Explained: How Hamas attack has revived wounds of Holocaust for Israeli Jews

The words ‘Holocaust’ and ‘Shoah’ (Hebrew for catastrophe) gained a trending traction on social media in Israel during the course of Oct 9 and Oct 10 after hundreds of Israeli citizens, mostly Jews, were killed in a wave of deadly attacks by the Palestinian militants from Gaza strip. 

Holocaust is a reference to the genocide of over 6 million European Jews during the second World War committed by the Nazis who owed allegiance to the German dictator Adolf Hitler. 

In its modern-day independent existence since 1948, Israel was initially almost completely constituted by the Holocaust survivors. They were the people who survived the death camps or managed to stay put during a period of visceral hatred against Jewish people in Europe during second world war. 

At least until 1972, radio broadcasts in Tel Aviv would routinely announce the names of “missing people” who survived Holocaust and were looking for their relatives in the hope of finding them alive in Israel: “the promised land”. 

Most present-day inhabitants of Israel are descendants of the Jewish people who survived persecution in one form or another during the second world war or the periods and centuries preceding it when waves of antisemitism led to the massacres of Jewish people. 

For these same reasons, Holocaust is an integral part of Israeli social fabric, where memorials are held regularly to commemorate major moments of persecution and museums such as Yad Vashem stand witness to the phases of atrocities faced by the world’s first Abrahamic community through centuries.

How Holocaust’s generational trauma has resurfaced in Israel after Hamas attack?

So far, at least 900 Israeli people, most of them Jews, have been killed by a wave of armed attacks launched by Hamas from inside the Gaza strip. According to the Israel’s President Isaac Herzog, “not since the Holocaust have so many Jews been killed on one day.” Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid termed it the “worst day since Holocaust”.

Besides, among the people killed during ongoing onslaught by Palestinian militants are the elderly individuals who survived Hitler’s death camps. Hamas members were seen on a killing spree in people’s homes, massacring hundreds of young people at an outdoor music festival, kidnapping scores of women, children and elderly, even Holocaust survivors. 

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said one of the people forcibly taken after Hamas militants launched an attack on Israel over the weekend was a Holocaust survivor who uses a wheelchair.

At the same time, many demonstrations across the world showing support to the Palestinians have turned into a show of antisemitism. 

At a rally near Sydney’s Opera House, a crowd of hundreds was heard chanting in a video, “Gas the Jews”, in a reference to the gas chambers in concentration camps where millions were suffocated to death. 

Israel Vs Hamas: Is this the most number of Jews killed since Holocaust?

According to Times of Israel, the claim appears to be accurate. There have been days of violence and similar bloodshed in Israel’s history and for Jews around the world since 1945, but none has had a civilian death toll this high. 

While there have been higher casualty tolls, these many civilians have not been murdered on a single day.

Between last few months of 1947 into 1949, 6,000 citizens of Israel died during its war of independence. But that is considered the death toll in entirety for a period of nearly two years. Besides, most casualties were soldiers not civilians.

Also watch | Remembering the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust

At the same time, comparisons have been made with Yom Kippur War of 1973 — an armed conflict fought between Israel and a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria — in which Israel emerged victorious. 

But while more than 2,000 soldiers died over the course of more than two weeks in 1973, the war had a very low Israeli civilian death toll, The Times of Israel reported.

Approximately 1,000 people died in the terror attacks of the Second Intifada, a period between 2000 to mid-2005. 

Similarly, big scale killings of the Jewish people have occurred outside Israel as well. 

In India, during 26/11 Mumbai attack, Pakistani terrorists took captives in the Nariman House, designated as a Chabad house, a five-story landmark in the Colaba area of South Mumbai, which was home to a Chabad house, a Jewish outreach centre. A total of six people were killed in Chabad House, including the Rabbi and his wife.

In 1946, a pogrom in Kielce, Poland, killed at least 42 Jews. The bombing of the AMIA Jewish Center in the Argentinian capital Buenos Aires in 1994, which the American Jewish Committee reportedly called “the deadliest antisemitic attack outside Israel since the Holocaust,” killed 85 people.

By contrast, while the figures are still being tallied, it remains accurate that the death toll of Israeli civilians due to Hamas attacks is the highest on a single-day basis since the second world war.

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