‘I come before you as a Jew,’ Blinken tells Israel after Hamas attack

Antony Blinken: “I understand on a personal level the harrowing echoes that Hamas’s massacres carry for Israeli Jews – indeed, for Jews everywhere.”

By TOVAH LAZAROFF
Oct

Hamas’s burning of bodies and execution of entire families in southern Israel reverberated among top leaders in Washington, sparking general moral outrage and triggering the specific trauma of antisemitic genocide and persecution.

“I come before you not only as the United States secretary of state,” Antony Blinken told Israel during a live-streamed press conference in Tel Aviv on Thursday, “but also as a Jew.”

“My grandfather, Maurice Blinken, fled pogroms in Russia. My stepfather, Samuel Pisar, survived concentration camps – Auschwitz, Dachau, Majdanek,” Blinken said as he referenced both eastern European persecution and the Holocaust.

He viewed the destruction of the southern Jewish communities from that lens, he said.

Turning to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who held the press conference with him, he said. “I understand on a personal level the harrowing echoes that Hamas’s massacres carry for Israeli Jews – indeed, for Jews everywhere.”

He spoke in the aftermath of Hamas’s assault against southern Israel that claimed the lives of 1,300 civilians and soldiers on Saturday, an event that was both a human and Jewish tragedy.

“I also come before you as a husband and father of young children,” Blinken said.

“It’s impossible for me to look at the photos of families killed – such as the mother, father, and three small children murdered as they sheltered in their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz – and not think of my own children,” he said.

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