Current tensions in Israel’s northern sector have a bone-chilling historical link to Holocaust Memorial Day, which begins Wednesday evening. They are both linked by the usage of chemical weapons and noxious gases against defenseless civilians.

Germans were the first to use mustard gases in World War One. Nobody stopped them or punished them, and so they once again used deadly gases on an industrial scale to put to death millions of civilians in World War Two. The international protocol signed in the two world wars’ interim did little to deter them from doing so.

Today it is Russia that is using them—the former victim of Germany during World War Two, many of whose civilians were slaughtered by gas along with the Jews of other countries.

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