Letters to The Editor
David Polsky’s article (“Reading Tragedy in Gittin and Gaza”) piece, published on Erev Tishah Be-Av, which compares Hamas to the Zealots, and the allegedly “poor, innocent Palestinians” with the Jews of Jerusalem, is, in my opinion, unacceptably and woefully far from the mark.
The Zealots were (for better or for worse, and they certainly do not escape the Talmud’s critique) attempting to free the Jews’ ancestral homeland, capital city, and Temple from a foreign military power—the Romans. Hamas, in contrast, is fighting for Dar al-Islam—a global conquest by the believers, emphatically beginning with knocking those satanic Jews into the sea, once and for all. One needn’t even look as far as Gaza to see this venom—it has, unfortunately, been in full display in some of America’s finest institutions. Hamas—and all the Palestinian entities over the decades—has repeatedly refused all proposals for peace and all of the two-state solutions offered, while inscribing in its own constitution its aim to utterly exterminate the Jewish state.
The Zealots had no plans to take over the Roman Empire. However one wishes to take Vespasian’s words, they are those of the head of a conquering army, of a general who would prefer capitulation to an extended siege. There were no Zealots breaking out of Jerusalem and gleefully going on a spree of murder, torture, and rape in some innocent Roman city (of which there were many in Israel, at the time), thus inciting a Roman siege and attack. The Zealots were defenders and did not rejoice in the spilled blood of innocents.
This brings us to the other side of the issue—the alleged innocent civilians of Gaza. The residents of Jerusalem did not elect the Zealots with a 70% majority. Nor did they join in the Zealots’ (non-existent) orgies of murder, rape, and torture. To still insist at this point—after all the revelations of the UNRWA teachers, doctors, and other “innocent civilians” who held, hid, and tortured the hostages, after all the polls showing consistent, extremely strong popularity for Hamas, and after the videos capturing the good citizenry of Gaza accompanying Hamas terrorists over the breach to join in the pillage—that Gaza is full of innocent civilians (who just happen to celebrate terrorism, but hey, for that they could be Ivy League students in the USA, one supposes) is simply blindness to the facts.
We are fortunate that the Allies had no such “progressive,” thoughtful advisors and think tanks when prosecuting World War II. Were there innocents killed in Germany, and in the Pacific theater? Absolutely—this is the reality of war. Indeed, no one really expected average German or Japanese civilians to overthrow Hitler or Hirohito in the waning hours of the war. However, to claim that war and victory were off the table because of these innocents (real or imagined), would have been to ensure all that much more suffering in the future. No Marshall Plan, no Berlin Airlift, no candy bombers could have occurred had the Third Reich not been utterly and entirely defeated and eradicated, a goal which was (thankfully) understood to be paramount and unarguable. It seems that some of our more “progressive” thinkers have been in retrograde motion ever since. Zion truly has much to mourn for this 9th of Av.
R.A. Alpert
New York, NY
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