On This Day — August 11, 2017 The world’s oldest man, a Holocaust survivor, died in Haifa, Israel at 113. His name was Yisrael Kristal. He survived Hitler’s madness and then made candy in the Jewish homeland. Born in 1903 in a Polish village, he once waved at the Austrian emperor as the royal carriage tossed sweets to the children. World War I orphaned him. By 17, he was in Łódź learning the confectioner’s trade. He got married, had two children, and he became a master candy maker. Then the Nazis invaded. In the Łódź Ghetto, both of his children died. In Auschwitz his wife was murdered. He survived as a forced laborer and walked out weighing 81 pounds. When Soviet soldiers liberated him, the first thing he did was make them candy. In 1950, he moved to Israel with his second wife. He settled in Haifa and went straight back to making sweets. He raised a new family. He laid tefillin every morning for the rest of his life. In 2016, at the age of 113, he finally celebrated his bar mitzvah only a century late. Yisrael Kristal outlived the empires that tried to erase him. He outlived the ghetto, the camps, and the century that swallowed so many. He died in the Jewish state he helped build, still making candy, still a believer, still choosing life. May his memory be a blessing.

Arafat backed Saddam’s rape of Kuwait. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians paid for it in blood and exile. The world never cared and has completely forgotten. Arafat went to Baghdad and stood publicly with Saddam after the invasion. In January 1991, he rallied the mob: if the Americans want war, “then I say welcome, welcome, welcome to war… Iraq and Palestine… [will stand] together, side by side.” When the Americans struck, Saddam fired Scuds at Tel Aviv while the United States forced Israel to absorb the attacks on its civilians without responding. Under Iraqi occupation, Kuwaitis were systematically raped (thousands of women), tortured with electric drills and acid, hanged, beaten, and executed. The country was stripped bare. Palestinians in Kuwait were widely viewed as collaborators. After liberation, Kuwait expelled them. A community of roughly 350,000–400,000 was reduced by about 90% within months. More than 300,000 were thrown out of the country. And yet, there were no endless UN resolutions. No academic industry of “Nakba” books. No campus protests. No media saturation calling it ethnic cleansing. Arafat later claimed what Kuwait did was “worse than what Israel did.” The world shrugged. A massive, deliberate expulsion of Palestinians by an Arab state (carried out against the entire community regardless of any alleged collaboration) happened in full view of the modern world. The response was total silence. The same people who turn every consequence of Arab-initiated wars against Jews into the eternal crime of the century treated this one as if it never happened. That is the real hierarchy of refugee suffering. That is the lie at the heart of eternal Palestinian victimhood. It’s not about concern for Palestinian lives. It’s about demonizing and delegitimizing the world’s only Jewish state.

The Holocaust is singular. Nothing in history equals it. A modern, industrialized European state decided that every single Jew on earth (man, woman, infant, elderly, disabled, convert, atheist, even war heroes) must be hunted down and murdered for the sole crime of existing. Not for land. Not for resources. Not for political control. Not as a byproduct of war. The annihilation of the Jews was the point. Even while the Germans were being crushed on the Eastern Front and the Allies pushed in from the West, the Nazis kept diverting trains, fuel, manpower, and industrial capacity away from the battlefield just to keep the gas chambers running. Mere traces of Jewish ancestry were enough for a death sentence. Conversion didn't save you. Assimilation didn't save you. Intermarriage or loyalty to Germany didn't save you. Jewish blood itself was treated as a permanent, irreversible stain. This extermination of Europe’s Jews was planned and carried out by university professors, engineers, architects, chemists, and bureaucrats. Ordinary, educated citizens of one of the most advanced societies on earth. They clocked in, murdered with industrial efficiency all day, then went home to listen to Beethoven and read Goethe. No other atrocity combined all of these elements at once: (1) total biological targeting of an entire people with no exemptions; (2) industrial-scale factory killing; (3) continent-wide reach; and (4) a sophisticated modern state treating murder of a people as a war aim equal to military victory. The crime was so unprecedented that Raphael Lemkin had to invent a new word for it: genocide. That word has since been stretched, emptied, and turned into a political weapon against the very people who actually experienced it. The Holocaust stands alone.

In 1976, Uganda under Idi Amin colluded with terrorists who hijacked a plane full of Jews and held them at Entebbe. Fifty years later, on the same ground, Uganda unveils a statue of Yoni Netanyahu, the Israeli commander who led the rescue and fell there. Yoni was already a legend in Israel. A Sayeret Matkal commander, a national hero whose name carried weight long before his younger brother entered politics. The man Uganda once enabled terrorists against is now honored by Uganda itself. Narratives can change. Truth can still win.