#OccupiedPalestine #Gaza #WarsawGhetto
"'And now we ask: How can you eat, sleep, live? How guilty will you feel in your hearts if you do not move heaven and earth to come to our aid by the only means available to our people and as soon as possible? (...) For the love of God, do something now, and quickly."
This desperate cry for help, quoted by Saul Friedländer in his monumental work 'Nazi Germany and the Jews,' [1] is not new and does not come from the Palestinians in Gaza. It was made 81 years ago by Slovakian rabbi Michael Bar Weissmandl, who was trying to save the Jews of Slovakia from deportation—and death—in Auschwitz by appealing to the Zionist leadership in Palestine and to the American and British governments.
But that was not all. Weissmandl, whose appeals to the Allies to bomb both Auschwitz and the railways leading Slovak Jews to Auschwitz went unanswered, did not mince his words when he addressed them in very harsh terms, as well as the Zionist organization in Palestine, which systematically refrained from assisting Jews in Europe: 'And you—our brothers in Palestine, in all free countries, and you ministers of all these countries—how can you remain silent in the face of this great murder? Silent while thousands upon thousands, now six million Jews, were being murdered. Silent while tens of thousands are still being murdered or are about to be murdered? Their hearts are broken and they implore you for help while lamenting your cruelty. You are brutal and murderers because of the cold-blooded silence with which you observe'.
If the brave Weissmandl goes so far as to call the Zionists and the Anglo-American rulers, who refuse to help the victims of the Holocaust, murderers, then how would he describe the current rulers of countries such as the United States, Germany, France, and so many others who are not content to remain indifferent to Palestinian suffering, but go so far as to arm, finance, and diplomatically support the genocide of the State of Israel against the Palestinians in Gaza?
We already know the answer from those concerned, supported by the cream of neo-fascists and other nostalgics for the Third Reich around the world: 'what is happening in Gaza has nothing to do with the Holocaust, and any comparison is sacrilegious and... anti-Semitic'. And yet, thanks to the relentless efforts and perverse inventiveness of the political successors of those (Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir...) whom Einstein already called 'fascists' and 'terrorists' in 1948, [2] the comparisons are obvious because they are staring us in the face. For example, the one between the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw and the Palestinian ghetto in Rafah, cynically called a 'humanitarian city' (!) that Netanyahu and his accomplices are preparing to cram 600,000 starving Gazans on the brink of death into. And if there are any differences between the two ghettos, they are not necessarily in favor of the Israeli war criminals’ plan: the Rafah ghetto is already a field of ruins, unlike the Warsaw ghetto, which was only destroyed at the end and during the crushing of the heroic revolt of its last defenders. For the rest, it is the same organized famine and the same genocidal intentions and practices of the supremacist executioners who are not afraid to dehumanize their victims (Jews then, Palestinians today), calling them 'subhumans' or 'wild animals' and 'cockroaches that must be crushed...?"
https://www.cadtm.org/The-Rafah-Ghetto-like-the-Warsaw-Ghetto