Yesterday, Australia’s Age and Sydney Morning Herald papers ran an article by Dr Jenna Price of ANU with separate headlines: “In my Jewish World, we’re torn apart”, later expanded as “Jews are being torn apart. If my sister were alive, even we wouldn’t be talking”.

Price argued that Israel’s response to Hamas’s October 7 2023 cross-border pogrom was an overreach that had divided the Australian Jewish Community: at least her own Jewish milieu. She said that Israel’s manner of campaign had invalidated Zionism—the belief in the right of a Jewish state of Israel given birth by the UN in 1947 and declared in 1948. In academia, criticism of the Israeli military wasn’t anything new though here we had antisemitism reduced to an anti-Zionist cliche.

Price correctly noted the “murder” of “about 1,200 innocent people, from babies to the old, from the whole to the infirm” in Hamas’s attack. Yet after detailing the death of both sets of her grandparents in the Holocaust, one from gassing, the other from firing squads, she then laid her thesis that’s inspired Israel’s haters:

And how did Israel respond? Forty eyes for an eye. Too much. Far too much. I am appalled at the way Israel has gone about its vengeance.

She was referring to the ratio 40:1, being the 40,000 Palestinian deaths reported by Hamas since the Israeli invasion of Gaza in Israel’s attempt to rescue the hundreds of its hostages taken by Hamas on October 7, versus the 1,200 lives killed in Israel that day.

At least Price here debunks the claim of 120,000 Palestinians killed that flew around the internet after a dubious letter published by Lancet, but there are also three massive faults in her analysis.

She doesn’t mention the word “hostage” once.

She doesn’t categorise the source of those 40,000 dead—the bulk of which are Hamas battalions claimed neutralised by Israel.

She doesn’t show an understanding of war itself.

To the latter and the crux of her piece, the quickest way I can respond to Price is this.

The Holocaust that killed your grandparents didn’t end by the Allies defeating just the death camp guards. It didn’t end with the Allies defeating just the 3rd SS Totenkopf Division that ran the concentration camps. No.

The Holocaust ended when the Allies (US, Commonwealth and Soviets) sacrificed over 11 million of their own soldiers to defeat not just the camp guards and the 3rd SS, but the entire Waffen SS (military SS), the Allgemeine SS (bureaucratic SS), the Wehrmacht (German army), the Kriegsmarine (German navy), the Luftwaffe (German air force), the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler himself.

In doing so, while the Germans lost 5 million soldiers, the Allies took with them over 11 million German civilians.

That is “Total War”. Had the Allies not waged this type of war the Holocaust would have continued until the dropping of the atom bomb by the Allies on Europe—or accelerated had the Germans dropped the bomb on the Allies first. The doctrine of “Limited War” as a decider of political affairs is a myth.

Fast forward to Gaza. Hamas has published its manifesto that has been available in public since 1988. It calls for the death of Jews, the prohibition against negotiating for a two-state Israel-Palestine, the institutionalisation of misogyny in the role of women as house keepers and the breeders of men, and the actualisation of Sharia as the rule of law in all Muslim lands.

Fast forward deeper into Gaza and you find a Hamas military ensconced in unfathomable tunnel networks—under houses, apartment blocks, UN schools, UN hospitals and mosques. We find terror tunnels where hostages have been raped, cells where hostages have been shot like Price’s grandparents. And rocket launch sites in courtyards, schoolyards and through building windows.

Fast forward further still and we learn of a generation of children indoctrinated into antisemitism by UNRWA, of UNRWA teachers participating in the October pogrom, of a complete lack of hope and desire for a future while Hamas’s leaders have amassed billions in personal wealth, while food aid is sold on black markets—all this, while on October 7 2023 not a single Israeli lived in the entire Gaza Strip. Gaza was purely Palestinian.

That’s why Dr Price, 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza are now dead. Most were Hamas militants, some were Israeli hostages and a great swathe were civilians acting as Hamas’s accomplices. Then indeed there were the innocent that come with all wars, most insidiously in this case Hamas’s above-ground human shields trapped by an UNRWA and UN Security Council that gave them no chance at a democratic government but only corruption and civil war.

October 7 2023 was unique in the annals of the Arab-Israeli wars. It was the largest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust. Total War is how the world gets back to “Never Again”—again. And it applies to South Sudan, Mali, Nigeria, Syria, Bangladesh and Ukraine where the defeat of religious fanaticism is needed too.

In fact, the main road to avoid Total War globally is a revitalisation of history and social studies in education, and that includes an end to the groupthink of a revisionist, activist academia.

© 2024 Adam Parker.

Picture credit: Map from “Persian Incursion”, a military simulation gaming an Israeli air attack on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. © 2010 Clash of Arms Games. Designed by Larry Bond, Chris Carlson and Jeff Dougherty. Author’s collection.