The Holocaust is unique in its volume and horrors and is a singular event in world history, yes there are other genocides and other horrors even to the Jews. But generally the genocide is waged to suppress a group, to take their territory, or some economic reason like to enslave a people. This was different the Jews had no territory, an held relatively little power. In the Shoah Jews were taken from all over Europe just to be killed. And friendly supposedly civilized leaders like Franklyn Roosevelt and Winston Churchill sentence hundreds of thousands to death because they didn’t want more Jews in their country.
This is what people don’t understand about the Shoah and Israel. Israel wasn’t created because of some compensation for the Holocaust, Israel was always the home of the Jews. Just because we didn’t run the land, Jews have lived there since Joshua and his band of Israelites marched around Jericho for seven straight days, sounded their shofars and made the walls come tumbling down.
The Jewish land became a Jewish state for the first time in almost 2,000 years because the lesson of the Holocaust was that it was too dangerous for the Jewish people to continue to be homeless and powerless. Or in the words of Elie Weisel we learned to trust our enemy’s threats more than our friends promises.
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