By Remi Kanazi

Free speech is not without consequence. In the United States, for example, criticism of Israel is tantamount to heresy.

Former US President Jimmy Carter felt a societal backlash last year after the release of his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, which condemned Israel’s apartheid-style policies in the occupied Palestinian territories. Consequently, and without foundation, Carter was branded by many in the American press as a one-sided, anti-Semitic propagandist. Similarly, Harvard professor Stephen Walt and University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer were lambasted for a paper the two co-authored that discussed the power of the Israel lobby and its adverse effect on American policy. Additionally, Norman Finkelstein, an esteemed professor at Depaul University and author of the bestselling book, The Holocaust Industry, witnessed a McCarthyite-style campaign mounted against him when he came up for tenure. Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors, has been an outspoken critic of Israel’s human rights abuses and of pro-Israel apologist and Harvard professor, Alan Dershowitz. Predictably, it was Dershowitz who led the anti-tenure campaign against him; ultimately, Finkelstein was not only denied tenure, but he lost his job at Depaul.

The attacks against Carter, Finkelstein, Walt and Mearsheimer serve as a few well-known examples of the consequences writers and intellectuals face when they breach the line and criticize Israel. Furthermore, the condemnation writers and intellectuals of Arab descent face are invariably higher than Jews of conscience, former presidents, and highly regarded academics. As a result, many writers often acquiesce to the demands of the mainstream. Their self-censorship usually appears in the form of “toning down the message,” be it to please editors or critics—essentially to conform to the reality of purported pragmatism. Yet, this “pragmatism” is a euphemism for acceptance of a repressive status quo and is analogous to the “necessary” practical thinking that silenced a multitude of commentators during the Oslo years - the supposed time of peace. Unsurprisingly, untold Palestinian suffering followed as a result of increased settlement expansion, land confiscation, checkpoints and seizures, and the ultimate failure of Camp David 2000.

Shying away from perceived controversial matters may help to protect a mainstream career, but the intent of a political analyst should not be to produce works of fiction. The vast majority of Americans weren’t open to criticism of US policy during the run-up to the war on Iraq, mainly due to the media’s complicity in promoting the war, but criticism was still the appropriate course of action based on the facts, and Americans would have been better off for it today.

A man who combined principle, activism, and human appeal quite masterfully was distinguished educator and commentator, Edward Said. In the realm of academia and Middle East analysis, Said was by no means viewed as the quintessential radical. Nonetheless, his positions were radical when juxtaposed with “conventional wisdom”: he was a proponent of the one-state solution, an unwavering critic of the Israeli government, and an ardent supporter of the ostensibly controversial right of return. Said was still heavily criticized throughout his career and endured incessant attacks by his detractors, yet his accessible personality and articulate message kept him relevant.

Sadly, Said’s relative acceptance has been the exception rather than the rule. In recent years, there has been increased emphasis on putative pragmatic dialogue. However, this accentuation on so-called rational and balanced thinking has proven to be little more than a sinister means to pressure the oppressed to accept the position of the oppressor. The greatest leaders of the last hundred years didn’t shy away from controversy; they remained persistent, and saw their visions brought to fruition; be they Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, or Mahatma Gandhi. Nevertheless, one cannot overlook that even paramount figures have been castigated for “overstepping” their boundaries, namely Martin Luther King who was chided for speaking out against the war in Vietnam, imperialism, and social injustices that plagued the US.

This week, Palestinians across the US commemorated 60 years of displacement. Yet, the lens the Palestinian people are expected to look through under the pragmatist vision is one that sees a dispossessed people as necessary victims for a righteous state to take form. Unfortunately, waves of writers and commentators continue to adopt this line in fear of retribution, in exchange for nicer houses and comfortable livings, or a combination of both. That is their free will. Free speech is not without consequence. Nonetheless, losing piece of mind is the only repercussion a writer should fear.

-Remi Kanazi is the editor of the forthcoming anthology of poetry, Poets For Palestine, which can be pre-ordered at www.PoetsForPalestine.com. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact him at: remroum@gmail.com.

Bertrand Russell wrote: The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was ‘given’ by a foreign power to another people.

