We hear frequently of the "Holocaust" and "genocide" in association with the
Israeli incursion into Jenin — especially in the European presses. The very
mention of those charged words in reference to fewer than 70 dead in a war
zone is blasphemous to the memory of 6 million butchered in a methodical
state program of death. Auschwitz alone saw 10,000 gassed on some days.
The Palestinians' historical analogies with the Holocaust and Nazis are
completely false in order of magnitude, wicked in their shameless efforts to
invoke the Nazis to denigrate Holocaust survivals, and spurious in their
equation of industrial murder on a continental scale with the minimal
collateral damage of war. The only possible affinity with Nazi atrocity in
the Middle East could be a similarity in the technique of liquidation,
albeit not of magnitude, of Saddam Hussein's gassing of innocent civilians —
or perhaps Nasser's earlier use of such terror weapons against Yemeni
villages. Indeed, the only gas masks that have ever been needed in the
Middle East were employed by Israelis — against Nasser in 1967, and Saddam
Hussein in 1991. Those who are now calling Israelis "Nazis" were a decade
ago cheering on their rooftops at the news that guided missiles might be
blanketing Israel with deadly toxins.
Mr. Arafat the other day, as is his wont, was presenting to the world
television audience one of his periodic and bizarre outbursts, laced with
invective, temper tantrums, and broken sentences. Through all his
hand-waving it was hard to follow his point; but I think he was trying to
equate Jenin with Stalingrad — "Jeningrad," he seemed to be saying. That
image is once again preposterous. In some ways Stalingrad was one of the
most horrific battles of the 20th century; it was as murderous as Verdun and
the Somme, and perhaps unrivaled in the sheer misery — in hunger, cold,
disease — experienced by both sides. During the months-long ordeal, there
were perhaps a million casualties — 120,000 Germans were captured, only
5,000 of whom were ever repatriated, and then not until the mid 1950s. In
turn, Russian total casualties probably exceeded the Germans losses — in
all, quite a different scene from the high-fiving Palestinians who emerged
from their takeover the Church of the Nativity on their way to hotels
abroad. At Stalingrad, there was no quarter given on any side; the idea that
a Soviet or German general would have forbidden his pilots from
carpet-bombing apartment buildings, or would have sent soldiers into a
booby-trapped alley to avoid civilian deaths and collateral damage, is
absurd.
If we need the help of history to put the frequent widespread killing in the
Middle East into any sort of historical perspective, then the Nazi
brutalization of western Russia in summer 1941 has some similarity to what
contemporary Arab governments have done in the last three decades — albeit
to their own, rather than foreign, peoples: Hama, where 20,000 were said to
be slaughtered by Assad; the 5,000-10,000 Kurds who were gassed and bombed
by Saddam Hussein; or the many thousands of Palestinians killed by the late
King Hussein of Jordan during an insurrection. In 1991 Palestinians were
ethnically cleansed from Kuwait, as Jews had been from Baghdad and Cairo in
1967.