Protesters around the world are right to condemn the Israeli militarism in the Gaza Strip - but the comparison that many are making with the 1941 - 43 Warsaw Ghetto is historically illiterate and dumb.Thousands marched in many countries last weekend against the repulsive action of the Israeli armed forces against Palestinians. A few hundred people stood outside the Israeli Embassy in Warsaw in protest at what is yet another example of Israel’s lashing out, counterproductively, at its Arab neighbours.
Thousands more marched in places like Amsterdam and London. And I would have marched with them were it not for the ridiculous slogans like “We are all Hamas now,” (oh, no you are not!) and “Gaza is the new Warsaw, ” (oh, no it isn’t). These are pantomime protestors protesting something they know little about.
Ambient music wiz Brian Eno,
at the rally in Trafalgar Square, called for Israel to stop making, “a Warsaw ghetto in the Middle East.”
Meanwhile, the Socialist Workers Party (yes, they do still exist, apparently) was handing out its
latest comment on the situation:
A quick look at a map shows that this has little to do with stopping Hamas from sending some missiles into sections of Israel, and everything to do with strangling an entire population of people, with the aim of either destroying the leadership that was democratically elected by the Palestinians themselves or dislodging that support from the Palestinian base. I think drawing analogies between what Israel is doing and what the Nazis did in the Warsaw Ghettos of Poland is entirely appropriate.
And of course
the bloggers think they have found in Israel the new Nazis.
After all, the situation faced by the Gazans is ominously similar to that faced by Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War Two. Penned in by the Nazi occupiers, the ghetto Jews suffered and starved and lived in endless fear of instantaneous death.
But it is not just the latest Israeli action that brought this analogy crawling out into the daylight. Back in 2003, two British leftwing MPs, Oona King and Jenny Tonge made the same charge.
The Guardian reported:
Israel's treatment of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip was today compared to the Nazis' creation of the Warsaw ghetto by MPs who recently returned from the region.
The controversial comparison, drawn by Oona King and Jenny Tonge, will anger the pro-Israel lobby and the visiting Israeli finance minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, who met Tony Blair at Downing Street this morning.
Labour MP Ms King, who is Jewish, said Gaza was "the same in nature" as the infamous Polish ghetto.
"No government should be behaving like that - least of all a Jewish government," the Bethnal Green and Bow MP said.
Do you like the bit about the “infamous
Polish ghetto”?
This comparison with the
Warsaw ghetto is mindless and moronic. Israel is not embarking on the Final Solution of the Palestinians.
Quite what they think they are doing in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem is a good question, however, and I am not even sure the Israeli government knows what exactly. Trying to stop the thousands of rockets that have been raining down on Israeli border towns? Well, even the Israeli side is saying it will never stop all of them. And if Israel thinks that Gazans are suddenly going to start blaming Hamas for being at the wrong end of Israeli rockets, guns and an invasion then they are very stupid indeed. Hamas will just get more popular with Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
And on the other side, it is not even clear why Hamas has been lobbing rockets in Israel for two years. These rockets, which have a very low degree of accuracy, can fulfil
no military objectives at all. None. So why does Hamas do it? Are they trying to illicit responses from the Israelis, like the one they are reaping now, in the hope of outside intervention from …well, who? The European Union?
Though the suffering of Gazans is great it is not on the same scale as what happened to those trapped in the Warsaw ghetto. Virtually nobody was left alive in the ghetto after the Nazis decided to trash it. And no Palestinians have been packed off the extermination camps.
Another difference is the amazing resistance the Jews put up against the Nazis, with hundreds of thousands of casualties in many of the ghettos across Poland.
I don’t see any of the above happening in Gaza right now. When protestors - who know little of either Gaza or Warsaw - shout slogans involving “holocaust”, or “genocide” or “Warsaw ghetto” they degrade all those terms and memories, and put off one person - me - who would like to join them in condemning Israel and its stupid, bloody attacks.