Dear Prof. Bauer:

I have always been an admirer of your work. You have devoted your life to preserving the memory of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust. You have devoted your academic career to the meaning of the Holocaust in Jewish history. You have fought the shallow trendiness to turn the Holocaust into pop Hollywood cliches.

Which is why I find your attitude so incomprehensible. On Sunday February 10 you decided to come forth and attack those who are demanding that the Israeli government stop toying with the Nazi terrorists of the PLO and its affiliates and start killing them. Writing in Haaretz, the newspaper for the anti-Jewish Israeli Left, you lay out your opposition to Israel dealing with terrorists by killing them. You roll your eyes in moral horror. You spread out your delicate squeamishness. You explain how horrible it would be if Israel were to kill its enemies.

You have spent your academic career studying World War II. Yet you have never internalized the fact that the world was saved because the enemies of Nazism were willing to kill Germans. They did not sit in pretend moral aloofness, whining that most Germans might be anti-Semites and fascists but were not individually involved in the mass murders, not insisting it would be morally unacceptable to target them. You have not drawn the lesson from history that a refusal to target German cities, civilians, and population centers, a refusal that would have extended World War II and allowed Hitler to complete his work, would have left the world a different place, and hardly a more moral one.

You announce on the pages of Haaretz, the mouthpiece organ for those leftist extremists seeking Israel’s destruction, that you are horrified that several Knesset Members from the Right demand that Israel stop seeking talks with the enemy and start killing him. One even speaks about "voluntary population transfer", a moral crime so horrid in your opinion that you have never clarified why this should be regarded as worse than the involuntary expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and elsewhere after the War, nor the expulsion of Jews from the Arab world. Your dislike of population transfer seems selective.

You insist in your Haaretz article that you are from the "1948 generation", those who fought for Independence and statehood for the Jews, but not for THIS kind of a state. You want a state in which it is not necessary to kill the enemy. You want a pristine state. You are unwilling to defend an imperfect real-world state under attack.

Well, let me ask you an academic question, as one academic to another. Suppose, just suppose, that it would be impossible for Israel to defend itself nor prevent the mass murders of Jewish children nor maintain its existence without destroying the villages of the suicide bombers and targeting their families and expelling Palestinian fascists. Better yet: Suppose you would be forced to make an academic moral choice: a Second Holocaust of the Jews, or a willingness by Israel and Israelis to impose decades of Denazification and martial law on the Palestinians while exterminating the PLO and killing all Palestinians with any direct or indirect connections to terrorism. Which would you choose?

I ask you this question of course because it is not a hypothetical academic question at all. This is the very real question on the real world table, the actual choice Israel now needs to make. You can hide from the choice like Shimon Peres, and demand that reality be ignored because it is too ugly and so better live in a fantasy world. Had Churchill and Roosevelt done so, none of us would now be here.

You are horrified that people propose killing the enemy. You call it murder. It is murder like the bombing of Berlin and Cologne and Dresden. In other words it is not murder at all. It is war. You prefer that Israel not be in a state of war. So do we all. You prefer that it be in a perpetual state of appeasement talks. Just like Neville Chamberlain.

By insisting that the only war fought by Israel must be a pure and nice and delicate and polite war, you are in essence insisting that Israel not fight at all. The alternative you really are offering to dirty ugly warfare is capitulation.

Israel IS in a state of war. It did not choose to be. And it has no real choice whether to continue being so now. Or rather, the choice is to pack up and leave, or return to Dachau and Auschwitz, the only alternative the Arabs offer (and the Europeans increasingly endorse). Because you and those like you are squeamish about killing the enemy, Jewish children die. And many more will die until the squeamish make up their minds that Churchill is better than Chamberlain.

Is that your legacy? Is this the lesson that you derive from the Holocaust you have studied all your life? That the worst scenario you can conceive is Israeli leaders being called criminals because they kill the enemy? That Israeli soldiers might be called upon to return fire? You - of all people - know the lessons of the Sudetenland, and how every act of aggression and barbarism in modern times is dressed up in the disguise of "self-determination". You, of all people, should know that even the complete implementation of the Meretz/Haaretz/Labor Party’s version of Munich will simply be the opening bell for the real Arab war of extermination.

And you, of all people, are helping Shimon Peres and the Labor Party impose its fantasy delusions on the Jewish people. If they succeed, the Jewish people will cease to exist.

Is that the result you want to be derived from the Holocaust? Do you really want to be part of THAT? Do you really prefer the facade of "morality" to Jewish survival? You know that Churchill would have stated that such a delusion will produce the loss of BOTH!

Sincerely yours,