The Jewish martyrs are common people with an identity that exposes them to the slaughter of many centuries. It is a story inhabited by people whose names have been lost or forgotten, as if there were nothing left of all those lives. Every time I encountered difficulty in telling their stories, I remembered the wonderful “iron mama” Faina Dorfman, whose grandfather, a rabbi, was burned by the Nazis in Russia. She lost her only daughter in a nightclub in Tel Aviv, but continues to believe in the Jewish saying Yihye besseder, “Everything will turn out well.” She thanked me for “bringing the truth to the world.” For me, pronouncing the names of Israel’s martyrs was an act of piety—accompanying them to the end, dying with them, so that they remain among us.
The Beginning
There is no difference between the terrorism that kills Jews in Israel and the terrorism that strikes them abroad. In Rome, in 1982, the little boy Stefano Tachè was murdered by Palestinian terrorists. In Entebbe, in 1976, the Jews were selected on the basis of the names on their passports. On the ship Achille Lauro, in 1985, an American Jew in a wheelchair, Leon Klinghoffer, was picked from among all the other passengers and thrown into the ocean by Palestinian terrorists. In 1980, in Nairobi, a bomb devastated the Israeli-owned Norfolk Hotel, killing fifteen people. Five years later, in Sinai, an Egyptian policeman fired wildly on a group of Israeli tourists, killing seven of them, four of whom were children. Then there were the attacks on the airports in Rome and Vienna, with more than twenty killed. In 1986, in Istanbul, twenty-two faithful were killed in the Neveh Shalom synagogue. Between 1992 and 1994 in Buenos Aires, more than one hundred died in the Jewish schools. In Mombasa, in 2002, at a hotel used by Israeli tourists, guests were killed by a bomb in the hall. That same year, a suicide bomber blew himself up outside the ancient Tunisian synagogue of Djerba. And the list continues with the barbaric killing of Rabbi Holtzberg and his wife, in her fifth month of pregnancy, in Mumbai in December 2008.
Ilan Halimi, a young French Jew who worked at a cell phone shop, was kidnapped in 2006 in the heart of Paris and taken to a suburb where he was tortured and murdered. The neighbors heard him screaming, but no one intervened to stop the slow execution. The den where Ilan was held hostage resembled a “homemade concentration camp.” Until the trial, the French government pretended that nothing serious had happened. Almost thirty people participated in the torture of Ilan, who was seized in plain sight, passed from one tormentor to another, starved and then given nourishment, and killed slowly, over a period of three weeks. The killers, young Muslims from the banlieues, stabbed him, broke his fingers, burned him with acid, and finally set him on fire. Ilan did not wear a long black robe, or the ritual tassels, or even the kippah. The name he bore was enough for Ilan Halimi to be a marked man. It was the most serious episode of anti-Semitism in France since the Second World War.
Thousands of French Jews vanished in Nazi death camps with hardly a murmur of protest from their Christian country-men. Sixty years later, the chief rabbi of France, Rabbi Joseph Sitruk, advises Jews not to wear yarmulkes in the streets due to rampant anti-Semitism. It’s the same in Norway, where Jews are advised not to speak Hebrew too loudly on the streets. For the first time since the war, French Jews are afraid. Shmuel Trigano, professor of sociology at the University of Paris, has openly questioned whether there is a future for Jews in France. Sébastien Sellam, a young disc jockey at a Parisian nightclub, was killed in 2003 in an underground parking lot by a Muslim neighbor, who slit his throat twice and mutilated his face with a fork, even gouging out his eyes. The assailant announced to Sellam’s horrified mother, “I have killed my Jew. I will go to heaven.”
Anti-Semitism—and not only in the guise of anti-Zionism—is in vogue again at European universities, in labor unions, in newspapers, among the political and cultural elite. Shouts of “Death to Jews” have filled the streets, and the crocodile tears spilled for Jews killed during the Holocaust make it much easier to demonize the living ones in Israel. The Dutch leftist parliamentarian Harry van Bommel attended a demonstration in Amsterdam where Muslims shouted, “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas!” Anti-Semitism in the Netherlands is stronger today than it has been during any other time in the last two centuries except for the Nazi occupation. The percentage of Germans who hold unfavorable opinions of Jews has climbed from 20 percent in 2004 to 25 percent today. In France, which has the third-largest Jewish population in the world, after Israel and the United States, 20 percent of people view Jews unfavorably—up from 11 percent four years ago. In Spain, where all Jews were expelled in 1492 and synagogues are historic monuments, the figures are even more striking: negative views of Jews climbed from 21 percent in 2005 to nearly 50 percent this year. January 2009 was the most intense period of anti-Semitic attacks to have been recorded in Britain in decades. Anti-Semitism in Western Europe in 2009 was the worst since World War II, according to the Jewish Agency. In recent years, there have been thousands of attacks specifically aimed at Jewish targets outside Israel, and the attack on the United States has been connected by the terrorists to the war against the Jews. The Israeli national airline has suffered dozens of attacks since 1968. During various terrorist strikes like the one in Entebbe, the Jewish passengers have been separated from the non-Jews. It is a hunt for the Jews “wherever they may be,” from the outskirts of Paris to the desert of Yemen.
After 2,500 years, the epic of the Yemeni Jews ended in November 2009, when U.S. forces rescued the last Jews from Sana’a, the magnificent city founded by Shem, the son of Noah, not far from the mountain where Noah’s Ark came to rest when the flood subsided. One year earlier, a Muslim extremist shot Moshe Yaish Nahari five times with an AK-47 assault rifle as he prepared to take his mother shopping for food to make the Shabbat dinner. The killer called out, “Jew, accept Islam’s message.” Moshe died in his mother’s arms. Five hundred Salafi Muslim extremists chanted “Allahu Akbar wa itbakh al-Yahud,” “Allah is great and death to the Jews.”
If one is to identify a beginning of the massacre of Israeli civilians, one must return to that infamous morning in September 1972, at 31 Connollystrasse in the Olympic Village in Munich. Some of the Israeli athletes assassinated by Arafat’s death squads were Holocaust survivors, the fruit of the night of Auschwitz and the wind of Chelmno; the disappearance of European Judaism had left its mark on their faces, together with the miraculous reconstruction in Israel. Others were sabra, born in Israel. Each of their stories calls up weeping and prayer. Today, before leaving for the Olympic Games, every Israeli athlete pays homage at the graves of his compatriots killed in Munich. What could have been more repugnant than the massacre of innocent Jews at the Olympics? But the episode became a great media event to stress the problems of the Palestinians, rather than a serious terrorist attack to be condemned.
On 31 Connollystrasse that day, a squad of eight Palestinians took Israeli athletes hostage and opened fire with AK-47s, shooting the coach Moshe Weinberg through the cheek. The Black September terrorists demanded the release of many fedayeen imprisoned in Israel in exchange for the hostages. The terrorists had been educated in the West. Like the suicide attackers who brought down the World Trade Center in 2001, “Issa,” the leader of the squad, had studied in Europe, getting an engineering degree in West Germany. The document claiming responsibility for the killing of the “Zionists,” the Jews, was written in perfect English. The terrorists of Black September were not after an exchange or negotiations; they just wanted to kill Jews. They wanted the young representatives of the Israeli people,