Warning: this post contains descriptions of extreme violence.

After the Holocaust, no statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that is not credible in the presence of the burning children.

This famous phrase comes from a 1974 essay, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire,” by theologian Rabbi Irving Greenberg, in which he attempted to lay out a new Jewish theology that could respond to the monumental cataclysm of the Holocaust. For Greenberg, the image of burning Jewish children was the ultimate moral obscenity – as well as a critical theological challenge. As he put it, “The cruelty and the killing raises the question whether even those who believe after such an event dare talk about God who love and cares without making a mockery of those who suffered.”

I thought of Greenberg’s words last week when, on Monday, May 26, the Israeli military conducted a series of airstrikes in northern Gaza, killing 54 Palestinians – most of them in a school building sheltering displaced families. The Fahmi Al-Jargawi School in Gaza City housed hundreds of people from Beit Lahia, which had been under intense Israeli military assault. At least 35 were reported to have been killed when the school was hit, half of them children. The Israeli military claimed, without offering proof, that it had been targeting “a Hamas and Islamic Jihad command and control center” there.

Videos shared online showed large fires engulfing the school, with graphic images of severely burned victims, including children, and survivors suffering critical injuries. Faris Afana, Northern Gaza ambulance service manager, arrived at the scene with crews to find three classrooms in flames. “There were sleeping children and women in those classrooms,” he said. “Some of them were screaming but we couldn’t rescue them due to the fires. I cannot describe what we saw due to how horrific it was.”

In one widely shared video, five-year-old Ward Jalal al-Sheikh Khalil can be seen silhouetted against the flames, trying to escape a burning classroom. Ward had witnessed the deaths of her mother and five siblings: Abd al-Rahman, 17; Muhammed, 14; Maria, 13; and Silwan, 11. Her father remains in intensive care. Her uncle Iyad, who found her at Baptist hospital, said, “She told me that she saw them burn to death and she couldn’t do anything. She tried to escape the fire before some men arrived and pulled her out.”

Tragically, this horrifying incident wasn’t the first time that Israel engaged in military operations that burned Palestinian children alive. On October 14, 2024, Shaban al-Dalou, his mother and younger siblings Abdul and Farah were engulfed in flames in their tents during an Israeli attack on Gaza’s Al-Aqsa Hospital. Last April, five children, four women, and a man from the same family died from severe burns after an Israeli airstrike hit the tent where they were staying in Khan Younis. On the same day, UNICEF announced that 15 children, including a child with disabilities, were burned to death in their tents over a period of 24 hours.

It should be added that the Israeli military has burned Palestinian children to death well before the current moment. During its military assault in 2008-2009, “Operation Cast Lead,” human rights organizations extensively documented Israel’s indiscriminate use of white phosphorous – a chemical substance that causes grievous burns, often to the bone. In its report, Amnesty International quoted Sabah Abu Halima, a mother of 10, who was gravely injured and lost her husband, four of her children and her daughter-in-law from a devastating white phosphorus artillery attack on her family home. In her testimony to Amnesty, Sabah said:

Everything caught fire. My husband and four of my children burned alive in front of my eyes; my baby girl, Shahed, my only girl, melted in my arms. How can a mother have to see her children burn alive? I couldn’t save them, I couldn’t help them. I was on fire. Now I am still burning all over, I am in pain day and night; I am suffering terribly.

In truth, the Palestinian children have endured burning at the hands of the Israeli military going back in the establishment of the state of Israel. During the infamous massacre at Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948, Jewish militias killed 110 Palestinians and committed well-documented atrocities against civilians, including women, the elderly and children. There are numerous testimonies to these events from Jewish soldiers and eyewitnesses. One photographer, Shraga Peled reported, “When I got to Deir Yassin, the first thing I saw was a big tree to which a young Arab fellow was tied. And this tree was burnt in a fire. They had tied him to it and burned him.”

Almost ten years ago, the late Jewish scholar and writer Marc Ellis noted the tragic irony of Greenberg’s theological statement in a post for the blog Mondoweiss. During “Operation Protective Edge,” a military assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014, in which the Israeli military killed over 2,000 Palestinians – including over 500 children – Ellis wrote:

As the news reports show and Palestinians know by experience, burning children has become a way of life for Israel. It makes sense to Israel’s government and Jews around the world who support the invasion of Gaza and even Op-Ed writers in the Wall Street Journal. The burning children of Gaza are collateral damage to a larger more important story.

For Greenberg, who viewed the the establishment of the state of Israel in theologically redemptive terms, the only response to the Holocaust that makes any sense is the continued survival of the Jewish people following their near annihilation. This is what comes of attaching sacred meaning to ethno-nationalism. And this is what it has come to: we are watching the result play out every day in a live streamed genocide where we are actually able, obscenely, to watch children burn to death on our mobile devices.

For the record, here is what Rabbi Greenberg had to say about Israel’s current actions in Gaza:

(How) can Israel deal with the fact that it is killing thousands of civilians including many children? Jewish tradition teaches that every human being is created in the image of God and is of infinite value. It is heartbreaking to kill so many individuals and devastating to realize that the price of saving Israel is the death of so many people (including, not to forget, hundreds of Israeli soldiers). One thinks of Golda Meir’s comment that we can never forgive the Arabs for forcing us to kill their children. Still, it is important for the world to know that Israel continues doing what it can to reduce civilian casualties.

I’m not sure that theology is really of much use in this terrifying moment, but I will say this: any statement, theological or otherwise, made in the presence of some burning children and not others is nothing short of chillul hashem: a desecration of God’s name.