Makoto Yoshihra was a Guadalupe boy who played football for Santa Maria High School. He wanted to become an automobile mechanic, but Pearl Harbor intervened.

He instead became the only Nisei medic in the 83rd Infantry Division, a unit made up overwhelmingly of White boys from Ohio who’d never seen a Japanese-American in their lives.

This Japanese-American, once the 83rd went into action in Europe, began to save their lives.

Because he was a medic, he wore the helmet insignia–a red cross on a white background–that designated him as such. Because medics wore that helmet, they became favored targets for German snipers. If a sniper could kill a medic, then he could kill, indirectly, the six or seven or twenty lives that the medic might save.

So that is why the sniper shot Makoto dead in the Huertgen Forest in late 1944. He was kneeling over a wounded comrade when the bullet hit.

Makoto’s helmet doomed him.

So did the logo of the World Central Kitchen convoy.

If you are about to accuse me of being anti-Semitic, you don’t know me. You don’t know what I taught my students about anti-Semitism and you don’t know the emotional toll that teaching the Holocaust took on me every year of the thirty years I taught.

You don’t know my mother, who never forgave Germany.

But now we have the Israeli airstrike on the World Central Kitchen convoy. My mother would never have forgiven that, either.

There is a difference between Israel and Bibi Netenyahu. I am convinced that he pulled the trigger on Chef Andres’ people. The impact? Now the people of Gaza are deprived of the 300,000 meals a day that the World Central Kitchen provided them.

And so they will die. They will die because that is what Netenyahu and the extremists in his cabinet want.

In the last great shipment of European Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz-Birkenau, once they’d been offloaded from the cattle cars, processed through the selection ramp and then shunted to a field near the gas chambers, there are photos of Jewish children who have only a half-hour or so to live.

They are eating bread provided by the SS. One photo shows another little girl still eating her bread on the way to her death.

There will be no bread for the children of Gaza. They won’t enjoy even the cynical mercy of the SS.

This is mercy: The Army’s Graves Registration Teams gently carried Makoto’s body–it did not matter that he “looked” Japanese– away from the battlefield, perhaps with the body of the G.I. he could not save. They would have meticulously catalogued his personal effects, enclosed him in a canvas shroud, and then they would have taken him to a military cemetery on the Franco-German border.

When the war ended, the Army brought him home to Guadalupe. His coffin would’ve come across the Atlantic in the cargo hold of a Liberty Ship, inside a metal coffin draped in an American flag. We have a tradition of treating our war dead with care.

The children of Gaza will die now because now there is no one left to care for them. Because they will die in such great numbers, bulldozers will bury them.

You may bring up October 7, and you have every right to do so. I will counter with December 7.

This is the image of a woman waiting for the bank to open in Hiroshima—rather, this is the shadow of her vaporized body. Can you tell me which plane she flew along Battleship Row? Was it a Zero? A torpedo bomber? Did she fly the dive bomber that dropped the fatal bomb on USS Arizona?

What crime did she commit?

And what crime did this little Gazan girl commit?