When Canadians learned the full truth of the Holocaust that occurred before 1946, the reaction was a complex mix of visceral shock and horror. Where is the shock and horror when we are told about the genocide underway in Gaza? Recent commentary by Rabbi Brant Rosen illustrates frightening acts that might bring humane people to tears.

Midrashim are rabbinic interpretations of the Hebrew Bible. Rabbi Rosen recalled examples. One series imagines:

the horror of Egyptian enslavement as so extreme that the Israelites were literally interred – sometimes dead, sometimes alive – in the bricks of their own homes.

Encasing people in the walls of their own homes conveys a unspeakable level of sacrilege: profanely transforming a place of sacred shelter and security into a site that literally embodies sadism and brutality. It’s almost as if the writers wanted to conjure the most extreme cruelty they could possibly imagine to convey the depths of Pharaonic oppression, so that God’s harsh judgement upon them could be justified.

Rosen recalled disturbing midrashim while watching the Democracy Now interview with Eyal Weizman on his new book, “Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide,” Weizman says:

Now, many of those homes were actually bombed during and before the so-called ceasefire. There are bodies. In fact, we are mapping the location of bodies of Palestinians that could not be extracted under the rubble of their own homes. We know there are about 10,000 Palestinians missing. Many of them are under the rubble. And when Israel is shuffling that rubble into all sorts of shapes and berms and military bases and roads, they are actually moving human remains.

.

Weizman’s organization Forensic Architecture examines atrocities beyond Gaza, but actions in the middle east are difficult to understand because this genocide is being carried out by a democratic nation with a well educated population.