I got the meaning of "Schindler's List" completely wrong!

[frazzled]

32. I think you're still drawing the wrong message

First, you should be much more careful about using fiction and movies as the basis for your analytical thinking. Movies manipulate emotions, but they're not accurate reflections of historical events or motivations. And emotional responses may vary widely: I, for one, despised Schindler's List, both as cinema (it was overwrought and pretentious, but not accomplished) and as storytelling (the victims in this film had no presence or human dimension: they seemed to be merely anonymous pawns for extolling the bravery of a member of the majority); and I'm Jewish, but I still hated that film and thought it was way overrated.

But mainly, the lesson you seem to be drawing is askew: the World War II victimization of the groups you mention—Jews, homosexuals, Roma, the handicapped, etc—was not because the Jews, gays, Roma, or handicapped were citizens of an entity engaged in a geopolitical dispute with Germany (those battles were being fought on a different front). And they weren't lobbing rockets into German territory or disputing Germany's existence as a state. This was a program aimed at exterminating "undesirable" people, mostly non-"Aryans" but also some politically suspect people as well, such as Communists. And the people in these groups were not collateral victims of the war Germany was waging in surrounding states. They were victims of an explicit program that removed them from their homes and transported them to camps where they were systematically starved and/or exterminated. They were not victims of bombing or gunfire against a government with which Germany had a dispute.

The better analogy would be to consider whether the current Israeli actions in Gaza against Hamas--which I completely and utterly oppose on the grounds that they are overly harsh, but more important, that they don't, and won't, accomplish anything--should be to ask whether they are not more like the Allied bombing of Dresden, which killed 25,000 mostly innocent civilians in the city's center. Or (even more philosophically troubling) the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Were these actions, with their huge civilian casualties, necessary to end that horrible war? That is still being disputed.

I want this incursion to stop. It's wrong and it's useless. But I still think your analogizing is wrong as well. (Almost any analogy to the Nazi madness will always be wrong.)

Lastly, I might add that your assertion that Israel was born out of the suffering of the Holocaust is a common but not entirely correct generalization. The creation of that state goes back to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, to the British attempts back in 1922, with the Balfour declaration, to establish a homeland for Jews in Palestine, to longstanding disputes in that region between Arabs and Jews who lived in the region (yes, Jews had lived in the region for a long time), and to surrounding issues regarding large Jewish populations in Iran, Iraq, Greece, Egypt and elsewhere in the middle east. After the war, the British ceded their mandate in this troubled region to the UN, which in 1947 recommended the establishment of two states--and the world concurred (yes, the recent Holocaust and its horrors did much to spur that concurrence). Unfortunately, the Palestinians and neighboring Arab states rejected this two-state solution at the time, and the parties have been fighting ever since. We're back to trying to get that same, acceptable two-state solution.

This is a war, not an extermination project. And it's a war that's been going on (and off and on) for three-quarters of a century now. I don't know how it ends, but it can't end by dismissing the legitimacy of the state of Israel. I'm happy to criticize the current Israeli government vociferously; but I'm not happy to create melodramatic analogies to Nazi motivations and actions. They're just not true. Proportionality is required in all thinking, and movies aren't the way to get there.