If this horror cannot be stopped, the promises that Zionism made to the Jewish people -- that the butchery was over -- will be upended. And no Israeli prime minister can willingly allow that to happen on his or her watch.
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The killers were armed with hatchets and guns instead of suicide belts, and they came not to kill Jews but to butcher them. The images are horrific: a prayer shawl in a pool of blood; a prayer book turned crimson, from which one of the victims had been worshiping as he was killed; and more haunting, the hand of a dead man, still wearing his phylacteries, soaking in his own blood. Witnesses said a worshiper's arm, also wrapped in a leather prayer strap, had been hacked off its torso. To Jews schooled in Jewish history, these images are not new; they are the images of a destiny from which Israel had been intended to redeem the Jews. Consider this description of the Kishinev Pogrom in 1903: [One young boy], blinded in one eye from youth, begged for his life with the offer of sixty rubles; taking this money, the leader of the crowd ... gouged out [his] other eye, saying "You will never again look upon a Christian child." Nails were driven through heads; bodies, hacked in half; bellies split open and filled with feathers. Women and girls were raped, and some had their breasts cut off. Now it's happening in the Jewish State. What does that mean for Zionism? That is what this column explores. ... By agreement with Bloomberg View, the entire column can be read online at http://www.bloombergview. |