By Ron Forthofer

After WWII, political pressure increased for a Jewish state instead of a homeland in Palestine. This pressure was due in part to the terrible guilt felt by people in the U.S. and other nations over the horrific suffering of several groups during the Nazi era, especially that of the Jews during the Holocaust. The pictures detailing the wretched conditions of Jews barely surviving the concentration and extermination camps and of the piles of bones from some of the millions killed were incredibly powerful.

In addition, a weakened Britain was ready to end its control of the Palestine Mandate partly due to the burden of maintaining 100,000 troops there and partly due to the guerilla campaign waged by Jewish terrorists. One additional factor in the British decision to end the mandate by May 1948 was the intense pressure put on Britain after it prevented Holocaust survivors from entering Palestine.

This decision by the British prompted the United Nations to form the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) on May 15, 1947. The committee issued a majority report on August 31, 1947 recommending the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states and an U.N. administered area around and including Jerusalem. Three members (India, Iran and Yugoslavia) of the eleven nations on the committee voted instead in favor of a single federal state with separate Arab and Jewish constituent states. Australia abstained. The U.N. General Assembly discussed the partition resolution in November.

Before that session, on September 22nd, Loy Henderson, director of the State Department’s Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs, warned Secretary of State George C. Marshall of the dangers of partition. Here is an excerpt of his comments:

“The UNSCOP [U.N. Special Committee on Palestine] Majority Plan is not only unworkable; if adopted, it would guarantee that the Palestine problem would be permanent and still more complicated in the future.

“The proposals contained in the UNSCOP plan are not only not based on any principles of an international character, the maintenance of which would be in the interests of the United States, but they are in definite contravention to various principles laid down in the [U.N.] Charter as well as to principles on which American concepts of Government are based.

“These proposals, for instance, ignore such principles as self-determination and majority rule. They recognize the principle of a theocratic racial state and even go so far in several instances as to discriminate on grounds of religion and race against persons outside of Palestine.”

The U.S. State Department was firmly against the partition. However President Truman overrode the Department. In 1945, Truman spoke to four U.S. ambassadors to Arab countries and bluntly said: “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”

On November 29th, U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181 calling for the partition passed. Following the adoption of the resolution, Arab countries proposed to query the International Court of Justice on the competence of the General Assembly to partition a country against the wishes of the majority of its inhabitants. This attempt was narrowly defeated.

Jews generally welcomed the partition plan while Palestinians and Arabs strongly opposed it. Palestinians supported a one democratic state solution. They also were outraged that the U.N. General Assembly was taking their land against their will and giving it to another people. For perspective, in 1947 Jews owned about 6% of the land in Palestine and accounted for about 1/3 of the population. The partition gave Jews control of about 55% of Palestine, including most of the coastal area.

Some of the numerous people who have commented on the injustice of this situation are quoted next. In 1956 David Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli prime minister, told Nahum Goldman, the president of the World Jewish Congress: “If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country . . . There has been anti-semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s prime minister-designate in 1947, made a similar point saying the Zionist plan neglected “one not unimportant fact…Palestine was not a wilderness or an empty, uninhabited place. It was already somebody else’s home.”

In 1956, Moshe Dayan, a military hero to Israelis, said: “What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived.”

Shortly before his death in 1970, Bertrand Russell, one of the leading philosophers of Western thought during the 20th century, summarized the issue very well, saying:

“The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was ‘given’ by a foreign power to another people for the creation of a new state. The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their numbers increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict. No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled en masse from their country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate? A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East.”

After the partition passed, fighting began almost immediately and quickly escalated. On March 19th, 1948 the situation had become so critical that the U.S. renounced partition as unworkable and called for a U.N. trusteeship. It was too late.

Commenting on the fighting, Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote: “In truth, however, the Jews committed far more atrocities than the Arabs and killed far more civilians and POWs in deliberate acts of brutality in the course of 1948.” As a result of these atrocities and other military actions, about 250,000 Palestinians had already fled their homes before Israel declared its independence on May 14th. Fighting intensified when, on May 15th, neighboring Arab countries sent troops to aid the beleaguered Palestinians. Contrary to Israeli propaganda, Israeli forces substantially outnumbered Arab forces in battles and were also better armed. By the end of the fighting in 1949, Israel controlled 78% of Palestine and had driven approximately 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. These Palestinians lost their lands, homes and most of their possessions. Israel also destroyed well over 400 Palestinian villages. There is debate about whether or not the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians was planned or simply happened as a result of the fighting. It is clear that the removal of large numbers of Palestinians was necessary if Israel were to be a majority Jewish state.

