There is a beautiful forest in Jerusalem near the Yad Vashem National Holocaust Memorial that is dedicated to the righteous gentiles who, during the Nazi regime, went out of their way to help save Jews, sometimes at their own personal risk. There are name plaques for individuals from nearly all European countries, including Germany, Poland, and Ukraine. The Germans at the time were a superpower, both in terms of their Wehrmacht to fight conventional wars, and with the infamous Gestapo, whose job was to find and kill every last Jew in Europe and deal ruthlessly with collaborators. Yet, some individuals had the courage to stand up to the Nazis and do what was right, in the name of humanity.
Eighty-five years later, a mini Nazi regime in Gaza launched a barbaric attack on men, women, children, and infants on October 7, 2023, killing over 1,200 of them and taking nearly 250 hostages. Despite offers of generous rewards by the Israelis, we are not aware of any Palestinian in Gaza who has done the right thing, trying to save at least one of the children, the elderly, or the infants. Rather, we now know that many hostages were held in families in Gaza, who abused them, spat at them, and made them do demeaning and indecent tasks. To cap it all, these same individuals, who have parted ways with the human race, have made it a routine to cheer and jeer at the despicable “ceremonies” that the Gazans hold at each hostage exchange, including the latest one when Israel exchanged hundreds of murderers to get back four corpses, including an elderly person, a young mother, and her two children, aged four and one at the time of their killing—the Bibas family. These kids and possibly their mother were killed a month after their kidnapping, with bare hands, i.e., probably strangled. Who does this to infants? Who sits by when this happens? Why isn’t there a whistleblower in Gaza?
I am not sure that there is anything one can add, or any lower than a supposed human being can go.
For these reasons, humanity should welcome Trump’s Gaza relocation plan, whether in its original version or any variation that ensures that all the Gazans leave that strip of land forever. No country would accept having barbarians at the gate who have committed heinous crimes not once but many times, and worse still, publicly proclaimed, “We will do many more October 7s.”
Since the dawn of history, when a country or a people attacks a neighbor without reason and is eventually vanquished, the aggressor can lose its sovereignty or its land, and the victors dictate the conditions. Gaza was never a sovereign nation, and the Palestinians never had a country; yet Israel gave Gazans independence in 2005 by leaving every square inch of the strip, only to be repeatedly attacked multiple times. Enough is enough.
There are consequences to bad actions. The Palestinians, at least in Gaza for now, have forfeited their right to live there, forever. Let Ms. Albanese find them a place.