BY ED FELIEN
In her Dec. 9 article in The New Yorker, “In the Shadow of the Holocaust,” Masha Gessen makes the case that Gaza is like the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Israelis are acting like Nazis:
“For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every ten minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of ten Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.
“Presumably, the more fitting term ‘ghetto’ would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.”
H0locaust Memorial, Toronto
Adam Horowitz, in his Dec. 8 article in Mondoweiss, wrote: “I used to think the term ’Judeo-Nazis’ was excessive. I don’t any longer. Jerusalem’s Deputy Mayor Arieh King tweeted a photo of over a hundred naked Palestinians who were kidnapped by the Israeli military in Gaza, handcuffed, and sitting in the sand, guarded by Israeli soldiers. King wrote that ‘The IDF is exterminating the Nazi Muslims in Gaza’ and that ‘we must up the tempo.’ ‘If it were up to me,’ he added, ‘I would bring 4 D9’s [bulldozers], place them behind the sandy hills and give an order to bury all those hundreds of Nazis alive. They are not human beings and not even human animals, they are subhuman and that is how they should be treated,’ King said. He ended by repeating Netanyahu’s biblical Amalek genocidal reference: ‘Eradicate the memory of the Amalek, we will not forget.’”
What happened on Oct. 7 when Hamas ordered attacks inside Israel?
According to Israeli social security data, the final death toll was 695 Israeli civilians, 373 security forces, and 71 foreigners for a total of 1,139. Some of these casualties were a result of friendly fire—an IDF helicopter gunship that opened fire on Hamas attackers may have killed some of the people at the rock concert, and helicopter gunships were told to fire on everything near the border with Gaza. The IDF Hannibal Directive said it was better to kill terrorists holding hostages rather than let Hamas take hostages prisoner—even though this meant blowing up houses where hostages were prisoners and blowing up cars carrying hostages to Gaza.
Attacks on civilians are war crimes, and the role the Hamas leadership played in directing such attacks must be the subject of an investigation by the United Nations and the International Criminal Court.
‘Guernica’ by Pablo Picasso
And, by the same token, Israel must be held accountable for civilian casualties.
Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israelis were “committed to completely eliminating this evil from the world” and added: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.”
Deuteronomy 25:19: “When the Lord your God gives you rest from all the enemies around you in the land he is giving you to possess as an inheritance, you shall blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!”
Some people believe this is the word of God, and some other people believe this is Persian propaganda meant to justify the colonization of the Levant in the sixth century BCE.
How do the atrocities committed by the Israeli Defense Force in Palestine compare to the atrocities committed by the Nazis in World War II?
Fower beds near the wall of the firing squad mausoleum
The aerial bombardment of Guernica that inspired Picasso’s famous painting killed at most 1,654 people.
There is a white marble mausoleum in Gubbio, an idyllic country town in the middle of Italy, holding the bodies of 40 randomly picked men, women and children who were murdered by Nazi officials in reprisal for the murder of one German officer.
In the final extermination of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, German soldiers killed 7,000 Jews and sent another 7,000 to Treblinka gas chambers.
Israel has murdered more than 30,000 in Gaza in reprisal for the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7.
“Never again” is now.