On December 11, 1948 the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 194 that, among other items, called for the right of return of the Palestinian refugees to their homes or for compensation to those choosing not to return. Unfortunately, the world has not yet dealt with the terrible effects of the Nakba.

The past and current Israeli dispossessions of Palestinians represent grave violations of human rights. However, it is arguable that the U.N. partition resolution was an even greater crime. In a misguided effort to atone for the horrific human tragedy of the Holocaust, the U.S. led the effort that forced Palestinians to pay the price for atonement. The partition plan stole Palestinian land and gave it to another people without much if any consideration for Palestinian rights. Truman’s support for this partition trumped U.S. interests, morality and international law, not to mention the rights of Palestinians. Shamefully, the U.S. continues to support the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians.

-Ron Forthofer is a retired professor and former Green Party candidate for Congress in 2000 and for Governor of Colorado in 2002. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

Johann Hari, The Independent

In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate and silence — and to a large degree, it works. There is nobody these self-appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as anti-Jewish: liberal Jews, rabbis, even Holocaust survivors.

My own case isn’t especially important, but it illustrates how the wider process of intimidation works. I have worked undercover at both the Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to expose the Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to challenge the anti-Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling me “a Jew-lover”, “a Zionist-homo pig” and more.

Ah, but wait. I have also reported from Gaza and the West Bank. Last week, I wrote an article that described how untreated sewage was being pumped from illegal Israeli settlements on to Palestinian land, contaminating their reservoirs. This isn’t controversial. It has been documented by Friends of the Earth, and I have seen it with my own eyes.

The response? There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered. Instead, some of the most high- profile “pro-Israel” writers and media monitoring groups — including Honest Reporting and Camera — said I am an anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people in North London to articles like mine. Vast numbers of e-mails came flooding in calling for me to be sacked.

Any attempt to describe accurately the situation for Palestinians is met like this. If you recount the pumping of sewage onto Palestinian land, “Honest Reporting” claims you are reviving the anti-Semitic myth of Jews “poisoning the wells.” If you interview a woman whose baby died in 2002 because she was detained — in labor — by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint within the West Bank, “Honest Reporting” will say you didn’t explain “the real cause”: the election of Hamas in, um, 2006. And on, and on.

The former editor of Israel’s leading newspaper, Ha’aretz, David Landau, calls the behavior of these groups “nascent McCarthyism”. Those responsible hold extreme positions of their own that place them way to the right of most Israelis. Alan Dershowitz and Melanie Phillips are two of the most prominent figures sent in to attack anyone who disagrees with the Israeli right. Dershowitz is a lawyer, Harvard professor and author of The Case For Israel. He sees ethnic cleansing as a trifling matter, writing: “Political solutions often require the movement of people, and such movement is not always voluntary … It is a fifth-rate issue analogous in many respects to some massive urban renewal.” If a prominent American figure takes a position on Israel to the left of this, Dershowitz often takes to the airwaves to call them anti-Semites and bigots.

The journalist Melanie Phillips performs a similar role in Britain. Last year a group called Independent Jewish Voices was established with this mission statement: “Palestinians and Israelis alike have the right to peace and security.” Jews including Mike Leigh, Stephen Fry and Rabbi David Goldberg joined. Phillips swiftly dubbed them “Jews For Genocide”, and said they “encourage” the “killers” of Jews. Where does this come from? She says the Palestinians are an “artificial” people who can be collectively punished because they are “a terrorist population.” She believes that while “individual Palestinians may deserve compassion, their cause amounts to Holocaust denial as a national project”. Honest Reporting quotes Phillips as a model of reliable reporting.

These individuals spray accusations of anti-Semitism so liberally that by their standards, a majority of Jewish Israelis have anti-Semitic tendencies. Dershowitz said Jimmy Carter’s decision to speak to the elected Hamas government “border[ed] on anti-Semitism.” A Ha’aretz poll last month found that 64 percent of Israelis want their government to do just that.

As US president, Jimmy Carter showed his commitment to Israel by giving it more aid than anywhere else and brokering the only peace deal with an Arab regime the country has ever enjoyed. He also wants to see a safe and secure Palestine alongside it — so, last year, he wrote a book called Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. It is a bland and factual canter through the major human rights reports.

