Babies

Babies are new life, smelling of sweet spring and talc and, yes, of soiled diapers – that too.

They are tiny, pink, brown or tawny, with bright eyes that have not yet focused and arms and legs that twitch and move when least expected, who coo and cry, whose tiny hands grasp our fingers, who make us laugh and smile and wonder at the why and wonder of it all.

We bring them home and say oh my God what did we do, what do we do now? Let’s begin and watch what happens.

They have hurt no one. They know nothing, least of all anger, hate and hurt. They barely think, just respond and make us realize that we all, each and every one of us, began that way; in all ways the same way if only for a moment until life begins to sort us out and assign our destinies.

Babies never hurt anyone. They can’t because of course they could not physically but profoundly because they have not even begun to learn differences, much less learned there is hate.

Like the song says, “You’ve got to be taught, you’ve got to be carefully taught…”

Unlike us, having but just arrived they do not live in tribes, do not know there are tribes that we call nations, religions, nationalities, ethnic groups, even neighborhoods. They simply live not even knowing what there is beyond hunger, thirst, sleep, twitching, soiling, yawning, spitting up, crying, cooing, feeling being swaddled or held.

Babies do not know there are Palestinians, Israelis, whites, blacks, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, or Zorostrians for that matter.

Babies don’t even know there are other babies. They do not hurt other babies. Other babies do not hurt them.

Babies don’t hurt grownups. Grownups hurt babies.

Grownups did those horrific, unimaginable, monstrous, wicked, evil things to babies that we have now seen in the photos from the carnage of Oct. 6.

Like everything else before and since in the 125 years since Theodore Herzl proposed what became Zionism – the call for a Jewish state, a homeland for Jews – all of this here about babies, all babies, babies everywhere, everyone’s babies, has been and is eternally so.

So too is it for every baby in Gaza.

So too is it for every dead Gazan. So too is it for every dead Israeli. Every one of them, we all of started life the same way – babies all.

Now, Israel tells the United Nations this – move 1 million Gazans south in 24 hours. That means among other things, move the babies and the little ones.

It would take what? How long? A month, at a minimum, who knows, to systematically and sanely move that many people. But move them where? To the bottom of Gaza where Egypt is the stopper in the bottle?

Even if you could safely evacuate 1 million people in one day, there is no room and literally there are no rooms for them in southern Gaza. There is hardly anything there to sustain life and Egypt won’t let them into Sinai, which itself is one of the worst, emptiest, most forbidding deserts in the world.

So this demand? It is understable in a military sense and because of the justified rage in Israel, of Jewish Israelis, but it not understandable in any other terms, in any human sense.

Sticks and stones… Or? Or the way the Bible has it? “An eye for an eye…”

Is it to be 1,000 eyes for an eye?

One violation should not beget another. One does not allow another.

If we Jews don’t know this, then who in the world can, who does, who ever will?

Does this recompense every dead Jew in the Holocaust? Never. There is no recompense equal to the crime.

Among the 6 million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust we don’t know exactly how many were babies but we have sure estimates that between 1.2 million and 1.5 million were children below the age of 12.

Dead by untreated illnes, slavery and starvation in the ghettos. Dead by gas in the camps. Dead by bullets in the shtetls, villages, towns, and cities of Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia, Hungary,Romania. Dead from the Einsatzgruppen, from the complicit Wehrmacht and the local peoples.

Dead from the Germans industrialization of murder in the six killing camps, all of them in pre-war Poland.

Chelmno, Majdenak, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz. These were the worst places ever on earth in the history of mankind, in the history of the planet, which is not a good one. There is bad. There is terrible. Then there is worse.

And then – then there are those six places, six monuments forever to maximum cruelty, to premeditated murder by an entire nation.

The animal and plants don’t make war, we do, mankind does. It has done so without end for the 7,000 years of recorded history. It is all there. It is in the history of every people and every nation in all of that recorded history.

But the most, most, most terrible places in recorded human history were the six killing camps.

Say their names again,Chelmno, Majdenak, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz. There can never be recompense for what happened at them, in them. Gaza cannot be recompense. Does anyone want that? Do Israelis want that? Do we Jews want that as recompense?

It is all of a piece. All of it reduces to what our good president told us Golda Meir said to him in 1973, and we heard repeated on American TV by an Israeli officer when he said:

“We have nowhere else to go.”

Jews have no place else to go. Neither do Gazans. No one wants Gaza and Gaza’s 2 million people, and that certainly includes the Palestinian Authority and the West Bank.

The Arab street urged on, fomented, organized by Iran and its insufferable evil, flies the Palestinian flag as it screams with hate against Israel and Jews. But it does not want the Gazans or it would have taken them long ago as brothers and sisters. Iran certainly does not want them. It uses them and throws them away.

No one wants the Gazans, they are orphans of war. They are orphans of 1,000 years of turmoil and tribalism in the Middle East. No one anywhere wants Gaza’s babies.

This Jew, Democrat, American, American Army veteran says go ahead if you want, if you must, go ahead and hate the children of Gaza, the babies of Gaza, the mothers of Gaza.

But know that like the Jews of Israel, like all us Jews outside Israel if it came to it, they too have nowhere else to go and they did not do what happened on Oct. 6. Iran and its compatriots are responsible for that just as surely as night follows day.

Now, Gaza City has begun to look like the Warsaw Ghetto at its end. Is this what we want again? What anyojne wants? Well someone must, because that is exactly, exactly what Russia has done to Kharkiv and a hundred other Ukrainian towns and cities causing us to recoil in horror. We know what it look like. The Russians have forced us all to look.

The rage of Israel is right and righteous. But Gaza’s babies didn’t do that, their babies did not murder and mutilate Israel’s babies.

Then what?

In 20 years the babies who remain on both sides will be grown. Will they then kill one another?

The reality, the unbearable reality that must be borne is that this is utterly, utterly hopeless. Anyone who thinks or says otherwise is a liar, a fool or both. It is hopelessly, hopelessly, hopelessly without hope, an endlessly looping tunnel of war.

Is that an answer? No. Why? Because there is not and never will be one except this:

“We have nowhere else to go.”

They have nowhere else to go.

Israelis have nowhere else to go.

If it comes to it, Jews everywhere have nowhere else to go.

It has no end. It has to end, but it has no end.

There is nothing to do on either side but weep for it all and for all who will die on both sides.

But more and more death changes nothing – and still there is nowhere else, nowhere else for the babies to go.