By John Pickard
Writing in Haaretz, Gideon Levy invokes the memory of the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis. This was the heroic resistance of the remnants of the Warsaw Jewish population, who refused to acquiesce meekly to being transported to extermination camps.
The uprising began in mid-April, 1943, when the occupants of the ghetto refused to surrender to the police. The SS immediately ordered the complete destruction of the ghetto and it was captured block by block over the next two months. Around 13,000 Jewish residents were killed , half of them burned alive or suffocated by smoke.
Why is Levy invoking the name of Mordechai Anielewicz, the leader of the Jewish Combat Organisation in Warsaw? Because, he writes, if Anilewicz was alive today, he “would have died of shame and disgrace” after hearing of the latest plans of the Israeli defence minister – with the backing of Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu – to establish a so-called “humanitarian city” in Southern Gaza.
What would the parents say to the son?
“Anielewicz would never have believed”, Levy writes, “that anyone would dare conceive of such a diabolical plan 80 years after the Holocaust”. The defence minister putting forward the idea of this “city”, Israel Katz, is the son of Holocaust survivors, who lost most of their own families to extermination camps. “What would they have to say to their son?” Levy asks. Knowing what was going on today, Levy suggests, Anilewicz would have died a second time, “this time from a broken heart.”
Left Horizons has carefully avoided a facile comparison between the Nazis treatment of the Jews of Europe, and the policies of the IDF towards Palestinians in the occupied territories. The Nazis’ extermination project was a massive, one could say an ‘industrialised’, scheme, involving not only camps, but an entire railroad system, schedules and other large-scale logistical considerations. Where camps were beyond reach, Jews were simply rounded up and shot by the thousands around the edges of mass graves.
Six million Jews lost their lives in a deliberate and calculated act of mass murder. As brutal as the IDF have been in the West Bank and even in Gaza, they have not yet emulated the Nazis ‘Final Solution’.
But it also true that the methods of the IDF in their dealings with Palestinians – shooting unarmed people for waiting for food at the wrong time or place – is an echo of the atrocities committed against Jews in the Second World War and individual acts of brutality and wanton murders do bear comparison with those of occupying powers, including the Nazis.
Serb massacres in Bosnia were described as ‘genocide’
This year, we are marking the thirtieth anniversary of the massacres in Bosnia. The leaders of NATO then were prepared to describe the massacres conducted by the Serbian militias and regularly army as “genocide”. NATO aircraft bombed Serbia, let us remember. British troops were sent as part of a NATO contingent to Kosovo in 1999 to prevent a massacre by Serbs there. Had it not been for the fact that Israel is an “ally” of the west, exactly the same definition and policies could be applied here. Using the same logic as was applied in the Balkans in 1995-1999, NATO ought to be bombing IDF bases.
The scandal over Gaza is that there is not a peep out of most western politicians about the nature or scale of the killings. Like those in the Labour Party, in hock to the Labour Friends of Netanyahu, who are incapable or unwilling to say what is being written in Haaretz by an Israeli Jew. If he was a member of Starmer’s Labour Party, accusing Israel of creating a “ghetto” for Palestinians, this “proud Israeli Jew”, as he once described himself, would no doubt be expelled for ‘antisemitism’.
Gideon Levy complains, with reason, that the proposal for a “humanitarian city” is presented as if it were a legitimate topic for discussion. “Who is for a concentration camp and who is against it?”, he writes. Levy goes further than most even on the left here have put the issue. “From there”, he writes, “the path may be shortened to an even more horrific idea: someone might suggest next an extermination camp…” This might be written ‘tongue in cheek’, but it has a serious side, Levy adding, “Israel is killing Gaza’s residents en masse anyway.”
He also argues, correctly, that the transition from ‘democracy’ to Nazism did not happen overnight. Genocides, he writes, do not start immediately, but mature through phases. They usually start with “dehumanisation” and “demonisation” which are the everyday experiences of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians. Prominent Israeli politicians have openly said that there are “no innocent” people in Gaza.
“Losing all connection to humanity”
Levy suggests that in Gaza, we are in the final phase before a full-blown genocide. “Germany transferred its Jews to the east; the Armenian genocide also began with deportation, which back then was called an “evacuation.” Today, we are talking about an evacuation to the south of Gaza”. This is more than a hint about what is clearly and unambiguously Israeli policy – articulated also by Trump – to ‘relocate’ (ie expel) Palestinians from Gaza.
For years, Gideon Levy writes, he has avoided comparing the Nazis to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. But, he says, “nothing prepared us” for the idea of the “humanitarian city.”
“Israel no longer has any moral right to use the word ‘humanitarian.’ Whoever turned the Gaza Strip into what it is – a mass graveyard and a wasteland of ruins – and treats it with equanimity has lost all connection to humanity”.
We sincerely hope that Levy’s words find some echo somewhere within Israeli society. His ideas are already common currency among a growing majority of workers and youth around the world, including in the USA. There are many reasons for socialists to demand the resignation of Starmer and the whole right-wing cabal around him – people who have no connection whatsoever to the best traditions of the labour movement. But Gaza alone shows that this ‘Labour’ cabinet have also “lost all connection to humanity” and deserve to be kicked out. The Labour Party has had enough of Tory-lite, it needs Labour leaders.
[The feature photograph, from Wikimedia Commons, here, is a well-known picture of the aftermath of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising]
