I saw the mass graves of Yazidis murdered by ISIS. It was a genocide and Israel should recognize it.

In December 2015, almost three years ago, I made the long drive into the killing fields of Sinjar in northern Iraq, where Islamic State committed genocide against the Yazidi minority. It was night by the time we got there, to the desolate areas around Sinjar mountain, called Shingal by locals. This was the place where members of the Yazidi minority had fled attacks by ISIS in August 2014.

Scenes of tens of thousands of people huddling, starving and dehydrated, galvanized the US to begin air strikes on ISIS. Yet just beyond where I slept on one of those cold nights in December, ISIS had machine-gunned men and elderly women and buried them in mass graves.

Last week the Israeli Knesset failed to pass a bill to recognize the Yazidi genocide. There are compelling reasons for Jerusalem to recognize the genocide, particularly because Israel is a living example of how people have taken the future into their own hands in the wake of the Holocaust. The Yazidis are a clear case, there is nothing controversial about the issue. They suffered genocide, experts at the UN and EU and others have already agreed on this. No one denies there was a genocide, and recognizing it doesn’t compromise Israel’s relations with any country. Yet Israel’s parliamentary majority chose not to back the bill; the ruling coalition ordered its members to vote against a preliminary reading.

IT’S WORTH remembering how we got here and why recognition should be considered by Israel.
ISIS had been allowed to take over swaths of Syria and parts of northern Iraq in the spring and summer 2014. Cynical and powerful countries in Europe and the West did nothing to prevent the takeover and often turned the other way as thousands of their citizens joined the black-clad ISIS columns of fighters. Social media companies initially did nothing as hundreds of thousands of pro-ISIS accounts tweeted scenes of beheadings and mass killing. Like the Nazis, ISIS crimes began with one group and grew to include others. ISIS began with the mass executions of Shi’ites at Camp Speicher, a former military base they captured in June 2014. While the world watched, more than 1,000 men were murdered, many of them beheaded. Then ISIS expelled all the Christians of Nineveh plains, marking their houses like the Nazis marked Jewish property. The world shrugged, as it had in 1938. Not our problem.

Then ISIS attacked the Yazidi minority in northern Iraq. ISIS prepared meticulously for this offensive against the towns and villages populated by 400,000 Yazidis. It used captured equipment from the fleeing Iraqi army, including US-made Humvees and M-16s to overrun the Yazidi areas. Kurdish Peshmerga fighters fled. In just a few days in August, ISIS massacred thousands of men and elderly women and began selling women and children into slavery. At first people didn’t want to believe this was happening. How could thousands of women be marked with numbers, like Jews had been at Auschwitz, and sold in 2014? But it happened. And it happened as Western countries looked on and did nothing.

Eventually, ISIS made several mistakes. Like Hitlerism, ISIS thought it could conquer the world. But as Hitler ran into Stalin and Churchill, ISIS ran into things it didn’t expect. In Iraq, it ran into masses of Shi’ite militias who flocked to defend Baghdad, and in Syria it ran into Kurdish fighters of the People’s Protection Units (YPG) who refused to surrender the city Kobani. In the Kurdish region of Iraq, it faced hundreds of thousands of men and women willing to defend their homes. As the Nazis had been stopped at Stalingrad, so the black plague of ISIS was broken in Kobani and in their offensive toward Baghdad in 2014 and 2015. Conveniently, by this time the world had begun to sign on to the US-led international Coalition. Though the Coalition helped defeat ISIS militarily, nothing was done to help victims of the ISIS genocide. No investment has been made in Yazidi villages or Sinjar. I went to Iraq and interviewed many Yazidis seeking shelter in the Kurdistan region, and saw again and again how the international community failed to help.

Four years after the genocide, the displaced Yazidis live in muddy tents, still fearful of being attacked again. Cynical politics in Iraq, including Baghdad’s disputes with the Kurdish region, have prevented Yazidis from returning or even feeling secure. The road to Sinjar, the one I drove on in 2015, is blocked. Yazidis are told to drive through Mosul, where they were sold into slavery. It would be like asking Jews to drive through Hitler’s smoldering Berlin in 1946. They wouldn’t feel safe. But the international community doesn’t care because Yazidis are not seen as important to the future of Iraq. The international community cares about powerful groups in Iraq – particularly politics in Baghdad. Today the US and Iran are in a contest over who will control Iraq. The Yazidis, like Jews in 1946 in Europe as the Cold war began, are victims of history. They simply do not matter in the larger scheme of the Middle East’s power politics.

THE PARALLELS between what happened to Jews in Europe and what happened to Yazidis in Iraq do not have to be exaggerated to make the similarities seem to fit. There is a direct connection.

ISIS is a Nazi ideology. It replaces the Nazi obsession with racial supremacy with an obsession with religious supremacy. It views all other religions besides a narrow interpretation of its own as sub-human and deserving of death, expulsion or slavery. This is the model Nazism used as well. Jews, Slavs, Gypsies and others were to be exterminated, enslaved or expelled to make way for “living space.” Nazism, like ISIS, came up with rules, laws and reasons. Both murdered systematically.

