By DOMINIQUE HERMAN, a freelance journalist who lives in Cape Town and Wiesbaden, Germany
I spent a weekend in Trier recently, which is Germany’s oldest city and a place rich in Roman ruins, UNESCO World Heritage Sites as well as the oldest church in the country.
Jewish life in the city dates back to the Roman era but it was in the early 14th century that the city’s small Jewish community really thrived. In 1349, though, pogroms put paid to Jewish life there and, about 70 years later, any Jews remaining were banished entirely from the archdiocese.
Only three centuries later were Jews allowed to settle again in Trier, in their still tiny numbers. They lived there then as Jews live today wherever there are Jewish communities in countries around the world: as small but well-integrated minorities.
Then Hitler came to power in Germany and Jewish families in Trier were deported wholesale and ruthlessly murdered. In the 1990s, the influx of Jews from the former Soviet Union formed the basis for yet another revival of Jewish community life in Trier, and now there is a new synagogue there to replace the one that was looted and burned by the National Socialists in 1938 during Pogromnacht, or Kristallnacht as it’s more commonly known.
The history of Jews in Trier is Jewish history in a nutshell: a pattern of devastation and drumming out followed by returning and rebuilding. Rinse and repeat. And so when I read that “genocide continues” in an allusion to Gaza, I felt supremely weary. Especially since I read it in the first sentence of a cookery newsletter to which I subscribe that, up till then, had dealt exclusively with topics such as Bundt cakes and baba ghanoush.
In this conflict, it’s not the members of the Israel Defense Forces who have consistently and loudly declared their genocidal intent, and it’s a wonder that this still needs to be pointed out.
Retired British Army officer Richard Kemp wrote in the UK Telegraph the day after the ceasefire saw the first three of the remaining Israeli hostages released from Hamas captivity: “Since the cessation was agreed the terrorist leaders have been renewing their vows to kill more Jews and launch repeated 7th October-style massacres. Meanwhile, hordes of Gazan civilians have flooded into the streets, mostly healthy in appearance, well dressed and many visibly over-fed. A far cry from the picture Hamas, the UN, human rights groups and so much of the media have painted for the last 15 months: of disease and famine at the hands of the Israelis.
“Despite claims of fuel and energy starvation in Gaza, cars now seem to be able to freely drive the people about and their ubiquitous smartphones are obviously well charged. Like their Hamas leaders, these ‘innocent’ civilians have been screaming themselves hoarse with ‘Khaybar, Khaybar ya yahud’, an Arabic rallying cry calling for the slaughter of Jews.”
In his report for the Henry Jackson Society, “Questionable Counting: Analysing the Death Toll from the Hamas-Run Ministry of Health in Gaza” (here), Andrew Fox writes that “understanding the Gaza fatality data is critical in understanding the conduct of the war by the Israel Defense Forces and the State of Israel’s leadership. International humanitarian law does not require that no harm happens to civilians. Rather, it demands that parties to war use their best efforts to mitigate harm to civilians.”
The think-tank released its in-depth findings into the fatality figures disseminated by Hamas during the war and discovered all manner of discrepancies and creative accounting. (Page 5 provides a neat summation.) Bearing in mind that the source for these figures is a group of men that delights in killing Jewish children in front of their parents, and slicing off Jewish women’s breasts and playing catch with them, it should hardly come as a surprise that they’re not entirely trustworthy.
This is an edited version of a column published on Dominique Herman’s Substack.
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