By Omer Bartov
In 1903, a local mob killed 49 Jews, including several children, and raped and wounded 600 others, in the city of Kishinev, then part of the Russian Empire. These three days of violence later became known as the Kishinev pogrom.
A few days later, the Jewish-Russian poet Hayim Nahman Bialik published a Hebrew poem that every Israeli school child still knows today.
I am a scholar of the Holocaust and genocide. When thinking about the unfolding Israel-Hamas war, I am reminded of this Bialik poem, “On the Slaughter.” It laments Jewish helplessness and victimhood – and condemns apathy to violence, including the murder of children.
Bialik writes:
“And damned be he who says: Avenge!
Such vengeance, for the blood of a small child,
Satan has yet to devise.”
Hamas militants killed approximately 30 Israeli children when they attacked civilians on Oct. 7, 2023, killing more than 1,400 people altogether. At least 20 Israeli children remain hostage in Gaza.
Since Oct. 7, Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 2,000 Palestinian children and more than 8,000 people overall, according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza.
Israel’s attacks on Gaza began intensifying on Oct. 28, as Israeli ground forces entered Gaza.
Both sides in this war have focused on the deaths and kidnapping of children, sharing images and videos of the children as a testament to the other side’s cruelty.
Particularly, Hamas’ slaughter of Israeli children evokes collective Jewish memories of pogroms and the Holocaust – and the attempt to annihilate the Jewish people.
For Palestinians, too, the killing of their children represents both the injustice of Israeli rule and occupation, and the perceived attempt to stop Palestinians from having their own country. The collective Palestinian memory of the Nakba in 1948, when Israeli forces killed thousands of Palestinians and pushed out 750,000 people from their homes, is replete with tales of children who lost both their homeland and their parents.
Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images
A new kind of protection
Bialik ended up emigrating to what was then called Palestine in 1924, and today he is considered Israel’s national poet.
Bialik wrote a longer poem, titled “In The City of Slaughter,” in 1904, after he visited the site of the Kishinev pogrom. Bialik fumed against Jewish men for hiding, instead of protecting their wives and daughters from rape.
Bialik called for a new type of warlike Jewish manhood. If neither God nor the authorities could protect them from slaughter, Jews had to create a state of their own – and Jewish men had to learn to fight and kill.
Over the next four decades, the numbers of slaughtered Jews, including children, piled up.
In the Holocaust, Nazis and their collaborators killed an estimated 1.5 million Jewish children.
It was this kind of violence against defenseless innocents that the establishment of Israel in 1948 was supposed to prevent.
‘Never again’
Most Jews who emigrated to Israel in the late 1940s were Holocaust survivors. They had experienced precisely the kind of defenselessness that Israel said it would never allow to happen again. Their sense of vulnerability and their memory of victimization were transmitted from one generation to another.
The popular slogan “never again,” referring to the Holocaust, meant what Bialik had intended: not only the prevention of violence against Jewish people, but a new breed of tough and brave Jewish fighters, prepared to die for their new homeland.
Israel’s failure to protect its people is partially why the Oct. 7 attacks were so shocking to the Israeli public.
The Israeli military’s delayed response left people in the attacked communities feeling utter helplessness. The intentional cruelty of Hamas’ killings, often videotaped and live-streamed, reminded Israelis of past anti-Jewish violence.
Children in Gaza
In the Gaza Strip, meanwhile, half of the population is younger than 18.
In 2014, Israel airstrikes, coming in response to intense rocket fire from Gaza, killed over 500 Palestinian children. The Israeli government described the children’s deaths as unfortunate, but unavoidable. The reasoning is that bombing presumed Hamas targets was much less risky and costly, in terms of Israeli lives, than a ground incursion into Gaza.
Since Oct. 7, Israel has carried out unprecedentedly massive aerial bombardments of Gaza.
The images of dead and mutilated Palestinian children have served to mute some people’s criticism of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israelis – and to heighten other people’s sense of Palestinian innocence and Israeli brutality.
There are two major difference between this round of killing and previous ones, most prominently in 2014.
