Steve Apfel
Steve ApfelINN:SA

Momentous human removals are afoot to address the vandalised welfare of Americans, Gazans and Israelis. A week into his presidency, Donald Trump has turned common sense into a science. Illegal aliens, it posits, can do nothing positive for American society, they can only destabilise and impoverish it, and must therefore be sent packing. So it is with devastated Gaza – a “demolition site” in Trump’s precise way, ever forthright and to hell with evasive political speech. There is no point in keeping perpetual refugees locked into a strip for Hamas to utilize, literally for cannon fodder in a war without end.

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(See review of Dr. Rafael Medoff book: How Cartoonists fought the Holocaust)

Not even Trump dare say this in public, but the Palestinian Arabs are never going to get a state to call their own because they don’t want a state to call their own, not as long as the Jews have a state to call their own. They are doomed to suffer and die like experimental lab mice.

The POTUS comes across as the boss of a Chicago outfit giving the owner of a designated property an offer he can’t refuse.

“I’d like Egypt to take people, and I’d like Jordan to take people. You’re talking about probably a million and a half people; we just clean out that whole thing.

“I spoke to Abdullah II of Jordan, I said I’d love for you to take on more, cause I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now, and it’s a mess. It’s a real mess.

“Resettling could be temporary or long term. Something has to happen. Almost everything’s demolished, and people are dying there. So, I’d rather they can maybe live in peace for a change. I’d like to get them living in an area where they can live without disruption, revolution.”

Not being the President of America, freed Israeli hostage Liri Albag did not have to keep herself in check. “There are 2 million terrorists in Gaza. Remember that. I was sitting with an 8-year-old boy and 4-year-old boys, who would spit at the mention of Jews. Do you understand what that means? Does anyone understand what that means?”

Trump must do, because like Ms Albag he has put his finger on the essence of the nightmare. To rescue Gaza’s people from hell and Israelis and the Arab world from tortuous agony, the only sane remedy is relocation.

Yet there is a large and vocal section in the US that won’t have it. Moreover it claims the moral high ground, the Holocaust high ground, the highest one you can pick a fight with. One headline went hell for leather at just the idea of relocation.

“Trump’s proposal for moving Gaza’s population sparks accusations of ‘ethnic cleansing

“Never underestimate the power of feeling good about yourself,” Dennis Prager says in response. “It feels very good to say: ‘Look, world, you abandoned (Europe’s Jews) in the 1930s, but we’re better than you.”

On this moral height Compassion rules. Empathy for ‘The Other’ stops debate, indeed throws a smothering blanket over common sense. Here is a trending story to illustrate what misplaced compassion can do, a story that showcases the title and subtitle of my article:

The actor’s name is well known, albeit for all the wrong reasons. People the world over debit Israel’s Oct 7 to his caring heart and precocious career. There is no avoiding the connection – I have yet to come upon a denier with gall enough to overlook occurrences in Israel during the dozen years between October 2011 and October 2023, a period stamped with the mark of Cain. How so?

The legacy of Gershon Baskin who worked for peace, is war. The name is indelibly entwined with the 2011 release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier kidnapped by Hamas and held hostage in Gaza. Angry about the ongoing drama for 33 hostages being so protracted? Baskin took longer than five years to bring one hostage home. Consider today’s barter price excessive? (1 hostage per 30 incarcerated killers). The Baskin barter ratio was, wait for it! 1 per 1,027. And the released Palestinian Arab prisoners were not exactly in prison for nothing. The Hamas military leader Ahmed Jabari told a pan-Arab newspaper that the prisoners released under the Baskin deal had collectively murdered 569 Israelis.

Still, when this deal was done and dusted, Baskin proudly wrote up the episode in a book and gained admittance to the rarefied guild of Certified Mediators. It was not long however before some of the freed killers presented a slew of bills for payment. By mid 2015 they had murdered six Jews in different attacks. Most heinous, Mahmoud Kawasame, a mass murderer given a new lease of life by the Shalit deal, was involved in abducting and murdering three Israeli teenagers Naftali Fraenkel, Gil-ad Shaar, and Eyal Yifrach in June 2014, which eventually triggered yet another mini war in Gaza.

But of course the deal’s infamy rests on a name the world came to know: Yahya Sinwar was among the 1,027 prisoners exchanged for the IDF soldier. Never in the bloody history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has there been death and devastation of the magnitude which Yahya Sinwar unleashed on Israel, and on Gaza. He masterminded a full blown Intifada in Judea and Samaria aka 'West Bank', the rebuilding of Hamas and, of course, the Oct 7 atrocities leading to the war in Gaza now nearing 500 days. Here is the supreme case for the conflagrationory power of stupid compassion.

Gershon Baskin has learnt nothing. Out of the goodness of his heart came the stupid reaction to President Trump’s solution for delivering the people of Gaza from hell.

“I really want to believe that this is not a serious story. I want to believe that if Trump did say this, it is the result of the last conversation he had with some crazy Israeli settlement leader. I hope that he understands that what he is suggesting is ethnic cleansing and should never even be whispered as a wish.”