ISIS, for instance, rounded up Yazidis in their towns and often kept them for a few days before separating men and women. The men were systematically machine-gunned to death, like the Einsatzgruppen had done during Hitler’s campaigns in the east. Women were sold. More than 30 mass graves have been found. I saw two of them in 2015.

Scenes of tens of thousands of people huddling, starving and dehydrated, galvanized the US to begin air strikes on ISIS. Yet just beyond where I slept on one of those cold nights in December, ISIS had machine-gunned men and elderly women and buried them in mass graves.

Last week the Israeli Knesset failed to pass a bill to recognize the Yazidi genocide. There are compelling reasons for Jerusalem to recognize the genocide, particularly because Israel is a living example of how people have taken the future into their own hands in the wake of the Holocaust. The Yazidis are a clear case, there is nothing controversial about the issue. They suffered genocide, experts at the UN and EU and others have already agreed on this. No one denies there was a genocide, and recognizing it doesn’t compromise Israel’s relations with any country. Yet Israel’s parliamentary majority chose not to back the bill; the ruling coalition ordered its members to vote against a preliminary reading.

IT’S WORTH remembering how we got here and why recognition should be considered by Israel. ISIS had been allowed to take over swaths of Syria and parts of northern Iraq in the spring and summer 2014. Cynical and powerful countries in Europe and the West did nothing to prevent the takeover and often turned the other way as thousands of their citizens joined the black-clad ISIS columns of fighters. Social media companies initially did nothing as hundreds of thousands of pro-ISIS accounts tweeted scenes of beheadings and mass killing. Like the Nazis, ISIS crimes began with one group and grew to include others. ISIS began with the mass executions of Shi’ites at Camp Speicher, a former military base they captured in June 2014. While the world watched, more than 1,000 men were murdered, many of them beheaded. Then ISIS expelled all the Christians of Nineveh plains, marking their houses like the Nazis marked Jewish property. The world shrugged, as it had in 1938. Not our problem.

Then ISIS attacked the Yazidi minority in northern Iraq. ISIS prepared meticulously for this offensive against the towns and villages populated by 400,000 Yazidis. It used captured equipment from the fleeing Iraqi army, including US-made Humvees and M-16s to overrun the Yazidi areas. Kurdish Peshmerga fighters fled. In just a few days in August, ISIS massacred thousands of men and elderly women and began selling women and children into slavery. At first people didn’t want to believe this was happening. How could thousands of women be marked with numbers, like Jews had been at Auschwitz, and sold in 2014? But it happened. And it happened as Western countries looked on and did nothing.

Eventually, ISIS made several mistakes. Like Hitlerism, ISIS thought it could conquer the world. But as Hitler ran into Stalin and Churchill, ISIS ran into things it didn’t expect. In Iraq, it ran into masses of Shi’ite militias who flocked to defend Baghdad, and in Syria it ran into Kurdish fighters of the People’s Protection Units (YPG) who refused to surrender the city Kobani. In the Kurdish region of Iraq, it faced hundreds of thousands of men and women willing to defend their homes. As the Nazis had been stopped at Stalingrad, so the black plague of ISIS was broken in Kobani and in their offensive toward Baghdad in 2014 and 2015. Conveniently, by this time the world had begun to sign on to the US-led international Coalition. Though the Coalition helped defeat ISIS militarily, nothing was done to help victims of the ISIS genocide. No investment has been made in Yazidi villages or Sinjar. I went to Iraq and interviewed many Yazidis seeking shelter in the Kurdistan region, and saw again and again how the international community failed to help.

Four years after the genocide, the displaced Yazidis live in muddy tents, still fearful of being attacked again. Cynical politics in Iraq, including Baghdad’s disputes with the Kurdish region, have prevented Yazidis from returning or even feeling secure. The road to Sinjar, the one I drove on in 2015, is blocked. Yazidis are told to drive through Mosul, where they were sold into slavery. It would be like asking Jews to drive through Hitler’s smoldering Berlin in 1946. They wouldn’t feel safe. But the international community doesn’t care because Yazidis are not seen as important to the future of Iraq. The international community cares about powerful groups in Iraq – particularly politics in Baghdad. Today the US and Iran are in a contest over who will control Iraq. The Yazidis, like Jews in 1946 in Europe as the Cold war began, are victims of history. They simply do not matter in the larger scheme of the Middle East’s power politics.

THE PARALLELS between what happened to Jews in Europe and what happened to Yazidis in Iraq do not have to be exaggerated to make the similarities seem to fit. There is a direct connection.

ISIS is a Nazi ideology. It replaces the Nazi obsession with racial supremacy with an obsession with religious supremacy. It views all other religions besides a narrow interpretation of its own as sub-human and deserving of death, expulsion or slavery. This is the model Nazism used as well. Jews, Slavs, Gypsies and others were to be exterminated, enslaved or expelled to make way for “living space.” Nazism, like ISIS, came up with rules, laws and reasons. Both murdered systematically.

ISIS, for instance, rounded up Yazidis in their towns and often kept them for a few days before separating men and women. The men were systematically machine-gunned to death, like the Einsatzgruppen had done during Hitler’s campaigns in the east. Women were sold. More than 30 mass graves have been found. I saw two of them in 2015.

Reprinted with author’s permission from The Jerusalem Post