First, this time the violence began with the slaughter of over 1,400 Israelis.
Second, Israel’s current bombing campaign has killed more Palestinians, including children, than at any other time in the past.
Hamas’ slaughter of Jewish children is now being reciprocated by what the Israel Defense Forces says are unintended – but certain – killings of even larger numbers of Palestinian children.
Ahmed Zakot/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Children are the ultimate victims
Both sides in the Israel-Hamas war are now flaunting and weaponizing their child victims to support their political causes.
For the Israelis and their supporters, the murder and kidnapping of children shows the inhumanity of Hamas and its supporters – and fuels calls for violent retribution.
For Palestinians and their supporters, Israel’s killing of even more children in Gaza helps wipe away Hamas’ crimes and exposes Israel’s alleged intent to kill all Palestinians.
Many people have flooded social media with images and videos of killed Palestinian and Israeli children, as well as bloody crime scenes where they were killed.
People have plastered posters of kidnapped Israeli children across the streets in American and European cities – and have videotaped those who tear them down.
But in Israel, at least, the media has mostly avoided showing images of both Jewish and Palestinian child victims. Showing kidnapped or killed Israeli children is considered demoralizing, and showing killed Palestinian children is considered to be enemy propaganda. In Gaza, people have been photographed and recorded carrying and mourning dead children, wrapped in blood-stained white cloth.
Is this Satan’s vengeance for the violence of men? In his deepest hour of despair, Bialik never hoped for more violence as a response to a massacre. As he wrote 120 years ago:
“If there is justice – May it appear at once!
But if it appears
Only after I had been eradicated under the sky –
May its throne be toppled forever!
And may Heaven rot in everlasting evil.”
Omer Bartov is Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University.
ASF says
Children are always the innocent vicitms, no matter which side of the border fence they reside on. it is a shame when those deaths are further exploited in the name of politics.
JimboXYZ says
As was predicted, the casualty counts will become so lopsided from Hamas/Hezbollah aggressions. They haven’t profited enough from the misery & genocide of the 2023 Holocaust. And Biden will fund every side of the cash cow. More population control. Think of it this way though, Covid killed/kills more than what this war will produce as a casualty count. That’s if one still believes that Covid wasn’t a political stunt on at least a USA or global scale ?
DaleL says
Professor Bartov has left out one issue concerning the Palestinian version of the Nakba in 1948. At the same time as some 700,000 Muslim Palestinians left/fled the new state of Israel, a similar number of Jews fled/left Muslim controlled Palestine and surrounding Muslim countries. They mostly went to Israel.
Hamas controlled Gaza is Israel’s neighbor. From an Atlantic story titled: The Theory of Hamas’s Catastrophic Success. “To have a neighbor who breaks your windows now and then is one thing; to have a neighbor who steals your children and dismembers your husband is another.”
Israel has been surrounded by hostile neighbors ever since its creation. These neighbors have condoned Hamas and in the case of Iran, financed Hamas. Hamas is the intolerable neighbor and is the cause of this conflict.
Bill C says
Nice justification for group punishment by Israel, like all Palestinians belong to Hamas. The world has judged otherwise, not because of anti Semitism, but because of the unjust brutality by Israel seen every day, like the bombing of a refugee camp. Acceptable losses because Palestinian civilian lives are worthless. “Who you going to believe, me or you’re lying eyes.”
Ray W. says
People keep offering explanations, excuses, simplistic solutions, and on and on, to this most intractable of violent problems. For thousands of years, accumulated enmities, hatreds and blind vengeances have driven the indigenous to kill and maim the other indigenous. For the last century, the best minds in the whole world have wrestled with how to stop the killing, without and form of success, unless you call exhausted pauses success. Let’s just blame one side or the other in a vain hope that it will mean anything at all. I don’t have an answer, you don’t have an answer, no one seems to have an answer. At least I cast my hopes as a vain fantasy that can never be achieved without political disaster for whomever tries to adopt it.
DaleL says
You should read the Huffpost November 4 story titled: “I Killed 10 Jews With My Own Hands’: IDF Screens Raw Hamas Footage For Journalists”. It is a jarring account of the atrocities by Hamas on October 7.
