easier to demonize the living ones in Israel. The Dutch leftist parliamentarian Harry van Bommel attended a demonstration in Amsterdam where Muslims shouted, “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas!” Anti-Semitism in the Netherlands is stronger today than it has been during any other time in the last two centuries except for the Nazi occupation. The percentage of Germans who hold unfavorable opinions of Jews has climbed from 20 percent in 2004 to 25 percent today. In France, which has the third-largest Jewish population in the world, after Israel and the United States, 20 percent of people view Jews unfavorably—up from 11 percent four years ago. In Spain, where all Jews were expelled in 1492 and synagogues are historic monuments, the figures are even more striking: negative views of Jews climbed from 21 percent in 2005 to nearly 50 percent this year. January 2009 was the most intense period of anti-Semitic attacks to have been recorded in Britain in decades. Anti-Semitism in Western Europe in 2009 was the worst since World War II, according to the Jewish Agency. In recent years, there have been thousands of attacks specifically aimed at Jewish targets outside Israel, and the attack on the United States has been connected by the terrorists to the war against the Jews. The Israeli national airline has suffered dozens of attacks since 1968. During various terrorist strikes like the one in Entebbe, the Jewish passengers have been separated from the non-Jews. It is a hunt for the Jews “wherever they may be,” from the outskirts of Paris to the desert of Yemen.

After 2,500 years, the epic of the Yemeni Jews ended in November 2009, when U.S. forces rescued the last Jews from Sana’a, the magnificent city founded by Shem, the son of Noah, not far from the mountain where Noah’s Ark came to rest when the flood subsided. One year earlier, a Muslim extremist shot Moshe Yaish Nahari five times with an AK-47 assault rifle as he prepared to take his mother shopping for food to make the Shabbat dinner. The killer called out, “Jew, accept Islam’s message.” Moshe died in his mother’s arms. Five hundred Salafi Muslim extremists chanted “Allahu Akbar wa itbakh al-Yahud,” “Allah is great and death to the Jews.”

If one is to identify a beginning of the massacre of Israeli civilians, one must return to that infamous morning in September 1972, at 31 Connollystrasse in the Olympic Village in Munich. Some of the Israeli athletes assassinated by Arafat’s death squads were Holocaust survivors, the fruit of the night of Auschwitz and the wind of Chelmno; the disappearance of European Judaism had left its mark on their faces, together with the miraculous reconstruction in Israel. Others were sabra, born in Israel. Each of their stories calls up weeping and prayer. Today, before leaving for the Olympic Games, every Israeli athlete pays homage at the graves of his compatriots killed in Munich. What could have been more repugnant than the massacre of innocent Jews at the Olympics? But the episode became a great media event to stress the problems of the Palestinians, rather than a serious terrorist attack to be condemned.

On 31 Connollystrasse that day, a squad of eight Palestinians took Israeli athletes hostage and opened fire with AK-47s, shooting the coach Moshe Weinberg through the cheek. The Black September terrorists demanded the release of many fedayeen imprisoned in Israel in exchange for the hostages. The terrorists had been educated in the West. Like the suicide attackers who brought down the World Trade Center in 2001, “Issa,” the leader of the squad, had studied in Europe, getting an engineering degree in West Germany. The document claiming responsibility for the killing of the “Zionists,” the Jews, was written in perfect English. The terrorists of Black September were not after an exchange or negotiations; they just wanted to kill Jews. They wanted the young representatives of the Israeli people, hosted by the nation that once planned their industrialized extermination. It was a spectacular escalation in the war of the Islamist movement to wipe Israel from the face of the earth. The building that housed the Israeli athletes is located less than ten miles from the Dachau concentration camp. They were the first Jews killed in Germany for being Jewish since 1945.

When the hostages and terrorists were taken on three helicopters to the airport of Fürstenfeldbruck, a Lufthansa airplane was waiting on the runway to take them to Algeria. But when the first terrorist climbed into the cockpit, he realized that the flight crew was not there. German agents opened fire and turned on the floodlights. Two terrorists were struck and killed. Instead of returning fire or surrendering, the surviving terrorists completed their mission, throwing a hand grenade into the helicopter where the nine hostages sat. With the Jews dead and their objective attained, the three surviving Palestinians surrendered. Thirteen years later, on August 30, 1985, the Palestinian leader Abu Daoud would explain the significance of this action to the Tunisian weekly Realité: “The Zionist state is a military entity, and its citizens must be considered as combatants.” From Munich to Tel Aviv, nothing has changed over the past thirty years.

