Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on David’s Tent, a ministry of Israeli believers Avner and Rachel Boskey. The Boskey’s have ministered at Tabernacle of David, and we consider them trustworthy and Biblically sound.
The prophet Isaiah speaks of the emotional umbilical cord between the God of Jacob and His Jewish people: “In all their affliction He was afflicted” (Isaiah 63:9). This divine connection is not merely one of sympathy (‘I feel bad for you’) but of empathy (‘I feel exactly what you are feeling’). The Apostle Paul mirrors both this spiritual truth and this emotional reality when he declares, “I am telling the truth in Messiah; I am not lying! My conscience testifies with me in the Holy Spirit!” (Romans 9:1).
When the Jewish people suffer, we have it on the highest authority that the God of the Jewish people also suffers. Theologically speaking, this means that Jewish suffering has scriptural priority to the heart of God. It’s not just an issue of how it fits into a Last Days scenario or onto an eschatological chessboard.
Yet in most cases the nations of the world have a cold heart vis-à-vis Jewish suffering. Jeremiah states it plainly: The nations “have called you an outcast, saying: ‘It is only Zion! No one cares for her’” (Jeremiah 30:17).
- A quick look at how the Allies responded to Jewish suffering at Auschwitz murder-camp in WWII can help cast light on how the nations are responding to jihadi attacks on the Jewish people in our day.
Doubtful efficacy
On April 7, 1944, two Slovak Jewish young men, Rudolf Vrba (age 20) and Alfréd Wetzler (age 17) escaped Auschwitz and made their way to Oscar Krasniansky of the Slovakian Jewish Council in Zilina, Slovakia. They dictated their eyewitness account – the ‘Auschwitz Protocols’ – of the Nazi murder machine in Oświęcim, Poland (in German, Auschwitz). That report detailed the camp’s location, its geography, sketches and information about the layout of the gas chambers, and how prisoners lived and were murdered. It listed the death transports to Auschwitz since 1942, their cities of origin, and the numbers ‘selected’ for work or the gas chambers. It was a veritable ‘smoking gun’ – eyewitness proof of the Holocaust apparatus. These Protocols were later submitted as evidence of Nazi genocidal crimes at Nuremberg Trials (November 1945 – October 1946).
On July 29, 1944, Ernest Frischer of the Czechoslovak State Council forwarded a letter through the US War Refugee Board to John McCloy, Under Secretary of War. The letter sat unanswered until August 9, 1944 when Leon Kubowitzki, Head of the Rescue Department for the World Jewish Congress, sent an urgent appeal asking for the US to consider bombing the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz in order to slow down Nazi mass extermination of European Jews. McCloy responded on August 14, 1944, turning down the request:
- The War Department had been approached by the War Refugee Board, which raised the question of the practicability of this suggestion. After a study it became apparent that such an operation could be executed only by the diversion of considerable air support essential to the success of our forces now engaged in decisive operations elsewhere and would in any case be of such doubtful efficacy that it would not warrant the use of our resources. There has been considerable opinion to the effect that such an effort, even if practicable, might provoke even more vindictive action by the Germans. The War Department fully appreciates the humanitarian motives which promoted the suggested operation, but for the reasons stated above it has not been felt that it can or should be undertaken, at least at this time.
The military and strategic facts were markedly different than the War Department’s ‘officialese.’ McCloy was flat out lying when he referenced a study regarding the feasibility of bombing Auschwitz, as no such study had been undertaken. As far as practicability: On August 21, 1944, a front page article in the New York Times described how “500 United States heavy bombers from Italy today . . . bombed the I.G. Farbenindustrie synthetic oil and rubber plant at Oswiecim in Polish Silesia.”
In another example, former U.S. Senator George McGovern piloted a B-24 Liberator in December 1944, and his squadron bombed I.G. Farbenindustrie factories (synthetic rubber based on oil) at Buna-Monowitz (Auschwitz III) less than five miles from the main Auschwitz crematoria. In a 2004 interview, McGovern stated: “It would have helped if we had bombed the railroad lines leading to Auschwitz. The purpose of those rail lines was to carry human beings to their death, and we might even have been able to use long-range fighter planes to get down right on the tracks and knock them out . . . We should have hit that junction and disabled it. We should have hit the rail lines, even if we had to go back several times.” In 2005, he added: “There is no question we should have attempted . . . to go after Auschwitz. There was a pretty good chance we could have blasted those rail lines off the face of the Earth, which would have interrupted the flow of people to those death chambers, and we had a pretty good chance of knocking out those gas ovens.”
Wolf Blitzer’s father David was a prisoner at Auschwitz. Here are his comments about the feasibility of bombing Auschwitz:
- “The biggest puzzle for me is that they did not bombard the railroads leading to the crematoria. This is the biggest puzzle. We saw the airplanes – in 1944, we saw airplanes bombarding cities. We were laughing, we were happy, we were even praying to God – we could get killed from those bombs, but we couldn’t understand why they did not bombard – every day, thousands of people were burned and gassed in the camps, only because they had the possibility to bring those trainloads of people. If those rails had been bombarded, the [Nazis] couldn’t have done it so perfectly.”
