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.

Israels Moral Army

There was a report the other day about why the Israelis rejected the UN report into their ‘invasion’ of Gaza last year. They are alleged to have said that because Israel has the most ‘moral’ army in the world, what others stated were ‘war crimes’ committed by the Israeli Army could not and would not have happened. They have also stated before that they have the most ‘ethical’ army in the world.

Now one thing I have learned in life is that as soon as anyone starts making presumptuous or sanctimonious statements indicating a belief that they are ‘better’ or as in this case (presumably more) ‘moral’ that anyone else they are inviting Nemeses to cut them back down to size. There is one thing that Nemeses dislikes more than anything else and that is ‘hubris’. I have written about this before and risking accusations of repetition I restate the following:-

“So whole-hearted is the faith in technological idols that it is very hard to discover, in the popular thoughts of our time, any trace of the ancient and profoundly realistic doctrine of Hubris and Nemesis. To the (Ancient) Greeks, Hubris meant any kind of over-weening and excess. When men or societies went too far, either in dominating other men and societies, or in exploiting the resources of nature to their own advantage, this over-weening exhibition of pride had to be paid for. In a word, Hubris invited Nemesis.” (Aldous Huxley - Essay on ‘New Forms of Idolatry’ 1945).

This still rings true today, from its ancient classical, origins. [‘hubris’ … Presumption; insolence (originally towards the Gods); pride; excessive self confidence. ‘Nemesis’ …The Goddess of retribution and vengeance]. Nemesis was perceived to be the personification of the retribution which appears to overtake every wrong. She was conceived as a mysterious power, watching over the propriety of life, shaping the demeanour of men in times of prosperity, punishing crime, taking luck away from the unworthy, tracking every wrong to its doer, and keeping society in equipoise. Nemesis was/is said to be implacable in the pursuit of her cause.

If the Israelis (or the Americans or anyone else for that matter) think for a moment that force of arms on its own solves problems they are sadly mistaken. It never has and it never will. Any force has to be accompanied by magnanimity to the ‘defeated’. I am not sure that the Israelis understand the meaning of the word ‘magnanimity’. They have done nothing to help the unfortunate inhabitants of Gaza – in fact they are just keeping up the unequal pressure.

It has to be remembered that only a person can be moral or ethical. Morals and ethics have to do with the interrelationships between human beings. An army, on the other hand, cannot be moral or ethical. An army being an organisation of people who are trained to kill, does not have a life of its own. Ethical conduct can only take place between humans and other sentient beings. The Israeli army may have a code of ethics and instruct its soldiers about moral conduct but under the pressure of war, when it is a case of kill or be killed, anything can and does happen. In any case I am not sure that anyone can be killed in a morally ‘correct’ manner or killed ‘ethically.’

Nothing the Israeli’s have done addresses the original cause of the ‘Palestinian problem’ – injustice; the injustice of having their hereditary land expropriated (without consultation or compensation) to create the State of Israel in 1946. Building a wall dividing Palestine from Israel; having state of the art weaponry does nothing if the original injustice and the sense of injustice is not addressed in a meaningful manner – not just talking about talking. The Israelis will never feel secure while the Palestinians feel deprived, humiliated and treated as second class citizens.

The Israelis (and the Palestinians) must learn, or remember, that violence is the last resort of the morally bankrupt. So where does that place the Israeli army or Hamas?

Think about it.

UN report on Israel’s attacks on their buildings in Gaza

I suppose we can be thankful that this is now a war of words and for a change it looks as if the Israelis have come off second best. At least their moral standing and their ego seems to have been dented somewhat.

The United Nations has just produced a report on the damage inflicted on various UN building in Gaza by the Israeli during their incursion into Gaza in December 08 and continuing into January 09.

Ehud Barak, Israel’s Minister of Defence repudiates the UN’s report. He says it is biased because it does not give enough weight to the restraint the Israeli’s have shown while under attack from thousands of rockets fired by Hamas, into Israel, over a number of years.

This is a valid statement.

But how about the restraint shown by the Palestinians after some sixty years of being landless people – remember that Israel was formed from land taken from the Palestinians in 1946, without compensation? Many were forced to live in that sliver of land called the Gaza Strip, without adequate facilities, shortages of all supplies (because of the Israeli blockades) and desperate overcrowding.

