Given to a public meeting initiating our organization, Not in Our Name (NION), Jew Opposing Zionism. Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip was viewed in contrast to the Nazis’ creation of the Warsaw ghetto.
Let’s begin in Warsaw
On October 16, 1940, the authorities in Warsaw in Nazi-occupied Poland, ordered the city’s 440,000 Jews to leave their homes and move into a tiny area, the Jewish ghetto. Four weeks later, the Nazi sealed off the Ghetto with a 10-foot wall.
Food rations in the Ghetto were a small fraction of the minimum for survival. The inhabitants improvised smuggling food in the Ghetto. Still, by 1942, more than 100,000 in the Ghetto had died of starvation and disease.In July 1942, the Nazis began shipping the surviving 300,000 residents to be killed in death camps.
In January 1943, with 70,000 residents left, resistance groups began armed actions that halted deportations for a time. On April 19, they launched their final battle, the Ghetto uprising.
A month later, the Nazis had burned and bombed the buildings, and raised the Ghetto to the ground. The Nazis had physically destroyed the ghetto and killed all but a handful of its inhabitants.
The story of the Warsaw Ghetto grips the human imagination as an epic of suffering, destruction, and courageous resistance. Unique in many ways, the Jewish Holocaust has much to teach us about racist oppression and about the present struggle of the Palestinians.
The destruction of Warsaw’s Jews forms part of the Nazi holocaust, which has shaped my life. My family was trapped in a ghetto in nearby Piotrkow. My mother died in Auschwitz and I barely escaped the same fate. Like many others, I have sought to resist the forces of war and oppression that we saw in Nazism, and that still live on.
Hitler’s method of the big lie
Today we see something horrific. Many of the methods of Nazism are being employed against the Palestinians, with the ultimate aim of wiping them out as a people. And this horror is justified as a way of doing honour to the victims of the holocaust. What a lie!
Let’s recall that the U.S., Canada, and Britain were complicit in the murder of Europe’s Jews. When the Nazi campaign against the Jews was in full swing, Canada’s prime minister at that time, Mackenzie King, praised Hitler (see Irving Abella, None is Too Many). Few voices protested Hitler’s mass murders. The U.S. and Canada excluded Jewish refugees.
Today, Canada’s Prime Minister joins in the blockade against the Palestinians because— he says— Hamas is plotting genocide against Israel. This is another horrifying lie.
We see many similarities between the Nazi holocaust and what is being inflicted today on the inhabitants of Gaza.
I’m going to talk about three kinds of similarities: methods, motivation, and resistance.
The Methods of Nazism
The Nazi holocaust began as a project of ethnic cleansing, to remove from Europe a Jewish population of about 10 million. The Nazis considered shipping the Jewish people outside of Europe, but finding no way to do this, decided to imprison them in ghettos and ultimately, to kill them all.
Across Nazi-occupied Europe, Jewish people were robbed of their land and belongings, driven from their homes, and herded into ghettos and concentration camps.
This is the fate that so many Palestinians have also suffered.
The Nazi army and police expelled the Jewish people of Warsaw from society and confined them in a walled open-air prison. The idea was to keep everyone on each side of the wall ignorant, to segregate the Jewish people as beings who were less than human, and whose suffering would be invisible and unknown.
That is also the purpose of the Gaza ghetto.
In the countryside around Warsaw, Jews were hunted down and thrown into the Ghetto. Overcrowding became extreme – six times as high per square meter as outside the walls.
The food ration was a tenth what it was on the outside. (Germans: 5,500, Poles: 2,500, Jews: 250 calories per day)
The water was dirty, electricity service, sporadic at best. Sanitation conditions were disastrous; medical facilities, scanty. Few inhabitants could find work. Epidemics began to spread, Like in Gaza.
Jews were harassed and humiliated at checkpoints. Tens of thousands were killed arbitrarily, including the innocent children. Acts of defiance and resistance were met by collective punishment, claiming the lives of many taken at random.
There was a Jewish government and Jewish police in the Ghetto, but they were controlled by the Nazi authorities who used them to repress and punish the Jewish people.
To anyone who knows the conditions in Palestine today. All this sounds very familiar. Almost everything I have said applies to Gaza today.
Motivation
Anti-Semitism, the hatred of Jews, was based on the memory of Jews in Europe as merchants and money-lenders who were part of the exploitation of peasants in medieval times.
As system the of capitalism arose, this reality ebbed away and anti Semitism was reconfigured as racism. Jews were now regarded as not European but Asiatic and therefore inferior.
Right-wing political parties and institutions encouraged anti-Jewish sentiment, using it to divide working people against each other.
The Nazis specialized in this, calling on all so-called “Aryans,” an invented race of Europeans, to unite against the Jewish people.
In the 1930s, the capitalist world fell into economic and social crisis. The Nazis and other right-wing forces blamed the collapse on Jewish bankers and merchants.
This racist crusade against the Jews helped justify the German rulers’ plan to expand and conquer new markets and sources of raw materials. Nazi Germany set out to conquer and colonize Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, getting rid of the Jewish people as part of a wholesale slaughter.
But racism is not a Nazi invention. Racism is the ideology of Euro-American imperialism. The British rulers used racism to justify building an empire around the world, enslaving the Africans and pillaging India. The U.S. rulers used racism in bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The U.S. empire today rests on racism in its own country through the genocide against indigenous peoples, oppression of Blacks and immigrants, and also on a world scale. This is true also of Canada.
