In a message honoring the heroes of the Warsaw ghetto, Albert Einstein declared:
The Germans as an entire people are responsible for the mass murders and must be punished as a people if there is justice in the world and if the consciousness of collective responsibility in the nations is not to perish from the earth entirely. Behind the Nazi party stands the German people, who elected Hitler after he had in his book [Mein Kampf] and in his speeches made his shameful [genocidal] intentions clear beyond the possibility of misunderstanding.
Does not the Hamas Covenant, which begins with the words, “Israel will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it,” make the genocidal intentions of Hamas also “clear beyond the possibility of misunderstanding”?
Is this not also true of the Fatah Constitution of the Palestinian Authority, which calls for “The complete liberation of Palestine and the economic, political, military and cultural elimination of Zionism”?
Did not the Palestinian Arabs repeatedly hear Yasser Arafat’s declarations of war against Israel but nonetheless elected him as their Fuhrer? Must they not therefore be held collectively responsible for the brutal murder and maiming of more than 10,000 Jews perpetrated by their terrorist government, the Palestinian Authority now headed by Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas? And must they not be punished, as Einstein said of the German people, “if there is justice in the world and if the consciousness of collective responsibility in the nations is not to perish from the earth entirely”?
Is it not clear beyond the possibility of misunderstanding that these Arabs glorify the suicide bombers who have reduced Jewish men, women, and children to body parts? Is it not clear beyond the possibility of misunderstanding that these Arabs teach their children to emulate these murderers? Is it not clear beyond the possibility of misunderstanding that poll after poll of these Arabs reveal their desire to annihilate Israel? Yet the Government of the United States claims they deserve a sovereign and independent state?
Given the murderous hatred of these Arabs, why does the government of Israel risk the lives of Jewish soldiers to minimize “collateral damage”? Is not such a policy doubly unjust? On the one hand, does it not deny that the Arab Palestinians are collectively responsible for the murderous acts of their leaders? On the other hand, does it not place the lives of Jewish soldiers on the same level as the lives of these Arabs?
But must we not also hold the Government of the United States morally culpable for aiding the terrorist Palestinian Authority, indeed, for promising its president, Mahmoud Abbas, statehood in Judea and Samaria, the heartland of the Jewish People?
Albert Einstein was a gentle man, very much inclined to pacifism. But above and beyond his desire for peace was his ardent desire for justice.
