Will We Ever Learn the Lesson of the Holocaust?

Gary Cooperberg
April 25, 2006

The siren sounded for two minutes and all of Israel stood in silence. It was two minutes when every Jew in Israel truly shared a common bond. The Nazis murdered Jews because they were Jews, and every Jew alive today is a survivor of Hitler’s attempt to destroy the Jewish people completely. For two minutes we were all forced to realize that from the horrors of the Holocaust the Jewish State was reborn.

Unfortunately when the two minutes were up most of us simply went back to our daily routines and chose to forget the obligations we still have to those who perished simply because they were Jews. The State of Israel, with all of its faults and problems, stands today as the shining example to the entire world that G-d has not forgotten His Chosen People. Those who seek to make “peace” by forcing Israel to retreat from parts of her homeland are mocking our G-d and our Divine Destiny. Rather than endangering the Jewish State, all they are really doing is endangering themselves. Ariel Sharon is a classic example. One would think that Mr. Olmert would have learned a lesson from this tragic event.

No matter what course our government takes the nations of the world will oppose us. Our leaders have been futilely seeking ways to please our enemies without endangering our citizens for as long as we have been in existence. It would seem that eventually they would realize that it is an impossible effort. While everyone, from left to right, agrees that we must separate from our Arab neighbors because we cannot live with them, no one seems to have the courage to simply remove them from our midst. Instead, our national policy is to flee from them, including fleeing from parts of our own country! We have a very tiny country. How much of it can we flee before we realize that we have nowhere else to go? What will our leaders do when our borders are around Ramat Gan?

Of course we all want peace. But the greatest lesson of the Holocaust is that the word “peace” to our enemies means a world without Jews. That is not something we can live with. We were blessed with the miracle of our return home after an absence of nearly two thousand years. How dare we as much as consider carving up that miracle and handing it, piece by piece, to those who seek to take all of it from us and throw us into the sea? If the world is against us and intends to destroy us why must we lend a hand to our own self destruction? Even those who don’t believe in G-d must still have a shred of self respect. If death is inevitable why not go down fighting? Why should we march to our own demise willingly in the futile hope that maybe our enemies won’t murder all of us?

Yet the fact is that our very existence is clearly a miracle. What other people has been persecuted and exiled for two thousand years and not disappeared? That is a miracle all by itself. Yet for this same people to have returned to our ancient homeland after the most unthinkable and unprecedented survival of attempted mass extermination to which we lost a full third of our people, is proof positive that G-d is guiding our future. Can one imagine that G-d would have predicted our return in the Bible, begin to fulfil those predictions only to change His mind?

Let us all open our eyes and see what is happening to our world. Ehud Olmert cannot and will not determine the final borders of Israel. Those borders were already determined by G-d. You will find them in the Bible. George Bush will not win his war on Terror on the back of the Jewish State. If he wants to be on the right side of that war he will stand with Israel and forget his deceitful illusion of two states on Jewish soil. That will never happen. The world is on the verge of collapse. The only nation whose future is guaranteed by G-d is the Jewish State. Those who are courageous enough to stand against the majority and demonstrate their faith in G-d by standing with Israel may survive. Those who choose to join with our enemies, or merely turn their back on the efforts to harm Israel, will perish. The Holocaust demonstrated that most of the world hates its Creator and seeks to deny Him by trying to destroy His People Israel. The renewed Jewish State is destined to demonstrate that our Creator is very real, and that the true purpose of life is to serve Him with love.