And this racism bears down today against the Arab and Palestinian people.
Disunity and Resistance
The Nazis came to power in 1933 in Germany, a country with advanced labour, progressive, and cultural movements. Workers in the millions supported the Communist and Socialist parties. Tragically, these parties did not unite against Hitler and failed to resist the Nazi takeover. It was a demoralizing defeat for the peoples of the world.
Fascism reigned in Italy and fought its way to power in Spain.
From 1940 to 1944, fascists occupied and ruled France.
Stalin’s purges and mass murders in the Soviet Union included the killing of the Polish Communist leaders and dissolution of their party which had had influence over hundreds of thousands of people.
The British and U.S. governments made war on Germany but took no action to assist the Polish Jewish population. As a matter of fact, these governments denied entry to those escaping the Nazi terror.
In the late 1930s, Jewish people in Poland were hit by sharpened legal discrimination and violent attacks. After the German takeover, the main resistance force in Poland, the Home Army, was hostile to Jews and offered almost no support. By and large the Jewish people stood alone in the world.
At first, most Jewish leaders advised their people to obey the Nazis, offer no provocations, and lay low until the crisis passed. Even when deportations began, many at first believed the Nazi lie that they were being resettled.
Late in 1942, reports reached the Ghetto about the death camps. The tragic news vindicated the underground groups that were determined to fight. They made painstaking preparations doing what they could to smuggle arms and ammunition into the Ghetto.
The final Nazi attack was carried out by 9,000 troops equipped with tanks, cannons, and planes, with a huge back-up force. Against them were 1,000 inexperienced and starving Ghetto warriors, armed with homemade grenades, pistols, knives, and several thousand bullets.
Their struggle was doomed, but they felt they had no choice but to fight. They were indeed heroic. The people of Gaza face all these challenges. We must help make sure that they, unlike the Warsaw fighters, do not stand alone.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was a Heroic Example
The Warsaw Ghetto revolt was the first urban uprising against Nazi rule. Others followed. It inspired resistance in many other Polish ghettos and concentration camp.
In some other parts of Europe, the Jews found allies.
In Nazi-occupied Soviet territory, the Jewish resistance worked with the pro-Soviet partisan groups.
In France, the Jewish resistance found allies among socialist groups and other social forces. I was then in France, and it is because of this united resistance that I am here today.
Today, we do homage to our sisters and brothers in the Warsaw Ghetto, and to all the victims of Nazism, by pledging that no victims of racism will stand alone.
We Must Fight for Freedom for the Palestinians
Today the United States, with Ottawa’s support, wages war in the Middle East. It wants the oil; it wants to control the entire region. That’s why they conduct war in Iraq and Afghanistan and threaten war against Iran.
Their strongest ally is Israel, whom they finance and arm to the teeth.
Israel has its own criminal reasons to see the Palestinians defeated. The Zionists want their exclusively Jewish state to expand and dominate the region. Racism is used by the Zionists like the Nazis used it against the Jewish people.
True, the Zionists do not aim to kill all the Palestinians. But they do aim to kill enough of them, to punish them sufficiently, so they will disappear from Palestine and disappear as a people from the earth’s family of nations.
And that, too, is a form of genocide.
Today the vast majority of Palestinians have been dispossessed and driven from their lands. Those who remain in occupied Palestine are confined to small enclaves, enclosed and surrounded by high walls and intimidating checkpoints. They are humiliated, even forced to crawl naked.
Gaza resembles Hitler’s ghettos.
The Palestinians are sealed off and deprived of the necessities of life. Arbitrary attacks strike them down, killing large numbers. There is a Palestinian authority, but it has been subjugated to the will of the Zionists.
Israel’s deputy defense minister, Matan Vilnai, has made a horrifying threat against the people of Gaza. If military resistance to Israel intensifies, he says Palestinians “will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust.” A bigger holocaust: the reference to Hitler’s actions is clear. This means that Israel want to physically wipe the Gaza population off the map.
Powerful forces have tried to erase the crime against the Palestinians from the world’s public memory, like the Nazis attempted in Poland.
But the Palestinian people have survived, and their resistance continues, with the increasing sympathy of peoples around the world. The truth about the crime against the Palestinians cannot be silenced.
The Palestinians are not as isolated as the Jewish people were in Poland under Hitler. The Palestinians are holding their own despite tremendous difficulties.
And that is where we come in.
We Need a United World Campaign.
If the crime against the Palestinians prevails, it would mean that Hitler’s spirit had triumphed.
To be true to the memory of the victims of the Jewish Holocaust and of all Hitler’s victims, we must defend the Palestinians.
We in Canada must join their resistance struggle.
We need a united campaign for peace and justice for Palestine, for a society in which all inhabitants, Jewish and Palestinians, have an equal voice and equal rights.
All the Palestinians expelled from their country should have the right to return.
The day will come when the Gaza ghetto wall will fall and we will see liberation of the Palestinians. It will be a new day for freedom for all of us around the world.
May the spirit of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising triumph in Gaza!
Let us work together for that day of liberation, and against the war in the Middle East.
Freedom for the Palestinians!