[Editor's Note: tonight marks the beginning of Yom HaShoah, the commemoration of the Holocaust.]

I am a child survivor, and went through the destruction of a defenseless people by an enemy called Nazism.

Now, the blood of Israel flows in its streets.  A second wave of Nazism breaks over us.  And I hear phrases of blame like "cycles of violence," "ending the occupation," as if something we were doing, rather than our very existence were responsible for attacks against us.

I hear lies, distortions, self-serving versions of history. Occupation? Years ago when there was no occupation, what did they do? They murdered our athletes at the Olympics; they hijacked planes; they pushed a man in a wheelchair off a ship into the sea.  What excuse will they use when there is no occupation again?

As a survivor of the Holocaust, I can no longer suppress my rage.  I must express this rage without any restraint.  Then I can go in peace.

The form that my rage takes is a question.

What would have happened had the Jewish people, as of V-E Day, behaved like the Palestinians?

The answer is bitterly obvious.

At the end of World War II, in response to the murder of 6 million of our people, rabbis and Jewish leaders could have declared their own holy war of terror.  A Jewish Hezb'allah or Hamas could have raised money through innocuous seeming charities to pay for murder.  They could have targeted Germans and Poles, Hungarians and Italians, all of those whose sins of commission and omission permitted us to be murdered.

They could have targeted populations in all the other nations who attended the Evian Conference.  There, in 1938, the international community joined together to assure the Nazis that no nation had any interest in intervening to protect individual Jews in Europe, and that the international community would do nothing to rescue, or forestall the annihilation of the Jewish people.

And lastly, to behave like Islam and the Palestinians, Jews could have trained their children to hate all those who were not Jewish, and not only to hate them, but to exterminate them.  And they could have hidden behind their children and sent their children to be torn to shreds as human bombs.

But the Jewish people did none of this. No reprisals, no vengeance, no culture of hate.

The vast majority of survivors like myself did nothing, nothing but return to what we left of our lives and begin again wherever we could find a home.