Thursday 31 January 2008

The only neo-Nazi state in the world today is the one built by 'survivors of the Holocaust'

It is an irony of life, or fate, that the only neo-Nazi state in the world today is the one built by survivors of the Holocaust and their descendents.

The Gaza Strip was a large Nazi concentration camp. As thousands of its inhabitants poured into Egypt through openings in the wall, the strip became another Warsaw Ghetto with the Israeli army depicted as the Nazi army and the Palestinians as the Polish Jews.

The Gazans rebelled this month, but the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto were 65 years ahead of them. Their Uprising goes back to January 1943 when they were equally killed by their invaders.

Even the walls the Israeli or Nazi army built around Gaza resemble the fences encircling the Warsaw Ghetto. According to the Holocaust history, the German Governor-General Hans Frank established on October 16, 1940 the Warsaw Ghetto he crammed with some 450,000 Jews, then closed off from the outside world by building a wall with armed guards.

The readers can easily replace the names of Sharon, Barack, or Olmert with the name of Frank, as they can replace the defense army and the assassination units with the SS Nazi men.

Between 1941 and 1943, starvation, disease, as well as deportations to concentration camps and extermination camps befell the Jews. Consequently, the ghetto population dropped from 450,000 to 70,000 Jews. In parallel, the Gaza Strip, with its almost two million inhabitants, has been surrounded by a wall and a new Nazi guard. Power was cut; food and drugs were withheld from the needy and the sick. I pause here to say that on the eve of my trip from London to Davos, and prior to the population influx into Egypt, I was having dinner with friends of mine when I received a mobile phone call from a man who said the minister of health wanted to talk to me.

Even though the connection was bad, I soon realized that I was speaking to the Palestinian Minister of Health in Gaza Strip. I do not know him in person; we never had any contact earlier. The minister told me the Gazans were dying slowly and in pain with no one to offer them help. Every time electricity is cut all of a sudden, he complained, a child, a pregnant woman or an old man dies in the hospital, as their frail bodies fail to endure the shock. My interlocutor may have been Bassem Naim - I am not sure. I have an email address with initials. I asked for a telephone number or address and then received the address in a message.

And so I found myself before a senior official who is announcing the death of his people to the whole world, while I couldn't but listen, share his sadness, and mumble futile encouragement words.

Only two days after the unexpected phone call, the Gazans fled through the wall to Egypt in search of water, drugs and food. In the same month in 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto staged an uprising against the Nazis, organized an armed resistance, and scored a preliminary victory. But in the next three months, the Nazis destroyed the ghetto and either killed the remaining population or deported them to concentration camps, mostly to Treblinka, where at least 56,000 people were killed according to official reports.

Palestinian figures are lower in comparison. Israel killed more than five thousand Palestinians, including 870 minors since September 29, 2000, i.e. since the outbreak of the Second Intifada. In the past days alone, it killed more than forty Palestinians against ten Israelis wounded by the resistance-fired rockets.

Those are not rockets but primitive fireworks Israel uses as a pretext to kill by resorting to pure Nazi practices. The Nazis used to kill 20 or 100 Jews for each Nazi citizen killed. The neo-Nazis in Israel are committed to the same ratio of killing because, just like the Aryan race, they consider themselves better than their enemies.

Were the Palestinians supposed to throw roses or rice at their enemies after forty or sixty years of occupation? In the past, the 'civilized' world feigned ignorance, claiming it was unaware of the magnitude of Nazi crimes until after 1943. But what excuse will it invoke today while Israeli crimes are reported by all the audio-visual media? Why do the Arabs and Muslims always expect the world to help them when they do not help themselves?

The neo-Nazi state would not have resorted to killing and destruction had it not been for the connivance of the Israel lobby in the United States; had it not been for the corrupt American Congress that can be easily sold and bought and for the radical American administration that vetoes any Security Council condemnation of Israel.

Israeli Nazism is a disgrace to the Jews who survived the Holocaust and are now committing similar crimes. It is a disgrace to the Christian West that killed the Jews and let the Palestinians pay the price. Last Sunday, the West commemorated the Holocaust, hushing up the memory of its victims' victims. It is a disgrace in particular to the American administration that offers Israel weapons to kill the Palestinians.

I clearly condemn the Nazis in the Israeli government and army. I equally condemn all those who support the crimes of the neo-Nazis, who constitute a minority compared to the majority of Jews who champion peace and about whom I have always written.

I have continuously opposed suicide attacks and asked for an end of rocket firing. Yet, nothing justifies the victims of the Holocaust and their descendents as they build the only Nazi state in the world in this century. By the same token, nothing justifies their perpetration of a "Pogrom" similar to the worst persecutions they endured in their long history stretching from the Romans, through the Third Reich and up to the Russian era.

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