Hello Andrea,

12 to 14 million were killed, 6 million of whom were of the Jewish faith.

One death based on genocidal madness is one too many. Babi Yar haunted me for decades...still does. So too did Yad Vashem when I visited Israel.

Canadian Jewish author Ann Michaels, in her stunningly crafted book, Fugitive Pieces, takes the unfathomable loss of so many Jewish stories to describe just a few.

The point that many are trying to make is that as deep as the wounds are, to the point of staggering trans generational grief, the Shoah is not an excuse to visit the same upon a people who had nothing to do with the Holocaust.

We all have wars, how we fight them defines us. Using the Holocaust as an excuse for non-accountability may be what some people call whining. BUT NOT ME.

Yad Yashem? I stood and looked down at the black onyx map of Europe, with all the names of the death camps, and the numbers lost under a single flame. I turned from such numbing summations to see a hermetically sealed Dias.

Inside was a human skin lampshade, the tattoo with two blue swallows holding a while scroll intertwined through a faded red human heart. In the middle, in gothic script? Sophia.

Sophia. The Goddess of Wisdom. The irony of someone 'reading' by such light hit me harder than the faces staring at me through the cutaway barbed wire railway car.

I share this as someone who has, albeit on a minor scale, born witness to such tragedy.

And what I am witnessing in Gaza, and the West Bank, is tragic: for Palestinians, for Israelis, for Jews and for me.