A betrayal of the victims of the Holocaust

A view from Israel

Friends,

The world’s leading hunger monitor, Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, said Gaza is in a famine that has “worsened dramatically” in the last few months. The number of Palestinians killed has officially surpassed 60,000. A new Gallup poll shows 6 in 10 Americans disapprove of Israel’s military actions in Gaza.

Occasionally I come across an article in the foreign press that strikes me as so important that I want to share it with you. The following was originally published on July 27 in Haaretz, the longest-running newspaper currently in print in Israel. It was published in Hebrew.

Orit Kamir is an Israeli professor of law who drafted Israel’s law against sexual harassment and its law prohibiting bullying in the workplace (which was adopted by Israel’s labor courts). She is the author of “Betraying Dignity: The Toxic Seduction of Social Media, Shaming, and Radicalization,” published in 2020. I am grateful for her permission to republish this.

Silence in the Face of Gaza’s Starvation is Absolute Betrayal of Holocaust Victims

By Orit Kamir

In her childhood, my mother was starved by a dark regime. When the Nazi army occupied Poland and Jews were pushed into ghettos, they were forced to make do with less and less food. Eventually, food disappeared almost entirely. My mother was seven years old when the Lvov ghetto closed in on her. Fortunately, both her parents were alive and did everything to ensure her survival. The nutrition they managed to obtain for her was very meager: lengthy searches in the streets and trash cans sometimes yielded potato peels or edible plants. My grandmother would cook them and the water was drunk as soup. Proteins, sourced from various insects, were rare. Nevertheless, my mother was lucky. Other children wasted away and died.

The Nazi regime reduced the ghetto's boundaries and squeezed its residents, whose numbers dwindled daily, into increasingly smaller areas. My mother and her parents found themselves sharing an apartment with a family named Mintzer, consisting of two parents and four children. Both parents and the eldest son were captured in aktions and sent to extermination. Another son, hungry and weak, fell ill and languished for many days until he breathed his last. My grandparents tried to revive the two orphaned children who remained, but they couldn't help: they had nothing to give. The entire Mintzer family was annihilated. Bella, the youngest daughter, was ten years old when she died.

My mother somehow survived the starvation and the war, but the Mintzer children who wasted away before her eyes remained with her always. They accompany me to this day. The survivors' guilt doesn't dissipate and the scar still burns. On my first visit to Lvov, I searched for that building in the ghetto and lit memorial candles for them. Who would have believed that eighty years after they were starved to death, my country, the Jewish state, would decree that I bear real guilt for the starvation and extermination of tens of thousands of children like them. The state that arose from the ruins of that destruction has brought a hundred thousand children in Gaza to the danger of death from starvation.

Whether our mother was there in body or not - we are all second, third, and fourth generation to victims of starvation and extermination. And the one commandment the victims left us, all of us, is simple: never again. Because every person, as a human being, has absolute and inviolable value, "human dignity," and our supreme duty is to recognize and ensure it. Simply because they are human. All the more so for children. They are always entitled to life, to protection, without question and without qualification. This is the entire Torah and there is nothing else. And it dictates our responsibility and our moral duty.

But in 2025, the Israeli army, on orders from the political echelon, is destroying Gaza and exterminating its population. Neighborhood after neighborhood and city after city in the Strip are destroyed to the foundations, and people are expelled with nothing and pushed to crowd into increasingly smaller areas. Like then. After we destroyed all infrastructure, including hospitals, the mortality is relentless. Families constantly shrink and thousands have already been erased from the face of the earth. Others leave behind hopeless orphans, abandoned to their fate. Like then.

Since Israel broke the ceasefire in March, Gaza's besieged population has also been deliberately and systematically starved. Israel allows only very little food to enter the Strip, and what little is allowed in is brought in a way that cannot reach all residents. Children, the sick, the elderly, people weakened by hunger - cannot reach the four food distribution stations Israel created, instead of the 400 stations that operated before. We have decreed their fate to languish until they die of hunger, weakness, and disease. Relatively strong young people who do reach the distribution stations to get some relief are shot to death daily by Israeli soldiers.

There is no electricity, no gas, no clean water; if someone finds a potato peel - there isn't even a way to cook it. And all this time, Israel prevents the entry of food, medicine, and other vital supplies that could save lives, and which are available in large quantities at hand (because they are held by UN organizations that Israel decided to boycott), and denies its actions - even now, as it tries to make minor corrections at the margins.

This is conduct of incomprehensible cruelty. It creates horror beyond the ability to imagine, and this allows most Israelis to deny it: if it's too terrible to be true - it's probably not true. And so they allow the horror to continue happening.

What value does our freedom have if we don't use it to stop dispossession, killing, and starvation? What do we need the rule of law for if not to ensure human dignity?

The Israeli public's silence is a betrayal not only of the entire world of values it claims to hold; it is an absolute betrayal of Holocaust victims, in whose name we demanded a state for ourselves where we could ensure our existence. It is a betrayal of the Mintzer family and the millions of other families who were slaughtered and perished throughout Jewish history. It is a betrayal of the entire long legacy of Jewish existence as a persecuted minority. It is a betrayal of humanity in general - and of our collective identity in particular. It is such a monumental betrayal that it's hard to contain.

I don't usually invoke the name of the Holocaust, because too many bear it in vain, but now it's unavoidable.

Those who rejoice in Gaza's destruction and annihilation, those who justify or rationalize the horror with talk of revenge for the terrible massacre of October 7 - have lost their souls. But those who can still feel human emotion must wake from the paralyzing slumber and shake off this unforgivable betrayal.

You who cry out against the firing of the Shin Bet chief and the attorney general and the chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee - but fill your mouths with water regarding the extermination and starvation we are carrying out in Gaza: your concern for Israeli democracy and the future of the state pales against your silence in the face of mass extermination. What value does our freedom have, which you fight for, if we don't use it to stop dispossession, killing, and starvation? What do we need the rule of law for if not to ensure human dignity?

You who organize rallies to bring back the hostages, whom the government wickedly abandons with unbearable evil - but don't address the destruction of the lives of another two million women and men who are also languishing in Gaza alongside the hostages: what kind of human solidarity is this, that applies only to the twenty "our" hostages, and closes its eyes to the fate of millions?

You who run WhatsApp groups with many participants and broadcast hope for a healthier and saner future - and close your eyes to the unforgivable crime: what rosy future can there be here, when the tens of thousands of children who died through our fault will accompany us wherever we go?

And you who presume to lead, in various ways, the sane public - but are careful not to say "controversial" things that might upset someone: shame on you. If children dying of hunger don't disturb you enough to cry out without political calculations, what alternative are you offering? What leadership?

Where are the Holocaust researchers from Yad Vashem? The Medical Association? The nurses? Professional associations - of psychologists, sociologists, lawyers, social workers? Where are the student organizations? When children become Muselmänner and die in agony because of us - don't you think it's your duty to cry out until the horror stops? So what are you here for?

If a million Israeli women and men took to the streets, as one person, with an uncompromising demand to end the war immediately - this horror would end. Even a monstrous and disconnected government cannot ignore the entire public. When a million Israelis took to the streets, the hostages will finally be returned to their homes; the lives of soldiers, 896 of whom have already been sacrificed, will be saved; their souls will be saved from the insane trauma their state imposes on them; and two million people in Gaza will be rescued from the inferno Israel has trapped them in.