There is nothing there you can’t read in the mainstream Israeli press every day. Carter’s comparison of life on the West Bank (not within Israel) to Apartheid South Africa is not new. The West Bank is ruled in the interests of a small Jewish minority; it is bisected by roads for the Jewish settlers from which Palestinians are banned. The Israeli human rights group B’tselem says this “bears striking similarities to the racist Apartheid regime”.

Yet for repeating these facts in the US, Carter has widely called “a racist”. Several universities have even refused to let the ex-president speak to their students.

These campus battles often succeed. Norman Finkelstein is a political scientist in the US whose parents were both Jewish survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. They lost every blood relative. He made his reputation exposing a hoax called From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters which claimed that Palestine was virtually empty when Zionist settlers arrived, and the people claiming to be Palestinians were mostly impostors who had come from local areas to cash in. Finkelstein showed it to be scarred by falsified figures and gross misreading of sources. From that moment on, he was smeared as an anti-Semite by those who had lauded the book. But it was when Finkelstein revealed two years ago that Alan Dershowitz had, without acknowledgement, drawn wholesale from Peters’ hoax for his book The Case For Israel, that the worst began.

Dershowitz campaigned to make sure Finkelstein was denied tenure at his university. He even claimed that Finkelstein’s mother — who made it through Maidenek and two slave-labor camps — had collaborated with the Nazis. The campaign worked. Finkelstein was let go by De Paul University, simply for speaking the truth.

Are the likes of Dershowitz and Phillips and Honest Reporting becoming more shrill because they can sense they are losing the argument? Liberal Jews — the majority — are now setting up rivals to the hard-right organizations they work with, because they believe this campaign of demonization is damaging us all. It damages the Palestinians, because it prevents honest discussion of their plight. It damages the Israelis, because it pushes them further down an aggressive and futile path. And it damages diaspora Jews, because it makes real anti-Semitism harder to deal with.

We need to look the witch hunters in the eye and say, as Joseph Welch said to Joe McCarthy himself: “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

The illegal settlement of Beitar Illit. Israel plans to build nearly 2000 new apartments in Jewish settlements in the West Bank in 2008, the largest number in a decade, an Israeli newspaper reported on Wednesday, April 2, 2008. The homes are all being built in the large settlement blocks Israel wants to keep as part of a final peace deal with the Palestinians, including Giv’at Ze’ev, Ma’aleh Adumim and Beitar Illit near Jerusalem, Ariel in the north and Qiryat Arba in the southern West Bank, Yediot Ahronot reported. (Photo: Aljazeera)

“Land Grab: Israel’s Settlement Policy in the West Bank”

Published in May 2002.
B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, endeavors to document and educate the Israeli public and policymakers about human rights violations in the Occupied Territories, combat the phenomenon of denial prevalent among the Israeli public, and help create a human rights culture in Israel.

Historical Background

Since 1967, each Israeli government has invested significant resources in establishing and expanding settlements in the Occupied Territories. As a result of this policy, approximately 380,000 Israeli citizens now live on the settlements on the West Bank, including those established in East Jerusalem.

The [peace] process between Israel and the Palestinians did not impede settlement activities, which continued under the Labor government of Yitzhak Rabin (1992-1996) and all subsequent governments. These governments built thousands of new housing units, claiming that this was necessary to meet the “natural growth” of the existing population. As a result, between 1993 and 2000 the number of settlers on the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem) increased by almost 100 percent.

International Law

International humanitarian law prohibits [an] occupying power [from transferring] citizens from its own territory to the occupied territory (Fourth Geneva Convention, article 49). The Hague Regulations prohibit the occupying power [from undertaking] permanent changes in the occupied area, unless these are due to military needs in the narrow sense of the term, or unless they are undertaken for the benefit of the local population.

The establishment of the settlements leads to the violation of the rights of the Palestinians as enshrined in international human rights law. Among other violations, the settlements infringe on the rights to self-determination, equality, property, an adequate standard of living, and freedom of movement.

Taking Control of the Land

Israel has used a complex legal and bureaucratic mechanism to take control of more than fifty percent of the land in the West Bank. This land has been used mainly to establish settlements and create reserves of land for the future expansion of the settlements.