As I wrote, I agree with Professor Bartov except that the UN partition of Palestine, which created Israel, resulted in not just the Nakba, but also a similar number of Jews to have to flee their homes in Muslim controlled areas. There are still 1.7 million Muslim Palestinians who are citizens of Israel. Many of them serve in the IDF. Hezbollah, unlike Hamas, typically attacks IDF posts, not civilians. It is true that west bank Muslim Palestinians are frequently harassed and there are some instances of even murder.
The issue though is Hamas and Gaza. In 1988, Hamas published its charter. It calls for the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic state in Palestine. It is Hamas that has decided that civilian lives, including Muslim Palestinian lives, are worthless or only of value has human shields.
(Despite centuries of Ottoman rule, not all Palestinians were or even today are Muslim.)
hippy says
It is exactly what the Muslim extremists want. They do not care about the Palestinians and continue to use innocent Palestinians as fodder and their dead bodies as propaganda. Until the Muslim world wakes up and does something about the extremism, this will never change.
Endless dark money says
The world was built on exploitation and greed.only profits matter. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.
Foresee says
Yes, what Hamas did was atrocious, but what Netanyahu is doing is more atrocious. Get rid of Hamas AND Netanyahu. Maybe then peace will be possible.
ASF says
It’s pretty difficult to coiceive of acts more atrocious than literally baking an infant in an oven or gouging out a parents’ eyes while attacking his children after they had to watch that happen–cutting off the arm of one of them before they mercifully died, just for extra kicks.
I am afirad that peace won’t be possible while this is considered to be, in any way, shaoe or form, justifiable.
If outside intefering parties feel that Israel’s way of getting rid of this terrorist entity called Hamas is unacceptable, then I suggest they come up with a better and more effective way of doing it themselves–one that doesnlt involve military stikes or doing any of the manuevers that israel is currently doing.
Otherwise, I don’t see how forever placing Israel in a “darned if you do and dead if you don’t” position is going to help anybody–including the Palestinians who Israel-bashers keep insisting don’t supprt Hamas either (which I don’t feel is necessarily the truth.)
Ray W. says
“Outside interfering parties…” Oh, my! Ryszard Kapuscinski was right when he wrote that all the Azerbaijanis and Armenians want is for the world to leave them alone in their own little hell, so as to better allow them to thrash each other.
While I do not claim to be one of them, one of these days you are going to realize that there are people in this world who are far better educated and informed than you are. Hatred drives nearly every one of your posts, yet you seem to think that hatred is the answer, as if being less atrocious than Hamas is a virtue that justifies vengeance; it is not. You even attempt to engage in some form of balancing act, claiming that Hamas commits more “atrocious” acts than dies the IDF, as if living for three days trapped and injured inside a collapsed apartment building before slowly dying is less horrible than the acts you listed. Since you rely on the term, I looked up the definition of “atrocious.” It means “horrifyingly wicked.” I can agree with you that Hamas committed atrocities. I can agree with you that the IDF is committing atrocities. I cannot agree with you that one side is more horrifyingly wicked in their atrocities than the other.
It’s time to get back to the basics.
2500 years ago, or so, the three plays of Agamemnon hit the Greek stage in Athens.
Greek law at the time was based on a debt of blood vengeance.
In the first play, King Atreus’ father dies, leaving the kingdom to his two sons. Atreus slays his brother and all of his nephews, but one, as Atreus misses the unborn son of a pregnant concubine. That man grows up carrying under law a debt of blood vengeance.
King Atreus dies before the debt can be repaid, and the kingdom passes to King Agamemnon, the eldest of his two sons. Agamemnon’s brother, Menelaus, does not challenge for the throne.
Prince Paris steals Helen, which theft launches a thousand ships. But some versions of the play have a northwest wind keeping the fleet from leaving the home harbor. Agamemnon tricks one of his daughters into attending a festival, at which he sacrifices her to the gods. The winds abate and the fleet sails. Queen Clytemnestra, outraged at the sacrifice of her daughter, assumes a different debt of blood vengeance against her husband.