Whatever the Palestinians – through the agency of Hamas and others – do to Israel and the Israelis (and I do not condone it at all) is born out of frustration and anger at the injustice of the whole Israel/Palestine/Middle East saga.

The Israelis are not doing themselves any favours by trying to maintain their high moral tone, claiming that their army is the most moral in the world, against a mounting body of evidence that this is not so.

As in any institution which relies on extreme discipline to ensure its orders are carried out to the letter, the Israeli army leaders (and their masters, the Israeli politicians) must always be guided by the highest moral imperatives. I do not believe this was the case.

There are grounds for believing that the Israeli politicians were thinking about the benefits to be gained, politically in Israel, by appearing to be strong and determined against the ‘enemy’ (Hamas and the Palestinians) just before their forth-coming elections. Remember that the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert was at the time considered a lame duck PM, who was allegedly involved in a corruption scandal. He would have wanted to hand over the reins with his party in the best possible political condition.

It is recorded that the great teacher, Hillel (who died in 10 C.E.) summarized the essence of Judaism by saying: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow humans; this is the whole Torah, all the rest is commentary. Now go and learn.” Another central premise of the Torah (the moral code of Judaism) is the command to “Love your neighbour as yourself.”

I wonder if they told that to the Palestinians? Imagine saying, “We love you and we hate what we are going to do to you – but we will do it anyway.” That is the height of hypocrisy. The Israeli’s know this, which is why they are so upset with this report. It shows them up and they have to see themselves for what they are and how the rest of the world sees them. Very confronting!!

The problem in Gaza is the Israelis

Tell me please, someone, why is Israel so special – more so than any other piece of God’s earth? The land was there before the Jews were thought of and will still be there long after the last Jew and the last Palestinian has perished. I am fully aware of recent Jewish history and the Holocaust and the Death Camps of horrific memory and why the State of Israel was ‘given’ to the Jews (and ‘taken’ from the Palestinians). That is now past and hopefully the world has learned something from those events. But I wonder if the Israelis have moved one iota from the Old Testament dictum of, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”. This does not work – never has, never will. All it does is to build resentment and continue a cycle of injustice, the seeking of revenge and feuding, which helps no one and harms many without solving the original problem. The Israelis should know this. They have been victims of the self same tactics!!

The Israelis know all this very well. Their history is replete with Jewish persecution and they quite rightly complain, loudly, to the world about anti-Zionism. If they persecute others, it is presumably pro-Zionist and therefore ok? So why should they use the same failed tactics, failed against them that is, against others and expect the tactics to work against ‘other’ ie Palestinians, this time around? Attacking Hamas, while at the same time killing innocent Palestinians in the hope that the surviving innocent Palestinians will blame Hamas (their elected Gaza government) for the slaughter and not Israel (whom they consider the occupying forces and also the oppressors) is a very unlikely scenario indeed.
I have said it before and I will say it again, and again – remove the causes and the reason for the formation and popularity of Hamas, Fatah and other hard line Arab organisations no longer exists. Think about the following:-

• The illegal and unjust occupation of Palestinian lands by the Israelis. Against the specific ruling of the United Nations the Israelis have continued with their construction of illegal settlements in occupied Palestinian lands. No compensation is offered to those Palestinians denied access – for 60 years – to what is rightfully their land.
• The Israelis complete clamp on all movement by Palestinians to prevent suicide bombs (so they say and yet the Israelis themselves developed terrorist tactics and used them against the British – see the destruction of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on 22nd July 1946 when a bomb placed in the basement by Israelis demolished part of the Hotel, killing 91 people -mainly British and injuring a further 46 people. Israelis celebrated the 60th anniversary of this event!)
• The blockade of Gaza. This prevents all shipment of food, water, medical supplies and any form of aid and causes untold misery in Gaza.
• The Israeli practice of using ‘collective’ punishment against ALL those in Gaza for the activities of those few who feel motivated enough to take some action. This is both unfair and unjust - and the Israelis know it!!

My sympathy for the Jewish people and my support for their ‘right’ to live in their Promised Land is rapidly diminishing. Because of their intransigence and obsession with the belief in their ‘rights’ to the land of Israel and as a ‘special’ people the Israelis are building up such a massive problem that we, in the West, will have to bail them out and clean up the mess they will be leaving. All for what? Pray tell me.