And the true horror of it is that the Rumkowskis are the decent ones. They believe that they are doing what they must. There is no way to compare them to the Abraham Gancwajchis or the Yossi Beilins, the Peace Now’s or the Group 13’s that do not do what they do for the vanishing prospect of a greater good, but believe that their crimes are the greater good. They are not the worst of us. They are the best of the worst of us. They sacrifice us, but they do it reluctantly. They wish there was a better way.
Meanwhile the altars are built and wait for their victims. The voice of Moloch is heard in the land and the booming cry from its mouth is “Peace”. Fathers and mothers take their sons and daughters to the metal maw while singing songs of peace. It has been this way for decades now. Human sacrifice has come to be accepted as the noble thing to do.
G-d does not call them and no angel directs them. They listen to their leaders and their leaders sit at meetings with foreign diplomats who draw up plans and charts. And as they sit there at the mahogany altars where toasts are made and papers are pushed around, they scramble for a compromise, another in a long fatal line of compromises, how much must be given up, how many must die, so that the rest must live.
This long train of sacrifices has taken the PLO from a relic in Cyprus to a mortgage on the West Bank, Gaza and part of Jerusalem. And now another bout of sacrifices begins. Murderers are set free, victims are forgotten and the blood begins to flow. There is no peace, but there are sacrifices for peace. And one day, if this goes on, a nation will have been sacrificed for the peace of the altar in a new Shoah.
A million Isaacs lie on the altar and no voice calls out to stay the knife, the sacrifice of peace that G-d did not command, is made again and again. The blood flows over the altars of peace and it is never enough. Not so long as one Isaac still lives.
Originally published at Sultan Knish.