One of the great open questions in history is the innocence of the average German citizen regarding the atrocities of the Nazis.  We know that the Nazis kept their genocidal activities secret from the populace, but everyone knew that the Jews were being rounded up and placed in camps.  How innocent could they be?  As nations like Canada cease arms sales to Israel, apparently in support of suffering “innocents” in Gaza, Similar questions arise.  Just how innocent are those Gazans?

I have been to some chilling places in my life.  I sat on Red Square while Moscow was still the capital of the Soviet Union and could picture in my mind the threatening military parades through that space with Stalin or Kruschev standing atop Lenin’s tomb.  I visited Chernobyl just five years after the accident and clean-up activities were still underway.  But nothing has chilled me to the bone like visiting Zepplin Field in Nurnberg where the Riefenstahl films were shot.  When I signed up for the tour, I had no idea what I was going to see, but it seems that even though I had seen the famous footage where we demolish the swastika atop the grandstand, the grandstand is still there.  It is immediately recognizable, and as we rounded the. corner and it came into view, the entire busload of people hushed.  That it was still standing forced one to question if the sentiments behind Nazism were still floating around the nation.  My suspicions were only enhanced by a guide in Vienna the next day that clearly harbored anti-Israeli sentiment if not outright anti-Semitism.

Similar question exist about the average Gazan.  Or do they?

Seventy-one percent of Palestinians in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank believe Hamas made the right decision in attacking Israel on October 7, according to a new poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, an organization primarily funded by the European Union and the United States-based Ford Foundation.

Make sure and read that carefully.  71% of Gazans, even if they did not execute the Oct 7 attacks – involving rape, beheadings and baking babies – themselves, believe they were the right thing to do.  Now, perhaps propaganda is so rife in that area that these people are unaware, as were the German people, of the precise nature of the atrocities – but they sure-as-shootin’ knew something bad was going down and they support it!  Again, I ask – How “innocent” can they be?

Since Colin Powell told us war was about “breaking things and killing people,” we tend to focus on that as a definition of victory.  But there is much more involved.  Defeating a nation on a military level is only the beginning of victory, if the attitudes and sentiments that drove a nation to war initially are not driven out of the defeated nation, they will only rearm and attack again.  It would seem that after WWII we defeated the militaristic desires of the Germans, but based on what I saw one must wonder if the internal atrocities might resume if they ever found themselves unsupervised again.

The October 7 attack upon Israel was not driven by mere militaristic desire – it was a purely antisemitic desire for Jewish genocide.  The attack was not designed to conquer territory or take over a government.  The attack was designed purely to kill Jews because they were Jews – in the most horrific ways possible.  Therefore, it is not enough to merely conquer and destroy their military capabilities, or even eliminate their militaristic desire.  The source of the antisemitism must be purged from their midst in hopes that the attitude proper will die.  Hamas must be utterly destroyed – the anti-Israeli sentiment must die.  People that stand between the IDF and Hamas may not be combatants, but they clearly hold anti-Israeli sentiments and therefore are far from innocent.  Even if they do not fight the fight, they most certainly fuel it.

No one, most especially the Israelis, want to create suffering or kill innocents.  But there are almost no innocents in Gaza.  The thing that bothers me most is that in calling for ceasefire, in withholding military aid from Israel, we too are sacrificing our innocence.  We can, like Pilate, try to wash the blood from our hands – but they will be permanently stained.