The first stage of the Holocaust, before mass murder became part of German government policy, witnessed wholesale denial of the nature of the enemy that the Jews were facing - and the abandonment of the Jewish communities being persecuted. As the mass murder machine readied to conduct a crime against the Jewish people, there were very few individuals, even among the Jews themselves, who believed the propaganda declaring that the Nazis really meant to make total war on the Jewish people.
At this stage of history, a group of Jewish communities - S'derot and the small kibbutzim in the Western Negev - has been under daily lethal mortar attack for the past six years. The Arab enemy repeats, time and again, that this is only the beginning.
The Arab adversary clearly states that it will not cease fire until and unless these communities empty out, and that it will continue its attack until all Jewish communities in the land of Israel disband. The Arab call for total Jihad features in the new schoolbooks of the nascent Palestinian Arab entity.
For the first time since the traumatic rule of the Third Reich, a nation is raising its children to conduct a total war of extermination against the Jewish people - beginning with S'derot and the Western Negev.
Yet, the reaction throughout the Jewish world, and the response throughout Israel, is to regard the daily missile attacks on the small Jewish communities of the Negev as if they were some kind of weather report. The Jewish world shrugs off any premonition that this may be the beginning of a threat much more serious and sinister.
The media does not report the "right of return" campaign, in which Arabs living in "temporary" United Nations refugee camps have picked out the precise Jewish homes that they intend to take over, based on claims of where their families left from in 1948, as mapped out in www.PalestineRemembered.com. Najd, abandoned in 1951, is now S'derot, and Najd's descendants, wallowing in the UNRWA camp of Jabalya in Gaza ever since, intend to march on S'derot to "take it back." It is no coincidence that missiles are fired on S'derot from crowded Jabalya.
The mainstream press, even the Jewish media, shields anyone from knowing how every missile launched to kill Jews is praised on the official Palestinian Authority TV and radio; and how any Arab who dies while trying to kill a Jew is described by official Palestinian media as a "holy martyr for the cause of Palestine."
It has become nearly impossible to express the plight of the Jewish communities under siege in the Negev to the rest of the Jewish world.
What is it like to have more than 3,000 shock victims of all ages living in the small city of S'derot (population: 20,000), with a psychological service of less than five professionals, who cannot possibly handle the vast majority of people who need treatment?
What has it been like since the government agreed to a ceasefire imposed by the American government, with more than 200 missile attacks that have rained down on the area since the ceasefire, with no response from the Israeli army, since the American government expects it not to react?
The book of Lamentations, read at times of distress in the Jewish world, opens with one line, describing how Jerusalem "stood alone," as if it were a widow among the nations, with no one seeming to care.
Today, the Jewish communities of S'derot and the Western Negev stand alone, and no one seems to care.