Here’s David Berlinski defending God’s role in the Holocaust (from page 31 of his book, The Devil’s Delusion): “[T]he thousand year Reich…lies buried in the rubble of German cities smashed to smithereens,…[I]f God did not protect his chosen people precisely as [atheist Sam] Harris might have wished, He did, in an access of his old accustomed vigor, smite their enemies, with generations to come in mourning or obsessed by shame.”
In other words, David Berlinski is saying in defense of God that though God did not protect the Jewish people from the Holocaust, he nevertheless empowered the Allies to destroy the Jews’ enemies (the Nazis) after the fact, and to set those enemies into eternal infamy among men and women.
But here’s the problem with David Berlinski’s justification of God’s behavior surrounding the Holocaust. If God can smite (David Berlinski’s word) the enemies of the Jews after the fact, it means God could have simply prevented the murderous behavior in the first place.
By analogy, you don’t praise a police chief for tracking down, arresting, and smiting a murderer after the murder has occurred if you also know that the police chief could see the murder coming, had the power to stop the murder, and didn’t stop it. The obvious question for the police chief is: “Why didn’t you just prevent the murder? If you can smite, you can prevent, right?”
And the free will defense does no good here. In deciding between competing goods, it could be argued (absurdly) that God preferred the free will of Hitler and the Nazis to the suffering of six million Jews, and so had to let the Nazis slaughter the Jews. God, being all rational and good, presumably chooses the greatest degree of rationality and goodness to prevail in the cosmos, and that includes the risks entailed in the exercise of human free will. But David Berlinski says God empowered smiting, and smiting restricts the freedom of the will of the murderers as surely as preventing the will of the murderers in advance. It takes the murderers off the playing field of existence permanently. No free will there.
So any explanation of the Holocaust on theism quickly runs into serious problems of coherence. The Berlinski quote highlights this.
Prometheus Unbound 
Not only that, but by dealing with the situation as he did, God ended up punishing the Palestinians, and ensuring that Jews would be vilified for generations to come. Strange ways, indeed!
It’s funny how the god of the Jews needs humans to do all his work for him, as if there is no god at all. Their god is not protecting them, financial aid spent on militarization (from the US) is protecting them. They have fully oppressed the Palestinians who are genetically more ‘Jewish’ than the Jews in the name of their religion. Their god does not protect them, their oppression of others does. I’m fairly certain that the OT allows for slavery but they can’t really get away with that these days, which might be fortunate for the Palestinians … or not. The idea that the Jews now treat Palestinians like the Jews were treated in WWII (or try to) is reprehensible. YHWH’s chosen people are as immoral as any on the planet. If their god’s plan was to get them back to Israel, well, like the garden, the flood, and so on he’s fucked up again.
All three humans on this page reveal that they have no clue what they are talking about and they so easily mock what they cannot understand. It is like little children mocking an adults for the things they say and do only to realize later when they grow up and mature that they were wrong and the adults were right. Instead of trying to find fault with God why not try to apply your minds to actually understand from a God’s eye view what He was doing throughout both the Bible and History.
“But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised. But he who is spiritual appraises all things, yet he himself is appraised by no one. For WHO HAS KNOWN THE MIND OF THE LORD, THAT HE WILL INSTRUCT HIM? But we have the mind of Christ.”
(1 Corinthians 2:14–16 NAS95)
Your statement ‘By analogy, you don’t praise a police chief for tracking down, arresting, and smiting a murderer after the murder has occurred if you also know that the police chief could see the murder coming, had the power to stop the murder, and didn’t stop it. The obvious question for the police chief is: “Why didn’t you just prevent the murder? If you can smite, you can prevent, right?”’ Is false on its face since the officer is unable to act until there is a crime. The fact I am planning to kill someone does not give the law any grounds to act. Also in regard to God and His actions regarding man in general is which one of us has not violated his own conscience? If we fail to measure up to our own bar of justice how can we not be guilty of violating the bar of God’s justice. If we deserve censure based upon our innate orality then we have little hope but to face the holiness of God with fear and trembling. A truth about each and every human is the sense of guilt and some degree of morality. We are the only creatures that are ‘religious’. That in and of itself argues for His existance.