The indifference of the nations
In his cutting-edge work ‘The Abandonment Of The Jews,’ Professor David Wyman argued that the failure to bomb Auschwitz was a result of the Allies’ indifference to the fate of the Jews rather than the practical impossibility of the operation. As Jeremiah re-iterates: the nations “have called you an outcast, saying: ‘It is only Zion! No one cares for her’” (Jeremiah 30:17).
In September 1944 David Ben-Gurion addressed the issue of the hardness of the nations’ hearts, who quickly avert their eyes when Jewish people were being murdered, preferring to focus on other matters:
- “What have you done to us, you freedom-loving peoples, guardians of justice, defenders of the high principles of democracy and of the brotherhood of man? What have you allowed to be perpetrated against a defenseless people while you stood aside and let it bleed to death, without offering help or succor, without calling on the fiends to stop, in the language of retribution which alone they would understand. Why do you profane our pain and wrath with empty expressions of sympathy which ring like a mockery in the ears of millions of the damned in the torture house of Nazi Europe? . . . If, instead of Jews, thousands of English, American or Russian women, children and aged had been tortured every day, burnt to death, asphyxiated in gas chambers – would you have acted in the same way?”
Freda Kirchwey, American journalist and social commentator, wrote these words in 1943: “In this country you and I and the President and the Congress and the State Department are accessories to the crime and share Hitler’s guilt. If we had behaved like humane and generous people instead of complacent, cowardly ones, the Jews lying today in the earth of Poland and Hitler’s other crowded grave yards would be alive and safe; and other millions yet to die would have found sanctuary.”
The same cold-hearted and anti-Semitic dynamics which characterized Western leadership in WWII are characterizing an increasing number across the globe. This is being seen in the speed with which public opinion has turned against Israel – from shock at the Hamas savage atrocities of October 7, 2023, to demonstrators cheering jihadi terrorists and embracing them as freedom fighters (Freiheitskämpfer – a term reminiscent of the German terrorist Baader-Meinhof Gang [Rote Armee Fraktion] back in the 1970’s).
The indifference of Hamas
The Allies did not bomb Auschwitz, and so the Jews of Europe continued to be gassed and burned there. Yet those who made the decision to let Nazi genocide continue were able to sleep at night with a ‘clear conscience,’ not concerned about Jewish casualties. Similarly, in Gaza the jihadi terror group Hamas has made it their habitual ‘order of battle’ strategy to use Gazan human shields while attacking Israeli civilians with rocket attacks and jihadi fighter land attacks. After committing these double war crimes and atrocities, Hamas and Islamic Jihad are also able to sleep at night ‘with a clear conscience.’ They also are not concerned about Jewish or even Gazan casualties.
Hamas’ leaders are willing to fight Israel ‘to the last Palestinian Gazan,’ while they hole up in their rat’s nests of underground tunnels or in luxury hotels in Qatar. Hamas leaders’ willingness to sacrifice their own people reminds one of Adolf Hitler’s private declaration to Albert Speer at the end of his life on March 18, 1945: “If the war is lost, the nation will also perish. This fate is inevitable. There is no necessity to take into consideration the basis which the people will need to continue a most primitive existence.”
- Hamas is playing puppet-master to the world, stirring up anti-Israeli violence and anti-Jewish rage, while sacrificing its own people. Israel is manfully trying to avoid Gazan civilian casualties while rightfully destroying Hamas rocket launchers, squads and jihadi armories. In the meantime, a demonized hand is stirring up violent demonstrations against the Jewish people across the globe, bringing down upon the nations the curse of the God of Jacob according to Genesis 12:3.
Here is an enlightening May 13, 2018 quote from former Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan, Colonel Richard Kemp: “Hamas has followed this strategy many times in the past, firing rockets at Israeli civilian communities and constructing under the border sophisticated attack tunnels from which fighters would storm into the heart of Jewish communities and carry out mass murder and abduction. Thousands of Palestinians have died, including human shields that are so central to Hamas’ strategy, as the IDF has been compelled to forcefully defend its people. The world has often reacted with horror and outrage blaming Israel for the bloodshed provoked by Hamas – just as intended.”
Kemp also notes: “While political leaders such as Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak have so far consistently resisted calls for Israel to cease fire, they constantly say that Israel must observe the laws of war and minimize civilian casualties. They know that is exactly what the IDF is doing, and their words amount to posturing to appease elements of their electorates that oppose support for Israel. They should know better than to provide cover for Hamas and its supporters in this way.”
The speed at which the nations have pivoted against Israel, and the pustulating wound of anti-Semitic violence smearing across the planet – these are prophetic markers of both encroaching darkness and great spiritual harvest.
How should we then pray?
- Pray for jihadi deception, dissimulation and lying to be uncovered and rejected by world leaders
- Pray for clarity, moral courage, discernment and strategies for Israel’s leadership at all levels in utterly destroying the Hamas threat
- Pray for Hamas’ cruel terror dictatorship in Gaza to be finally shattered and all chains broken off the Palestinians living there
- Pray for minimal loss of life on Israel’s side and for those Gazans who are truly innocent
- Pray for the physical rescue of the approximately 161 Israelis (including babies) kidnapped by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PLO)
- Pray that the outstretched arm of YHVH will not return before it brings justice to God’s enemies
- Pray for the raising up of Ezekiel’s prophetic Jewish army throughout the earth
Your prayers and support hold up our arms and are the very practical enablement of God to us in the work He has called us to do.
In Messiah Yeshua,
Avner Boskey
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