Israel uses the seized lands to benefit the settlements, while prohibiting the Palestinian public from using them in any way. This use is forbidden and illegal in itself. As the occupier in the Occupied Territories, Israel is not permitted to ignore the needs of an entire population and to use land intended for public needs solely to benefit the settlers.

The Policy of Annexation and Local Government

The Israeli administration has applied most aspects of Israeli law to the settlers and the settlements, thus effectively annexing them to the State of Israel…This annexation has resulted in a regime of legalized separation and discrimination. This regime is based on the existence of two separate legal systems in the same territory, with the rights of individuals being determined by their nationality.

The areas of jurisdiction of the Jewish local authorities, most of which extend far beyond the built-up area, are defined as “closed military zones” in the military orders. Palestinians are forbidden to enter these areas without authorization from the Israeli military commander. Israeli citizens, Jews from throughout the world and tourists are all permitted to enter these areas without the need for special permits.

Encouragement of Migration to Settlements

The Israeli governments have implemented a consistent and systematic policy intended to encourage Jewish citizens to migrate to the West Bank…settlers and other Israeli citizens working or investing in the settlements are entitled to significant financial benefits.

The Planning System

The planning system on the West Bank, implemented by the Civil Administration, is one of the most powerful mechanisms of the Israeli occupation. As with the other bureaucratic systems, the planning system operates on two distinct tracks: one for Jews and the other for Palestinians.

This system is responsible for transforming the map of the West Bank because it is the planning system that approves the outline plans for the settlements and issues building permits for the establishment and expansion of settlements and for the construction of by-pass roads. Israel changed the composition of the planning institutions on the West Bank and transferred numerous planning powers to the Jewish local authorities, while expropriating these powers from Palestinian planning institutions.

While facilitating Jewish settlement, the planning system works vigorously to restrict the development of Palestinian communities. The main tool used to this end is to reject requests for building permits filed by Palestinians. In most cases, the requests are rejected on the grounds that the regional outline plans – approved in the 1940s during the British Mandate – prohibit construction in the relevant area of land. These plans do not reflect the development needs of the Palestinian population, and the planning system deliberately refrains from preparing revised plans. Houses built by Palestinians without building permits are demolished by the Civil Administration, even in cases when the construction took place on private land.

Conclusions

Israel has created in the Occupied Territories a regime of separation based on discrimination, applying two separate systems of law in the same area and basing the rights of individuals on their nationality. This regime is the only one of its kind in the world, and is reminiscent of distasteful regimes from the past, such as the Apartheid regime in South Africa.

Under this regime, Israel has stolen hundreds of thousands of dunam of land from the Palestinians. Israel has used this land to establish dozens of settlements in the West Bank and to populate them with hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens. Israel prohibits the Palestinians as a group from entering and using these lands, and uses the settlements to justify numerous violations of the Palestinians’ human rights, such as the right to housing, to earn a livelihood, and the right to freedom of movement. The drastic change that Israel has made in the map of the West Bank prevents any real possibility for the establishment of an independent, viable Palestinian state as part of the Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

The settlers, on the contrary, benefit from all the rights available to Israeli citizens living within the Green Line [Israel proper], and in some cases are even granted additional rights. The great effort that Israel has invested in the settlement enterprise – in financial, legal and bureaucratic terms – has turned the settlements into civilian enclaves in an area under military rule, with the settlers being given priority status. To perpetuate this situation, which is a priori illegal, Israel has continuously breached the rights of the Palestinians.

Particularly evident is Israel’s manipulative use of legal tools in order to give the settlement enterprise an impression of legality. In so doing, Israel trampled on numerous restrictions and prohibitions established in the international conventions to which it is party, and which were intended to limit infringement of human rights and to protect populations under occupation.

How In the world can we ignore the holocaust  of our children ??

The father of 6-month-old Palestinian baby Mohammed al-Borai holds his son’s body during his funeral in Gaza City, Thursday, Feb. 28, 2008. Mohammed al-Borai, was killed when an Israeli aircraft blasted Hamas government offices and metal shops in the Gaza Strip late Wednesday. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra)

Why is the American Public not shown these images ? Do we even know what is done with Billions of tax-dollars given to the Neo-Nazis as “aid” ?