That day in Munich, Islamic terrorism cut short eleven Jewish stories. Every one of them was a member of the great body of Israel. There was Moshe Weinberg, a Jewish son of Israeli liberty, with a winning smile and the joy of living stamped on his face. Amitzur Shapira, the father of four beautiful children, was a teacher in Herzliya. Shaul Ladani, who escaped the massacre in Munich, had been deported at the age of seven to the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, where his parents were exterminated. He contracted typhoid fever, but was saved and went to live in Israel. There was the great Yosef Romano, a Jew of Libyan origin who before dedicating himself to sports had fought like a lion in the Six-Day War. He was killed just five months after the birth of his third child. As Yosef’s friends would say, “courage was his religion.” The day before he was killed, Romano had said, “This is my last competition; I don’t have enough time for my children.” Yosef was so different from David Berger, a Jew from Cleveland, from one of the many American Jewish families who “make the aliyah” to Israel to discover their “roots.” He was supposed to get married after returning from the Olympics. His father said that David knew the risks he had taken on by moving to Tel Aviv; he was proud of David, the idealist, the pacifist, who felt the injustice of the world, who wrote poetry about the war in Vietnam.

There was Mark Slavin, who kissed the Jewish soil upon his arrival in Israel. He came from Minsk, and had fought against the Communists who imprisoned and silenced thousands of Russian Jews who, like him, wanted to reach Jerusalem. Mark’s grandmother, Griša, said that “he was a true Jew; he had always felt that he was an Israeli, and he was the one who convinced everyone to leave the Soviet Union.” He was made of the same mettle as the famous “Prisoner of Zion” Ida Nudel, who recalled, “I arrived in the land of my dreams not as a refugee looking for just any sort of place under the sun. I am in the land of my people, I am free among my people.” Mark had the calling of a liberator, and helped give a million Soviet Jews, a tribe absorbed and lost behind the Iron Curtain, the opportunity to find their freedom in the land of their fathers. He studied Hebrew in a kibbutz; he wanted to relive the history of the pioneers, and his parents were welcomed by the devout, ultra-Orthodox Jewish community of Bnei Brak.

Mark Slavin’s story is the story of many thousands of Russian Jews who fought in the prisons and in the squares against Communist obscurantism that kept them from having an identity and reclaiming the right to emigrate to the land of their fathers. They had nothing but their typewriters, which they used to translate the samizdat, or clandestine manifestos, inciting the people to resistance and rebellion. It was the power of the Exodus. They threatened the Kremlin and the greatest totalitarian empire of the twentieth century not with weapons and bullets, but with slogans like “Let our people go” or “Freedom for Israel.” Those dissidents gave a new meaning to the Jewish Passover expression zman heruteinu, “the time of our freedom.” Their Judaism grew in the Soviet prisons, nourished by a fervent underground movement that was undermining the Soviet colossus from within. The refuseniks, the Jewish dissidents, had the special serenity of those who know they are in the right.

In Munich, there was Ze’ev Friedman, who was born in Siberia, and whose father was deported to a labor camp on the Vistula. He spoke a wonderful mixture of Yiddish and Russian. His mother lost everyone in Treblinka, the extermination camp that in a few months obliterated hundreds of thousands of Jews from all over Europe. The first Jews from Warsaw arrived at Treblinka—that place with the strange and beautiful name, surrounded by conifer forests and little ponds—on the ninth day of the month of Av, the same day on which the Temple was destroyed. The Jews of Treblinka were “trunks endowed with legs,” slaves of a new species of men. The “Jews of death” took care of the corpses of their brothers and sisters, their mothers and fathers, their sons and daughters, pulling them out of the gas chambers by the legs, removing their gold teeth, cutting their hair, and throwing them into the open-air incinerators.

Ze’ev Friedman, who grew up with these stories, had distinguished himself in action against the fedayeen in Metula, a city on the Lebanese border. His father appeared on television asking for Ze’ev to be released, and recounting the fate that his family had already met. Upon learning of his son’s death, he said that if Israel did not respond to the massacre, “Hitler will have won from the grave.” Hannah and Shlomo were the only two survivors of the family. Ze’ev would have been the last male. Germany—like all of Europe—was indifferent to the silent martyrdom of Ze’ev Friedman.

