Warsaw Ghetto 1940 – Gaza Ghetto 2018.

Amended May 15, 2018
I wonder if anyone ponders  the irony of the current situation between Israel and the Palestinians (in Gaza) and compares it with the terrible events in Warsaw in the early years of the Second World War?

In 1940 the Germans (Nazis) walled off a small area of the city of Warsaw and instructed all Polish Jews to either move there or be forcibly transported there. From this Ghetto many Jews were transported to the infamous “Extermination Camps” that the Nazis had set up, under the ruse that they were to be “resettled”.

Once those in the Ghetto realized what was happening they set up a resistance movement to fight for their survival – after all they had nothing to lose. The final battle started on the eve of Passover on April 19, 1943, when a Nazi force consisting of several thousand troops entered the ghetto. After initial setbacks, the Germans under the field command of Jurgen Stroop systematically burned and blew up the ghetto buildings, block by block, rounding up or murdering anybody they could capture. Significant resistance ended on April 28, and the Nazi operation officially ended in mid-May, symbolically culminating with the demolition of the Great Synagogue of Warsaw on May 16. According to the official report, at least 56,065 people were killed on the spot or deported to German Nazi concentration and death camps - (I acknowledge  reference to Wikipedia for some of this information).

Now, today, in the Gaza Ghetto with the Palestinians who were either moved there or were forcibly resettled because the Israelis took control of Palestine, we are seeing an eyrie replay of those appalling events of 1943 under different circumstances, certainly, but with the same intent:-

To DESTROY THE RESISTANCE AT ALL COSTS!

There is a blockade in place – imposed by Israel under the guise of stopping the rocket attacks on Israel. OK – this, just possibly, I can understand. But what I can’t understand is the Israeli refusal to recognize the Palestinians justification for their use of these weapons.  Remember there are 1.8 million Palestinians packed into a small enclave. Gaza is the most densely populated area on earth – they have nowhere else to go. The Palestinians are frustrated, demeaned as a people, treated as second class citizens, racially vilified, starved of opportunity and quite frankly treated in a manner that those Jews who survived the Holocaust would recognize as similar to what they were subjected to.

So now, the Palestinians are fighting just as the Jews did many years before.

To so twist words as to accuse the Palestinians (Hamas) of “causing the problems and the deaths of  Palestinian’s” is an obscene abuse of language. Hamas (read Palestinians) are fighting for their survival as a people; fighting for their community, their religion and their way of life. Isn’t this what the Israelis have always done in the past? Isn’t this what the Jews trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto did? Would anyone in their right mind claim that the Jews who died in the Warsaw Ghetto caused their own deaths?

I am sure the United Nations would, today, classify the Zionist militia group, Irgun (1931-1948) – under the leadership of Menachem Begin ( later, in 1977, Prime Minister of Israel), as a terrorist organisation. In fact Begin himself was, at the time, in the 1940s, declared a terrorist by the British who had a “mandate” over Palestine. Various Zionist leaders held different ideas about how to achieve their goal of an Israeli nation but revisionist Zionists, like Begin, were extremist nationalists who believed violence was justified to create a state and considered guerrilla and terrorist tactics a legitimate route toward this end.

Sound familiar?

The injustice of the carve up of Palestine after the Second World War when Israel was established (in 1948) without any Palestinian consultation or the payment of any reparation for the Palestinian properties taken over when the new State of Israel was formed, is the root cause of the present problem.

That injustice, seventy years old now, still burns in the Palestinian psyche. What are the Palestinians supposed to do? They formed Hamas to fight for their rights just as the Zionists formed Irgun to fight for theirs.

The Israelis have now systematically destroyed the infrastructure of Gaza – hospitals, water plants, electricity generators, sewage systems, schools, roads, in fact anything of value to the inhabitants – with  the intention, I am sure, of forcing the Palestinians to leave, thus solving Israel’s “problem” (which the Israelis themselves created).

This is exactly what the Nazis did in Warsaw.

Violence begets more violence and creates a vortex, which, like a black hole, sucks in everyone and everything - there is no way out. Killing people never solved a problem – the Israelis know this; the Americans know this; the world knows this. Violence, as I have proclaimed in these posts many times before, is the last resort or the morally bankrupt.

Remember, what goes around comes around.

Read what you will into these words.