University of Virginia Library

Physiological psychologists are
still hard put to give a satisfactory
explanation to the phenomenon of
an amputated man who
occasionally feels an itch or a
twinge from his lost limb, from his
missing arm or leg. A trick of the
"imagination?" Whatever the cause,
it must be a maddening irritation.

It is some such irritation to
which Jews are particularly prone.
Suddenly, a twitch or pain will
shoot up from the six million Jews
who were hacked away by the
Nazis from the body of the people
Israel. In recent weeks and months,
many Jews have had the strange
sensation that the hacking process
itself was happening all over again,
and that once more those of us who
were spared, if only by geography,
were helpless to do anything about
it. This nightmarish feeling has been
brought on by the spectacle of
genocide in Biafra.

What is being done to the boys
of Biafra is a particularly acute
reminder of what had been done to
the Jews of Europe a quarter of a
century ago. It also brings home
again the realization of nearly all
Jews that if the Israelis had fared
badly in the June, 1967 war and
had been massacred by the Arabs,
the world at large would surely
have behaved as it does in the
Biafran tragedy: it utters passive
sounds of sympathy for the victims
while extending active aid to the
killers in one form or another.

Yes, Biafra all too painfully
recalls for us Jews our own holocaust.
We remember the way the
Allies, the Western democratic
leaders as well as the director
Stalin, had refused on trumped-up
pleas of expediency to take steps to
slow down the slaughter of the
Jews or to admit the few who
escaped to safety in their countries.
Constant Jewish demands that
Auschwitz be bombed were rejected.
Thousands of Jews, young
and old, fleeing from the gas
chambers and crematoria were
turned back at the frontiers of the
free world and sent back to die like
vermin. We know this. We have not
forgotten.

Because of this memory it was
unthinkable that twenty-five years
later Israelis should stand idly by
while another people, the bos,
were also being exterminated. An
Israeli Aid to Biafra Committee was
set up, including - a rare, if not
unique thing in Israeli history -
representatives of all the political
parties, from the extreme Right to
the Communists. Israelis were
ashamed not to be able to do much
to alleviate let alone stop the mass-murder;
their resources are so much
more limited than the richer and
larger Western nations. But they did
what they could. In towns and
villages up and down the country
Jewish children by the thousands
made collections for the Biafran
children. Planeload after planeload
of food and medical supplies have
been flown from Israel to Biafra.
Israel was even willing to sacrifice
what political leverage it possessed
in the international arena and to
extend diplomatic recognition to
the secessionist territory if this
would be instrumental in ending
the slaughter. To do so would have
severely injured the good relations
which Israel maintained with thirty
African states, half of which habitually
sided with her in United
Nations votes on Middle East affairs.
But Biafra rejected this offer
on the basis that overt amity on the
part of Israel might provoke intensified
hostility from certain Moslem
African States and from the Soviet
Union.

What else but this could Israel
do when the pain and anguish of
her memory offered a plain analogy?
The Kremlin, the State Department,
Whitehall, and even the
Vatican have finally been shamed
into some little gesture of human
solidarity in the face of tragedy.
But so little has been done. The
international political machine lets
its expression of concern first run
through its complex tubes of protocol
and jurisprudence; the final
result of the distillation is so
meagre as to save a few, only a very
few.

We have all been exposed to the
image of the dying Biafran child,
skeletal, with protruding ribs and
swollen belly, with hair gone white,
and the uncomprehending look on
his face: "Why must I suffer? Why
must I die?"

He need not die. Many aid in his
death through he complicity of
silence. All of those who read this:
Raise your voices in anger and
indignation to this callousness. We
must not allow another Holocaust.