October 7 is historically unique

The heinous crimes perpetrated on October 7, 2023 cannot be equated with any other event in world history. They have no parallel.

There is no parallel.

We, lovers of life and defenders of freedom, try to find parallels as a way to understand the unimaginable barbarism that was committed against innocent Israelis. It is only natural to try to search for analogies. But there are none. Historical comparisons are inaccurate. They may be applicable in a small way. Unfortunately, they serve no significant purpose except to muddy the analysis.

Any comparison between the events of October 7, and any other event in world history, is an analogy gone awry.October 7, 2023 cannot be compared to the Holocaust. Or to 9/11. Or to Pearl Harbor. I understand why the comparisons are made – it is for the sake of the impact that was made. It is because, in our search for understanding, we want to categorize October 7 as “Holocaust-like” as “Israel’s 9/11” as “like Pearl Harbor.” These are used because of the element of surprise, because of the sheer numbers, because of the sheer animalistic brutality.

Fortunately, the Jewish world today is nothing like Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Today we have Israel; 80, 90, 100 years ago, we did not. Israel is a Jewish state, it is our Jewish state. And one of the main objectives of the Jewish State of Israel is to defend and protect Jews and Israeli citizens. And Israel neither needs, nor will rely, on any other entity for its protection. 

The fact that Israel was created with the clear purpose of protecting Jews in Israel and around the world cannot be understated. It was the purpose, and is still the purpose, and that is a gargantuan difference between then and now.After this war with Hamas, a reckoning will be coming. The leadership of Israel failed in its primary responsibility to protect its citizens. The threats were foreseeable – they were expected. Every leader, and almost every Israeli and lover of Israel, went to bed on October 6 knowing that Hamas was bent on Israel’s destruction and would, one day soon, attempt to murder as many Jews as possible.

And so they did. The brutality unleashed on October 7 hearkened back to medieval times. But worse – again, no comparison. Although there was awful brutality perpetrated by Nazis and their local non-Jewish communities wherever Jews lived, by and large, the Nazis controlled their antisemitism. For them, it was a tool. Again, no comparison.

For example, on November 9-10, 1938, the nightmare known as Kristallnacht, a number of Brown Shirts were arrested by Nazis. Why? For being too brutal. During the Kristallnacht rampage, 91 Jews were murdered, 7,500 Jewish businesses were burnt and destroyed, 267 were synagogues destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish were men arrested and sent to concentration camps. And several Nazi perpetrators were arrested for displaying too much brutality in following the orders to destroy.

Again, the Nazis controlled their antisemitism and used it as a tool. In a famous speech delivered by Reinhard Heydrich, the high-ranking SS officer tells the SS that “we control the antisemitism; it does not control us.”

The Nazis created factories of death – gas chambers and crematoria to murder Jews more efficiently. That was their rationale. The cost of the bullets, the cost to the German psyche, especially to the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile execution teams, was simply too high. Murdering by gas and then incinerating the bodies was quicker and cheaper. On October 7, hundreds of bullets were sprayed into one Jew, and then another, and then another. They cared nothing about human life, let alone about efficiency or cost.

Even the awful European pogroms perpetrated by Bogdan Chmielnicki, the Cossack leader and hero of the Ukrainian people, the monster who created the pogroms, never ordered his pogromists to murder 1,400 Jews in a single night.

The Kishinev pogrom

The Kishinev pogrom of 1903 was the most famous pogrom in the modern era. It took place April 19 through 21 in Kishinev, in the province of Bessarabia, in Moldova, part of the Russian empire. After two days of murder, rapes, and burning, the Czar’s army finally came into Kishinev and stopped the pogrom. 

Even in Kishinev, only 49 Jews were murdered, 92 seriously wounded, and 500 lightly wounded. The news shook the world.

Jews raced out of the Russian empire seeking safe refuge in the United States and Palestine. The Kishinev pogrom was the stimulus for the Second Aliyah, which went on from 1904 until 1914, the start of World War I. During the rush of immigration, 2.5 million Jews left Europe for the United States; 35,000 Jews went to Palestine.

As awful as Kishinev was, as awful as Kristallnacht was, the mass murder and savagery that Hamas’s marauding murderers perpetrated in Israel on October 7 was worse. This Jewish massacre was pre-modern butchery and medieval carnage – with a modern twist.

The writer is a social and political commentator. Watch his TV show Thinking Out Loud on the Jewish Broadcasting Service.