Steve Hutcheson

I saw a photo last week of a father holding his 6-month-old baby son. The father’s face was devoid of expression; the child in his arms was dead. The boy’s name was Mohammed Al-Borai; he along with several others had been killed in a blast fired indiscriminately by an Israeli cannon into the densely populated areas of Gaza.There were more photos, one of a group of young boys holding flowers standing around the battered and bloodstained body of the baby boy. That struck me as the most poignant. I had been having a discussion about the cause of suicide bombers among Palestinians and it will be this image more than any other that will concern me more than most. In their minds the young dead boy will have more impact on their future than anything any one might tell them.It was then that I started to contemplate perhaps more fully the plight of the Palestinians today and the parallels in the history of the Jews that led to their mass exodus from their own countries to immigrate to the land that was at the time known as Palestine.The Warsaw Ghetto during the Jewish Holocaust holds special significance to the European Jews. It was a place of oppression and the pathway to the ultimate death of thousands of their population that has become symbolic with their struggle for recognition. Yet what they are failing to acknowledge as their descendants press forward with their own brand of Jewish and Zionist idealism is the parallel set of conditions that they are now imposing on the Arab people of Palestine.

The Nazis rounded up the Jews of Poland and quartered them in a small area of Warsaw, building a barricade around the perimeter to prevent them leaving. So too have the Israelis through conflict and force pushed many of the Arab inhabitants out of Israel into an enclave that now has a population density of 4,200 people per sq. km which is 14 times that of the surrounding area of Israel which has 360 people per sq. km.

The Nazis deprived the ghetto inhabitants of food and essential supplies. So too has the Israeli government stopped the flow of goods to the 1.4 million inhabitants of Gaza by limiting the convoys of supplies to a mere trickle.

The Nazis reduced the average calorie intake of the Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto to 241 calories per day. So too have the Israelis reduced the calorie intake of the Palestinians in Gaza. According to a UN report, it is presently at 61 percent of the average daily requirements.

The Nazis restricted public utilities such as water and electricity. So too has the Israeli government.

The Nazis restricted the inhabitants from adequate health care. Israelis restrict the health care in Gaza by limiting the medical supplies in or the treatment of cases that need to be done outside.

The Jewish inhabitants through the ZZB and the ZOB resisted the oppression by the Nazis albeit too late and their rebellion was brutally crushed without concern for who was in the way. So too have the Palestinians of Gaza through their own resistance organizations, in particular Hamas, rebelled against their oppressors and so too do the Israelis use all means available to crush the rebellion without concern for who is in the way or who they maim or kill in doing so.

The Nazis destroyed the structure of the ghetto leveling it to the ground in a broad quest to rout the resistance to their oppression. Israelis indiscriminately level buildings and the infrastructure in Gaza in a quest to rout out the resistance to their oppression. The Nazis assigned the Jewish people to a lesser status of all their inhabitants depriving them of their rights as citizens and even as humans. Israel assigns the refugees held in Gaza less status than is given to the Jews worldwide and deprives the Palestinians of their rights to return to their former lands.

The Nazis applied whatever was at their means to break the will of the Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto. Israelis do the same thing; they use whatever is at their means to break the will of the Palestinians.

The Nazis killed the Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto indiscriminately. Don’t the Israelis kill indiscriminately the inhabitants in forcing their control over Gaza?

The Jews of Israel and elsewhere are quite right to protest at the inhumanity of the Nazis in their treatment of them and oblige the world not to allow the same situation to happen again. The Palestinians protest at the inhumanity of the Israeli treatment, yet in a bizarre twist of events, the world still allows the oppression to happen and continue.

It was after the Jews in the ghetto had been largely killed or transported that the world stood up and felt guilty in not acting sooner.

With the picture of Mohammed Al-Borai in my mind I question when the world will stand up and say: Enough is enough, there is not going to be a repeat of the Warsaw Ghetto and particularly when its perpetrators are those who suffered the most by its conduct.

There is a basic conflict of inhumanity occurring to the Palestinian people of Gaza that the world is deliberately ignoring. An inhumanity that was inflicted by the Nazis on the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto is now more than ever closely paralleling that which they are inflicting on the people of Gaza. They learned a hard lesson but it was not a lesson learned well. They have been given the power to practice humanity but have decided instead that they will treat the concerns of the Palestinians in the same inhumane way the Nazis treated them.

A future monument will no doubt contain photos of Mohammed Al-Borai in the arms of his father and the world will decry the injustice.