Lax immigration policy provides the other supreme example of perverted passion as a mass disrupter and killer. And we discover Jewish liberality again at the coal face, in Trump’s first term in office.

When the ‘wrongly’ elected President made an executive order to not grant visas to Muslims from countries which breed terror groups, a thousand non-Orthodox rabbis signed a petition. Other rabbis declared their temples to be biblical cities of refuge, and sheltered illegal aliens. Other Jewish progressives accused Trump of copycatting Franklin D Roosevelt denying safe haven to a shipload of Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe. They introduced the Dr Seuss cartoon above whose caption is “These are foreign children and it really doesn’t matter.”

At a time of dire need Trump slammed America’s door tight shut – on Muslim travellers and migrants.

The idiots equated the cases, blind to glaring differences. For one, Roosevelt keeping stateless Jews on board the St. Louis in 1939 was, observed Walter Russell Mead & Nicholas Gallagher, following the 1924 Reed-Johnson Act which totally cut off immigration to the United States, refugee or otherwise. The two went on to describe the “almost total ban imposed on immigrants that would endure for two generations. Not even the Holocaust could pry the doors open more than a crack; large-scale immigration was not allowed to resume until 1965.”

Another difference between the acts of Roosevelt and Trump is that when the former locked the gates on refugees it was not to keep out terrorists. Roosevelt reacted to the economic realities of the Great Depression. Mass unemployment and fears of foreign paupers did it for Jews seeking to escape the death camps.

Thirdly there was no Jewish terrorism. The ghettoes were not a breeding ground for suicide bombers. No murderous Jews were trying to infiltrate America by secreting themselves within refugee hoards. On the other hand Trump barring Muslims from certain countries was a matter of life and death for Americans. The immigration system could hardly tell the good from the bad. Neither French nor German immigration could tell the difference, and some citizens paid with their lives. Jewish desperately trying to enter America posed no such threat. They may have been paupers, but none were potential mass murderers.

Fourth, the world map was very different in Roosevelt’s day. There was no State of Israel to offer Europe’s Jews a haven. Today the map contains several - actually many - Muslim states which, if they played ball, could take in every displaced Muslim at a blink. Why did they not play ball? Why did compassionate progressives not pressure Muslim states to play ball?

Most vapid is that degree heavy progressives that sneer at Trump voters are incapable of joining standout dots. If refugee Muslims really were like Holocaust escaping Jews, from which death camps had the Muslims fled? Invoking Anne Frank to score points can be a double edged sword. There have to be two players. Here progressives came up against no real candidate for the push effect. Where was the equivalent Third Reich from which Muslims had fled? Which regime was about to exterminate them? Narrative makers addressed the problem by expelling it from the narrative they fashioned.

But the oldest lesson delivered on the evil of misplaced compassion occurred in biblical times. Samuel 15:1-34 tells of King Saul attacking the Amalek people, of what led up to the war, and what followed.

Israel dug its grave so to speak, when the army departed from the military plan set by the prophet Samuel, to whom God had relayed instructions. The objective was simple: annihilate Amalek, do not spare one human, not even one animal. Have no pity, Amalek is your, what we now call, existential, enemy. King Saul, Israel’s commander in chief, spared Agag the King of Amalek. Departing from the battle plan he took Agag captive. A more consequential folly has never been committed. How did the callous and ungrateful Agag thank Saul for the one night he was allowed to live? He made a woman pregnant, according to the Midrash. Agag’s monster descendants were none other than Haman and Hitler. The one plotted a Holocaust in the Persian Empire, the other carried one out in Europe.

The cleverest Jews never learn the lessons of history. At the famous trial in Jerusalem Adolf Eichmann emulated Agag. As the king had pleaded with the Prophet Samuel to spare him, so Eichmann pleaded with the President of the court. The President responded with the sentence that Samuel the prophet had pronounced on Agag. Before cutting him to pieces Sameul cried,

“As your sword has made women childless, so shall your mother be childless among women.” Using the exact terms, the court of Israel passed the death sentence on Adolf Eichmann.

Beyond all reason certain Jews of great intellect and attainment objected. Martin Buber, Ernst Simon, Hugo Bergmann, Isaiah Berlin, Professor Walter Kaufmann and the Harvard historian Oscar Handlin, opposed the death sentence on Eichmann. Hitler’s henchman, they said to their infinite shame, had a right to live.

Compassion when fighting a mortal enemy is the deadliest weapon in the arsenal. The international community knows it and exploits it brilliantly.

Biden, Obama and a whole spectrum of humanists blackmailed Israel to eliminate Hamas with pity.

If there is one lesson worth applying to the latest fraught hostage deal it would be: Do not let the avatars of humanitarianism wield both the gavel of judgment and the axe of punishment.

Steve Apfel is an economist and former director of the School of Management Accounting. He is a prolific author of non-fiction published in many journals and sites. His books include: ‘The Paymaster’ (Fiction); Hadrian’s Echo: The whys and wherefores of Israel’s critics (non-fiction); ‘War by other means’ (contributor); and ‘‘Hitlers at heart’ (non-fiction) at publishers.