We must accept each other’s existence and work together for the greater good

By Rabbi Micah Greenstein | Guest Columnist | The Daily Memphian

If you read my columns regularly, you know I often come around to a word or concept from my life as a rabbi. That’s who I am. It comes naturally.

Several readers have asked for my perspective as a Jewish person on the slow return of kidnapped Israeli hostages brutalized by Hamas for 529 days and counting. Answering the question is not joyful, but it is necessary. This is also part of my life as a rabbi.

Let me start with a connection that might be more historically familiar to many people. I teach a class at Memphis Theological Seminary entitled, “The Holocaust and Its Roots,” and I share eyewitness material with future ministers. Here’s one:

In the burning pits of the Nazi death camp Treblinka, if the guard was kind, he would smash the Jewish child’s head against the wall before throwing the baby into the burning ditch; if not, the guard would toss the Jewish child straight in the burning ditch alive. 

Horrifying. We would all agree.

Last month, medical examiners received the bodies of Ariel and Kfir Bibas, ages four years and nine months at the time of their kidnapping from Israel by Hamas. Forensic evidence confirmed that these little boys were first choked to death by their captors with their bare hands. Then their small bodies were mutilated by rocks to simulate death by Israeli bombardment. Medical examiners have further corroborated that the Israeli children’s mother, Shiri Bibas, was also murdered in Hamas captivity.

Horrifying. I hope we would all agree. 

The Hamas intentional slaughter of babies and the parade of death is not dissimilar to what the Nazis did, both out of hatred and the intent to exterminate Jews.

Wars are always horrific, but what will it take for the world to realize the evil that a flawed democracy like Israel is fighting against?

As one of my friends asked, “If mass murder and rape at a music festival, beheading and burning families alive wasn’t enough, how about kidnapping babies from their cribs, tearing them away from their parents, strangling them to death, abusing their corpses and releasing them 16 months later in locked coffins full of terrorist propaganda in exchange for the release of dozens of convicted terrorists serving multiple life sentences for murdering people?”

There are more than 53 Muslim countries in the world, and more than 60 majority Christian countries. There is only one Jewish country, so why would good people of all faiths not recognize the right of the only Jewish state to simply exist? That’s what Zionism means.

For 250,000 survivors of the Shoah in 1945, Jewish Palestine was the only haven. Three years later, with borders approved by the United Nations, Israel’s Declaration of Independence was met by the invasion of six Arab armies.

The 600,000 Jews in Palestine, coupled with 850,000 more Jews expelled from Arab lands, were prepared to fight and die. A staggering 1% of Israel’s population was killed in that war alone.

Wars have played an outsized role in Israel’s history since 1948 given the ongoing denial of Israel’s right to exist.

Retrospectively, it is heartbreaking that after Israel’s capture of the West Bank and Gaza following the 1967 Six-Day War, the United Nations ceasefire resolutions called for Israel to return some of the conquered lands for peace.

Israel was willing and eventually returned the entire Sinai to Egypt in 1973 in exchange for no more wars. Aside from Jordan, Arab nations responded with the famous three no’s:

“No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, and no negotiations with the Jewish State.”

Against this historical backdrop, the savagery of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack was no outlier, although its intensity was stunning.

On that day 1,200 citizens were murdered — the most Jews killed in one day since the Holocaust — and 240 people abducted, including babies and the elderly.

The attack continues to traumatize Israel nearly a year and a half later. As I write this column, 59 Israeli hostages remain in Gaza, although 35 of them are presumed dead. Somehow 24 are still alive.

The Israel-Hamas War must stop. The leaders of the Hamas death cult must leave. The 2 million Gazans need massive aid to rebuild their lives above hundreds of miles of the Hamas terror tunnels. 

Will the recent steps toward cessation of the fighting hold? We all hope so. In any case, we must be wary of defining either Israel or America by a single Israeli ruling coalition or an American president.

Both the United States and Israel are characterized by the principles behind democracies, which guarantee “full freedom of conscience, worship, education, and culture.” 

Imperfect democracies like Israel and America house extremists. This is fact. But the extremists do not define either country. Neither should extremists define the Palestinian people.

Hamas was created expressly to kill Jews and attack the Jewish people’s only sovereign state. Its reign of terror does not represent the millions of Palestinians tyrannized by the militias still in control.

The bottom line is that the 7 million Jewish Israelis and 7 million Palestinians living between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea have nowhere else to go. The goal must remain two peaceful entities co-existing side by side. 

Having said that, if slogans like “Free Palestine” mean, “Free the Middle East of Jews” that means eradicating the only sanctuary for Jewish people on the planet. That is the end goal of Hamas.

No believer in the one God of love and life of all humanity would add an asterisk to sanction murdering Jews — nor to condone remaining silent while it happens. Only a believer in a God of darkness and death could explain away such Jew hatred. 

Now I come to my rabbi’s word for the month. We pray for the messianic vision of the Jewish people and the Jewish State: the day when people of all faiths accept each other’s existence and work together for the greater good.