Ten years pass, and Troy is finally sacked. One of the captured Trojans is Cassandra, one of three hundred children of the Trojan king. Cassandra, blessed with the gift of foresight and cursed with the knowledge that no one would ever believe her, warns King Agamemnon to not enter his home upon his return to Greece. Inside, Queen Clytemnestra and her new lover, the now adult surviving nephew, await his entry.
Disregarding the warning, Agamemnon enters his home and is murdered by the two. The debt of blood vengeance passes to Agamemnon’s son, Orestes, and his surviving sister. They murder their cousin and Orestes murders his mother.
Greek society, seeing three generations of royalty decimated under the law of the debt of blood vengeance, decides to abolish the law. Orestes is brought to trial for the murder of his mother. No one is punished for the murder of the cousin. After all, the law of debt of blood vengeance, then still in existence, required as much of Orestes and his sister. But matricide, which his sister could not bring herself to do, is another matter under Greek law, vengeance of not.
Prosecuted by the furies and defended by Zeus himself, Orestes is tried by a jury of 12 prominent Athenians. They deadlock 6-6, and the goddess of the city, Athena, casts the deciding not guilty vote, thereby introducing the concept of mercy into Greek law.
Social historians assert that this is the earliest recorded instance of a society giving up a vengeance-based legal system and adopting a justice-based legal system. Vengeance requires a personal response to satisfy the debt of blood vengeance. Justice means that a jury acting separately from the parties decides the outcome. The concept is termed as an “honor” system of law vs. a “respect” system of law. Honor demands vengeance. Respect commands justice.
History tells us that during the third crusade, English priests found the first play of Agamemnon in the Arab libraries in Damascus. They translated it into Latin and brought it back to England in or around 1193 A.D. Within 22 years, English barons gathered their forces and forced King John to sign the first of several versions of the Magna Carta, in which the right to trial by jury was enshrined into English law.
Is it possible that two indigenous populations of Palestine are locked in a de facto system of law based on the debt of blood vengeance, a never-ending debt that passes from generation to generation?
Could it be that in 1915 or thereabouts, a Palestinian man participates in the slaughter of a Jewish community? That survivors of the community hold onto the debt of blood vengeance and today’s settlers, many descended from ancient lines of ultra-orthodox families, are settling the score?
Could it be that in 1948 or thereabouts, a Jewish man, fighting in the Irgun militia prior to the formation of the State of Israel, participated in the slaughter of members of a Palestinian community, during what Palestinians call the Nakba, or the catastrophe? That survivors of the Palestinian Arab community stormed out of Gaza on October 7th, intent of slaking the thirst of the debt of blood vengeance and settling the score? But the score will never be settled. The ancient law of the debt of blood vengeance prohibits ever settling the score.
Some Jewish courts have rabbinical records dating back over 2000 years. These records are admissible in rabbinical courts. They know who killed whom, who broke bread with the enemy, who married outside the faith, and on and on.
I have to believe that Palestinian villagers, tending to the same olive groves for 2000 years, know who killed whom, who broke bread with the enemy, who married outside the faith, and on and on. Oral histories survive for centuries on this type of continuity of village life.
The ancient Greeks knew 2500 years ago that a debt of blood vengeance can never be satisfied. So, those ancient Greeks, as described in the three plays, changed their law and adopted a justice-based legal system. In today’s Palestine, it seems that the only thing that can be done is to repeatedly engage in honor-based acts of blood vengeance, followed immediately by claims that these acts of blood vengeance are less “atrocious” than those committed by the enemy, whomever that might be.
ASF will lose every argument she raises in which she claims that Israeli acts of blood vengeance are less “atrocious” than Palestinian acts of blood vengeance. There is no form of reason known to mankind that allows “atrocious” to ever be a good thing. “Atrocious” is horrible and no one can ever claim to be good when committing atrocious acts.
As Ryszard Kapuscinski also wrote, religious extremism, racism, and nationalism are the three great plagues upon mankind. Palestine today is home to each of those three plagues.