In the Cities of Slaughter: Kishniev (1903)–Auschwitz (1945)–Gaza (2025)

In the City of Killing
–Chaim Nachman Bialik (excerpt)

…The sun rose, rye bloomed, and the slaughterer slaughtered.
you’ll flee and come to a yard– and this yard will have a heap in it–
and on this heap they’ll have beheaded two–a Jew and his dog.
One axe did for them both and in one heap they were thrown
And in the mixed blood of both–pigs will snuffle and roll;
tomorrow a rain will come down and sweep it to one of the wasteland streams
and blood will no longer scream from the gutters and garbage pails
For it will be lost in the deep…
And all will be as nothing. All go back to as if it never were.
To the attics of the roofs you’ll climb and stand there in the darkness–
while bitter fear of death still gnaws in the lightless quiet;
and from all the dark holes and from the shadows in vents
eyes, see them, eyes silently watch.
Ghosts of the “martyred” they are, bent and desolate
to one corner under a roof they are crammed–and they too keep silent…
Here the axe found them and to this place they come
to stamp here the look of their eyes in that last moment,
all the sorrow of their pointless death and the curse of their lives
and they cling here together, trembling and terrified, and from where
they hide
silently raise their eyes to protest their disgrace and ask: why?
And who else is like God on earth and can bear this in silence?

Kishniev 1903/Auschwitz 1945/Gaza 2025

In Kishniev, 49 Jews were murdered.  Several hundred were wounded and women were raped.  The pogrom shocked the conscience of the world.  It was a watershed within global Jewry.  Zionism was rapidly thrust into the Jewish communal mainstream. and immediately became a legitimate response to European anti-Semitic violence. Thousands of Jews decided to emigrate to Palestine forming the backbone of the Second Aliyah.  Without the latter, there may have never been a Zionist settlement.

Nevertheless, the magnitude of the tragic event pales in comparison to Gaza, in which a minimum of 50,000 Palestinians have been murdered.  In the interim between 1903 and 2025, mass slaughter has become normalized.  We are anaethetized, immune to any sense of outrage over this unbearable suffering.

There are no crematoria in Gaza. No smokestacks belching the ashes of the martyrs. No “showers.” No scrapes of fingernails on the walls as they vainly rebelled against death.

But it shares one thing in common with Auschwitz: When the lines of soon-to-be victims trekked to the gas chamber, no one cared. The world stood by. The perpetrators worked methodically and efficiently to destroy an entire people and almost succeeded.

In Gaza, there are no crematoria. They don’t need them. They don’t need axes to slaughter.  Bombs these days are much more efficient. Each one made to kill by the hundreds or thousands instead of merely by the score.

Unlike in Kishniev, the Israelis don’t waste their bullets on the dogs in Gaza. They leave them to eat the corpses of the dead. So much more efficient that way.

Instead of the extermination camps, we have extermination cities. Instead of Auschwitz, we have Rafah, Deir Balah, Jabalya. All killing fields.  Targeted not only by human snipers, but by artifical intelligence perfected by engineers whose task is to make the killing more efficient, more thorough.  Then after a target is locked in, they send the drones hunting their prey like automated vultures.

Instead of crematoria, lives are snuffed out by weapons destroying everything on which they fall: buildings, streets, schools, hospitals, women, children. No need to dispose of their bodies as in Auschwitz. They simply disappear beneath the rubble. As they decompose, their blood and bones merge with the soil of the homeland.

But now the killers have devised a scheme to erase even the saving remnant, those they have not (yet) murdered. They are to be torn from that soil. Wrenched like olive trees from the ground which nurtured them. The murderers devised a plan–partly to assuage their murderous guilt, partly as a Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem: to “voluntarily” “transfer” the remaining millions to a second exile (following the first, the Nakba).  Leaving a country Arabrein, just as the Nazis imagined a Europe Judenrein.

Exile to where?  “Somewhere” is about as specific as they can manage. More likely, nowhere. No country wants to assume responsibility for something they refuse. So where will they dump the “wretched refuse” of that teeming Gaza shore? In the Mediterranean? Sahara? Sinai? “Refuse” not only in the sense of discarded human garbage,  but also as a form of toxic waste which every possible disposal site refuses.

As in Kishinev, as in Auschwitz, the world stands by. It guts its meager moral integrity, creating an equivalence between Hamas’ single-day attack with Israel’s 18-month genocide, a toll over 40 times that of 10/7. The moral bystanders are unable to distinguish between an attack killing 400 civilians and an outright genocide killing 50,000, 100,000, 300,000. Who can even count?

Instead of moral courage, we have a German state which once perpetrated a genocide against the Jewish people, telling the Paiestinian.people: you get what you’ve got coming to you. Stifling speech against genocide. Banning protests as “anti-Semitic.” German police beating protesters like the Browshirts once did to the Jews.  History repeating itself. Only the victim has become the “slaughterer.”

We have learned the wrong lessons from history. We proclaim “never again.” But the slogan is empty.  The human race is an ugly, cruel thing. We’ve perfected ever more throrough and powerful ways to eradicate ourselves. We’ve convinced ourselves that such crimes can, and must never happen again. But they can and they do.  Instead of ensuring they will not repeat, we wring our hands in helplessness.  A shameful betrayal of humanity.  Or maybe this is humanity in all its ugliness.  This is what we’ve become. What we always were.

Bialik wrote another poem about the 1903 pogrom, in which he raised an accusing finger at the world and its utter indifference:

If there be justice-let her appear now!
But if, after my extinction from the face of the firmament justice appears,
Let her seal be overturned forever!
And in eternal evil let the heavens rot;
You too go, wicked spirits, in this cruel injustice
And in your blood live and suckle.

When the world ends and life in earth is snuffed out billions of years from now (if not sooner), we will have deserved our oblivion.  Our existence will have been a blot, a moral stain on the universe.

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