Warsaw Ghetto and Gaza: Disturbing Parallels

I saw a photo last week of a father

holding his 6-month-old baby son.

The father’s face was devoid of expression; the
child in his arms was dead.

The boy’s name was Mohammed Al-Borai;
he along with several others had been killed in a blast fired
indiscriminately by an Israeli cannon into the densely populated
areas of Gaza.

There were more photos, one of a group of young boys
holding flowers standing around the battered and
bloodstained body of the baby boy. That struck
me as the most poignant. I had been having a discussion
about the cause of suicide bombers among Palestinians
and it will be this image more than any other that will
concern me more than most. In their minds the young dead
boy will have more impact on their future than anything
any one might tell them.

It was then that I started to contemplate perhaps more
fully the plight of the Palestinians today
and the parallels in the history of the Jews that led to
their mass exodus from their own countries
to immigrate to the land that was at the time known as Palestine.

The Warsaw Ghetto during the Jewish Holocaust holds
special significance to the European Jews. It was a place
of oppression and the pathway to the ultimate death
of thousands of their population that has become symbolic
with their struggle for recognition. Yet what they are failing
to acknowledge as their descendants press
forward with their own brand of Jewish and Zionist idealism
is the parallel set of conditions that they are now imposing on
the Arab people of Palestine.

The Nazis rounded up the Jews of Poland and quartered
them in a small area of Warsaw, building a barricade around
the perimeter to prevent them leaving. So too have the
Israelis through conflict and force pushed many
of the Arab inhabitants out of Israel into an enclave that now
has a population density of 4,200 people per sq.
km which is 14 times that of the surrounding area of Israel
which has 360 people per sq. km.

The Nazis deprived the ghetto inhabitants of food and
essential supplies. So too has the Israeli government stopped
the flow of goods to the 1.4 million inhabitants of Gaza
by limiting the convoys of supplies to a mere trickle.

The Nazis reduced the average calorie intake of the Jewish
inhabitants of the ghetto to 241 calories per day. So too have
the Israelis reduced the calorie intake of the Palestinians in
Gaza. According to a UN report, it is presently at 61 percent
of the average daily requirements.

The Nazis restricted public utilities such as water and electricity.
So too has the Israeli government.

The Nazis restricted the inhabitants from adequate health care.
Israelis restrict the health care in Gaza by limiting the medical
supplies in or the treatment of cases that need to be done outside.

The Jewish inhabitants through the ZZB and the ZOB resisted the
oppression by the Nazis albeit too late and their rebellion was
brutally crushed without concern for who was in the way.
So too have the Palestinians of Gaza through their own resistance
organizations, in particular Hamas, rebelled against their
oppressors and so too do the Israelis use all means available
to crush the rebellion without concern for who is in the way
or who they maim or kill in doing so.

The Nazis destroyed the structure of the ghetto leveling it
to the ground in a broad quest to rout the resistance to
their oppression. Israelis indiscriminately level buildings
and the infrastructure in Gaza in a quest to rout out the
resistance to their oppression. The Nazis assigned the Jewish
people to a lesser status of all their inhabitants depriving them
of their rights as citizens and even as humans. Israel assigns
the refugees held in Gaza less status than is given to the Jews
worldwide and deprives the Palestinians of their rights
to return to their former lands.

The Nazis applied whatever was at their means to break
the will of the Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto. Israelis do
the same thing; they use whatever is at their means to break
the will of the Palestinians.

The Nazis killed the Jewish inhabitants of the
ghetto indiscriminately. Don’t the Israelis kill indiscriminately
the inhabitants in forcing their control over Gaza?

The Jews of Israel and elsewhere are quite right to protest
at the inhumanity of the Nazis in their treatment of them
and oblige the world not to allow the same situation to
happen again.

The Palestinians protest at the inhumanity of the Israeli
treatment, yet in a bizarre twist of events,
the world still allows the oppression to happen and continue.

It was after the Jews in the ghetto had been largely killed
or transported that the
world stood up and felt guilty in not acting sooner.

With the picture of Mohammed Al-Borai in my mind I
question when the world will stand
up and say: Enough is enough, there is not going to be a
repeat of the Warsaw Ghetto and particularly when its
perpetrators are those who suffered the most by its conduct.

There is a basic conflict of inhumanity occurring to the
Palestinian people of Gaza that the world is deliberately
ignoring. An inhumanity that was inflicted by the Nazis
on the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto is now more than ever
closely paralleling that which they are inflicting
on the people of Gaza. They learned a hard lesson but it was not
a lesson learned well. They have been given the power to practice
humanity but have decided instead that they will treat
the concerns of the Palestinians in the same inhumane
way the Nazis treated them.

A future monument will no doubt contain photos of
Mohammed Al-Borai in the arms
of his father and the world will decry the injustice.

— Steve Hutcheson has worked in crisis recovery in
Kosovo, Afghanistan and Indonesia
for the past several years and is now based in
Thailand.

http://www.steve-hutcheson.com/wordpress/