The Warsaw/Gaza Ghetto
The Warsaw/Gaza Ghetto
UPDATE: someone compiled this incredible comparison of photos, which is available at Norman Finkelstein’s site.
Joseph Massad from Columbia University has an article called “The Gaza Ghetto Uprising”, where he compares the current Israeli attack on Gaza to the Nazi attack on the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw. Any relative analogy can be broken. To make an analogy is not to say two things are the same. Just that they are the same in important respects. In this case, the gigantic disparity between the victims and the aggressors and the complicity of the rest of the world.
A note here. In this analogy, Palestinians are the Jews. And I do think of blaming the Palestinians for supposedly bringing this on themselves or discussing how poor their strategy is, is at about the same moral level as blaming the Jews during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The Jews were heroes, facing unstoppable enemies and the indifference of the world. In those respects, the analogy applies.
In any case, Joseph Massad is not the first to make this comparison. It was made in 2002 before Israel massacred hundreds of people in the West Bank and Gaza in what Tanya Reinhart described as Israel’s moral low point (to that date – since then Israel has gone much lower). That quote from an Israeli military officer inspired an artist friend of mine to create this piece. Please feel free to use it or share it.
