Today, a holocaust is taking place in Africa.
Photo: AFP
Help the survivors
Survivors of Sudanese Shoah no less human than Jewish Holocaust survivors
Hadera residents don't want refugees of the Sudanese holocaust in their town. Other towns are also not rushing to compete for absorbing the miserable souls, who are seeking life instead of death in their own country.
During the Second World War, when Hillel Kook and his friends wanted to save Jews by bringing them to America, an outcry ensued. People schemed against this happening. Anti-Semitism ruled and the American Administration did not want to see Christians pitted against Jews and frightened Jews pitted against survivors in its home front.
Mr John Pehle, who at the served in the Treasury under President Roosevelt, left it angrily in order to join Hillel Cook in his work to save Jews. Pehle later said Americans did all they could in order not to save Jews. When a request was submitted to transfer Jews to deserted German camps in Libya and house them there until the end of the war, the Americans refused because of fears over what to do with the Jews after the war.
Today, a holocaust is taking place in Africa. Israeli residents of Hadera, who think that the holocaust is something that one sings about and defeats by traveling on colorful journeys to ruins of the Jewish people, do not want to save the Sudanese. The government is silent. The Knesset is silent. A few decent and kind-hearted people assist these refugees, but the entire nation is like Hadera.
The Americans, who refused to save Jews, refrained from bombing the train tracks to Auschwitz, and designated Jews in Europe as enemy subjects who may be killed, were not Jewish. They too believed they had no room for more Jews.
And so, the Jews remained where they were and died, while the Sudanese, who are dying by the thousands and suffering torture, do what the Jews did following the Holocaust. They walk through the wilderness, escape enemies, and are butchered by the Egyptians, who did not suffer a holocaust so they don't know what they shouldn't be doing.
And then, they sneak into the county of the survivors, and the entire nation is like Hadera. It doesn't want more dark-skinned people, just like the Americans didn't want Jews, and "no Jews" is just the same as "no Sudanese."
Indifferent to suffering
It's hard to believe we reached this point. Once upon a time there were people who assisted us. Today, Israel attempts to prevent several thousand refugees from arriving here because we're the chosen people, and because we're allowed to do what we didn't want done to us.
A Holocaust survivor called me today and I asked him what he thought about this story, and he said he read in the newspaper that the largest number of immigrants to Germany in the past year came from Israel. He added that he was not surprised.
We haven't learned a thing. We've become indifferent to the Sudanese' suffering and there is only one kind of suffering that is allowed – our suffering. This is the case even though we have a country with a powerful army, and even though we built a state here in order to absorb refugees who didn't speak our language and were brought here because they wanted to escape hell.
So please don't be preaching to me on the uniqueness of the Holocaust. It is indeed unique, and what was done has no equal - the extermination of an entire people at a death factory never happened in the world, yet the Jewish survivors were no more human than the survivors of Sudan.
We must stand up immediately and bring the survivors to a safe haven. We must assist them. We must do what the Serbs, who today are the world's "bad guys" and at the time were the greatest fighters against Nazism, did with our Holocaust survivors.
