Khan Yunis, Gaza's City of Slaughter - Opinion - Haaretz.com
"Arise and go now to the city of slaughter; / Into its courtyard wind thy way; / There with thine own hand touch, and with the eyes of thine head / Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay / The spattered blood and dried brains of the dead." (from "In the City of Slaughter," Haim Nahman Bialik)
On Easter Sunday of 1903, riots against Jews broke out in Kishinev (today's Chisinau, the capital of Moldova). The Russian press did not report it. The New York Times did, at length.
U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt met with a Jewish delegation in the wake of the riots and expressed deep sympathy for its victims. American newspapers published photographs of shroud-wrapped victims on the front page. The Russian term "pogrom" was born. Leo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky denounced the riots and blamed the Russian government.
Easter evening, aftermath of Kishinev massacre (April 1903). Published in L'Assiette au Beurre - The Crimes of Tsarism and the massacres of Kishinev.Illustration: Vaclav Hradecky 1865 - 1940 (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)
Future "national poet" Haim Nahman Bialik quickly wrote a short poem, "On the Slaughter," and traveled from Odesa to Kishinev as part of a delegation organized by the historian Simon Dubnow. He stayed in the city for five weeks; he attended the trial of a handful of rioters who were sentenced to just a few years in prison and composed a list of the victims.
Upon his return, he published "In the City of Slaughter," which Ze'ev Jabotinsky translated into Russian. Theodor Herzl prepared a plan for a Jewish homeland in East Africa, specifically in Uganda. Over the next 120 years, the Kishinev pogrom became a myth that shaped Jewish consciousness forever. There is no child in Israel who has not heard about it.
Bialik's words in "On the Slaughter" – "A proper revenge for the blood of a little child / Satan has not yet devised" or "And if there is justice, let it show itself at once!" have been enshrined in the Hebrew language, always used to describe Jewish and Israeli victims.
An oil painting rendering the aftermath of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom.
The vicious pogrom lasted three days. It began on Easter Sunday, coinciding with the last day of Passover in the Diaspora, which, like this year, fell on April 19. Hundreds of Jewish homes were looted and destroyed. The local bishop blessed the rioters, who raped, threw babies out of high windows, drove nails into the heads of their victims and blinded them. Bialik discovered mangled limbs in a vegetable garden and a stable, which had become a human slaughterhouse.
How many people were killed in these riots? 49. Almost the same number as the number of people who were killed in the Gaza Strip on Friday. A routine day in Gaza. They were killed in Israeli airstrikes and by artillery fire, as part of the exercise of self-defense by Jews.
Israeli newspapers, just like the Russian ones 120 years ago, reported hardly any of this. The local "bishops," our rabbis and teachers of Jewish law, halakha, did not stop blessing the killers, the bombers and the artillerymen, like in 1903 Kishinev.
Palestinians pray next to the body of a person killed in an Israeli strike, at the Indonesian hospital in Beit Lahia, on Friday.Credit: Mahmoud Issa/REUTERS
Among the victims in Gaza on Friday were a pregnant woman and many children. Four of the children were killed in an airstrike on a barber shop in Khan Yunis. Five members of one family were killed on the outskirts of that city. A video posted on social media shows the bodies of babies, black, burned, lying on white sheets in a hospital. I've never seen such horrendous photos in my life.
In contrast to Kishinev, babies aren't being thrown out of windows in Gaza. But they are being burned to death. What moral person would dare claim that burning babies alive in a refugee encampment in a supposedly "safe" area is less shocking than throwing them out of windows? What hypocrite would dare say that IDF soldiers "don't mean" to kill babies, after already having killed thousands of babies and infants?
Ahmed Dalloul mourns over the body of his 4-year-old daughter, Siwar, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike, at the morgue of Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, on Thursday.Credit: Abdel Kareem Hana,AP
The Kishinev riots are part of an ordinary day for the army commanded by Eyal Zamir in Gaza; The horrors of October 7 are like an average month there.
Bialik cannot visit the city of slaughter in Gaza. Israel does not allow any journalist to do the work that was done by our national poet to document the horrors and to write "The City of Slaughter" 2.
If he could, he would surely write, in the vein of the last stanza of "In the City of Slaughter: "What is thy business here, O son of man? / Rise, to the desert flee! / The cup of affliction thither bear with thee! / Take thou thy soul, rend it in many a shred! / With impotent rage, thy heart deform! / Thy tear upon the barren boulders shed! / And send thy bitter cry into the storm!" ("Complete Poetic Works of Hayyim Nahman Bialik," edited by Israel Efros, New York, 1948).