Hamas’s burning of bodies and execution of entire families in southern Israel reverberated among top leaders in Washington, sparking general moral outrage and triggering the specific trauma of antisemitic genocide and persecution.
“I come before you not only as the United States secretary of state,” Antony Blinken told Israel during a live-streamed press conference in Tel Aviv on Thursday, “but also as a Jew.”
“My grandfather, Maurice Blinken, fled pogroms in Russia. My stepfather, Samuel Pisar, survived concentration camps – Auschwitz, Dachau, Majdanek,” Blinken said as he referenced both eastern European persecution and the Holocaust.
He viewed the destruction of the southern Jewish communities from that lens, he said.
Turning to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who held the press conference with him, he said. “I understand on a personal level the harrowing echoes that Hamas’s massacres carry for Israeli Jews – indeed, for Jews everywhere.”
He spoke in the aftermath of Hamas’s assault against southern Israel that claimed the lives of 1,300 civilians and soldiers on Saturday, an event that was both a human and Jewish tragedy.
“I also come before you as a husband and father of young children,” Blinken said.
“It’s impossible for me to look at the photos of families killed – such as the mother, father, and three small children murdered as they sheltered in their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz – and not think of my own children,” he said.
Biden, Emhoff meet with Jewish leaders after Hamas’s attack on Israel
In Washington on Wednesday night, both second gentleman Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, and US President Joe Biden, who is Irish Catholic, met with Jewish leaders to discuss the attack, which marked the start of Hamas’s war on Israel.
“Like all Jews, I feel a deep, visceral connection to Israel and its people,” Emhoff told them. “The images that we saw will be seared in our brains forever: rockets falling on cities, people dragged from their homes and shot dead, children sheltering from bullets, bodies lining the streets.”
“I know you’re all hurting. The entire Jewish community is hurting. I’m hurting. We grieve with you. We stand with you,” he said.
Biden, who considers himself to be a Christian Zionist, was raised as many Jews were, on stories of the Holocaust and the importance of ensuring that such depravity was never repeated. To drum this lesson home, he has taken his children and grandchildren to visit the concentration camps in Europe.
On Wednesday night he recalled those trips when speaking with the Jewish leaders. “I took my kids — every one, when they turned 14 years old, one at a time, I put them on a plane and took them to Dachau. I wanted them to see that you could not not know what was going on walking through those gates.”
Once one sees the camps, he said, it’s not possible to believe that people did not know what was happening. “You could not fail to understand as a country what was going on,”
The Hamas killings on Saturday, he said, marked “the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.”
“I have been doing this a long time,” Biden said of his role in global politics, adding that “I never really thought that I would see and have it confirmed, pictures of terrorists beheading children.”
Hamas’s actions, Biden said, “matches and in some cases exceeds the worst atrocities of ISIS.”
“This attack was a campaign of pure cruelty, against the Jewish people,” he said, as he urged the Jewish leaders and the world to speak out against it.
“Silence is complicity. I refuse to be silent, I know you refuse to be silent. America can’t be silent,” Biden said.
He condemned those who blamed Israel for the attack, explaining that this was “unconscionable” as he pledged to combat antisemitism.
Homeland Security has been asked to work Intensely with Jewish leaders to protect Jewish institutions and synagogues.
“The past few days have been a solemn reminder that hate never goes away. I used to think you could defeat hate, but all it does is it just goes underground, it doesn’t go away, it only hides until it’s given a little bit of oxygen,” Biden stated.
He explained that he drew strength from his faith that every person had a core of decency and humanity.
I know we can overcome this,” Biden said.
He explained that he had never experienced the pain that comes from the violence that occurred on Saturday.
From his personal life, Biden said, “I know what it is like to feel loss, lose people you adore, get a phone call saying they are gone, not the same, but I get that part.
“What I have learned is that as we persevere, we can grow, and the day will come when the memory of that person or those persons will bring a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye.”
But, “God it takes a long time, sometimes,” he added.
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