Another martyr of Munich was Kehat Schorr, who arrived in Israel from Romania in 1963, where he had fought against the Nazi troops in the Carpathian Mountains. With him was Yakov Springer, who taught school in Bat Yam, near Jaffa. He was one of the few survivors of the armed revolt in the Warsaw ghetto on April 19, 1943.

Yakov was a veteran of Via Mila, the heart of Jewish resistance against Nazism. During the war, the European newspapers noted that in Warsaw, for the first time in two thousand years, the Jews had fought in a battle. “Who knows if the spirit of Israel will not rise again from the ashes of Warsaw,” one Polish newspaper mused. Yakov took part in the revolt of two hundred Jewish young people. For them it was simply a question of how they were going to die. They wanted to show that they were not insects. “We wanted to choose to die our own way,” said Stefan Grayek, a leader of the uprising. He lived the rest of his life in a little house on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. “On the street we saw scenes that the human mind cannot imagine: infants, alive, in the arms of their dead mothers, piles of dead children, and around them other children squatting on the ground, waiting for their turn.” Yakov Springer, a man much like Grayek, would also fight for possession of East Jerusalem, where a little bit of his marvelous Jewish Warsaw had been planted, the Warsaw of rabbis, street kids, intellectuals—a city that by then existed only in the faded memories of the few who had survived its extinction.

It was partly with Springer in mind that Yitzhak Rabin, on April 19, 1993, paid homage in Warsaw to those who had taken up arms against the oppressors: “Where are the writers? And the rabbis? And the doctors? And the musicians? And the children? Where is Janusz Korczak? Doesn’t my people exist anymore? In human history, the rebels of the ghetto will be remembered as those who kept the embers of honor alive. We have risen from the ashes of the martyrs; the courage of the combatants in the ghetto is the cornerstone of Israel’s foundation.”

The community of Bat Yam paused to weep for its noble fellow citizen, and Yakov Springer’s daughter came back from Sinai, where she was serving in the army.

There was also Andrei Spitzer, who lived with his wife, a convert to Judaism, in a suburb of Tel Aviv. Andrei had immigrated from Communist Romania in 1967, the year in which the tiny Jewish state was attacked by the Arab powers. His wife received death threats from Black September after Andrei’s murder, and agents from Mossad, the Israeli secret service, flew to Holland to bring her to safety in Israel. Another of the victims in Munich was Eliezer Halfin, the son of Lithuanian Jews who had lost all their relatives in the Holocaust. The Nazis had killed twenty of Eliezer’s relatives. The USSR had denied him an expatriate visa dozens of times and even prohibited him from participating in international competitions, out of fear that Eliezer “the Zionist” would make statements in favor of Israel. He was the last Halfin male. The last victim of Black September was Yosef Gutfreund, who also left Romania, after spending months in prison under the accusation of “Zionist propaganda.” He was legendary for his generosity toward Egyptian soldiers dying of thirst in Sinai.

The day after the massacre of the athletes, all the Israelis in Germany put on the kippah in mourning, as did the Jewish athletes from the French, English, and American delegations. The shameful decision not to bring everything to a halt was morally bankrupt, and gave a green light for future massacres. The distribution of medals started again, gold and silver stained with blood. The Olympic celebration was dead, but the competition went on and on and on. Israeli rabbis came to drape the coffins with flags bearing the Star of David. In Frankfurt that night, about fifty Jewish graves were vandalized. None of the Arab delegations sent any condolences to Israel. Not one.

When the bodies arrived at the Lod Airport, there was no fanfare to greet them, only silence and a dignified sadness. Waiting for them was the great Moshe Dayan, with the look of a kibbutznik who had interrupted his work in order to weep for his children. There was also Yigal Allon, who had started fighting in the clandestine Jewish army at the age of thirteen. There wasn’t a single shop open in the entire country; the Jewish people were unified in suffering, just as they had been throughout their history. Tunisia offered to take the bodies of the terrorists—everyone wanted them. Libya won. Ambassadors from all the Arab countries were present at the burial in Tripoli. They were there to celebrate the “martyrs’ wedding.” The atmosphere in Israel was different. After reciting the Jewish Kaddish over the graves, the People of the Book went back to their homes. The next day was the beginning of the Jewish New Year, but there was no room for joy. That new year opened with all thoughts turned to the children of the eleven victims. Those children were, and are, the why of Israel.