Does Israel Have a Special Duty to Stop a ‘Holocaust’ in Syria?
Why religious leaders say yes and political leaders say no
Just hours before the Trump administration struck Syria on Thursday night, Israel’s former chief rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau said that what is happening in the war-torn country is a Holocaust.
“This is certainly a shoah of the Syrian people and it did not start today. For the past six years they have been living in a Holocaust,” Lau said. The word shoah, which means “catastrophic destruction” in Hebrew, is typically used to refer to the Nazi Holocaust, which the rabbi himself survived as a child.
Lau went further, suggesting that Israel, which rose out of the ashes of the Holocaust, now has a special responsibility. As “a nation that has suffered more than any other nation,” he
