Gaza’s Holocaust
By Dr. Elias Akleh

Ben Heine/ MWC NEWS

Holocaust is the genocidal crime against people based on their ethnicity. This genocide could be perpetrated through different means such as poison gas, guns, tanks, air raids, biological warfare, economical siege, starvation, destruction of vital natural resources, eviction into desert, and deprivation of basic vital materials among others, to produce the same result; mass deaths. For the last sixty years Palestinians have been suffering from all these methods in a deliberate programmed holocaust. The perpetrators are not Nazis, but those who claim to be survivors, and their descendents, of Nazi-caused holocaust; Zionist Jewish Israelis. 

The threat of Israeli Deputy Defense Minister, Metan Vinai, to inflict “bigger Shoah” (Holocaust) [British Telegraph 2/29] on Gaza’s Palestinians reflect the adopted policy of the Israeli government towards Palestinians.  Encircled by 8 foot high cement wall on three sides and a sea filled with hostile Israeli gun boats on the fourth, Gaza, with a dense population of 1.5 million people, has become the largest concentration camp ever on this globe. Israeli army is the prison guards of this concentration camp.  Controlling all borders, sea and air Israeli army controls and restricts all vital materials going into Gaza. Life in Gaza is dependent on the whims of the Israeli army guarding all crossings into Gaza. They close these crossing whenever they want for a long periods of time to starve Palestinians. UN reports had warned that the majority of Gazans live under the poverty line. To make things worse Israel had turned Gaza into a military exercise theatre for its snipers shooting children in the streets, for their special forces conducting offensive operations within civilian areas, for long range artillery practice, for tanks offensive exercises, for navy gun boats shooting exercises, and for air raid targeting. Starting Wednesday February 27th Israeli terrorist army had started their “bigger Shoah” against Gaza. 

This holocaust did not target only Gaza, although Gaza is now suffering its main assault, but also targeted every Palestinian community in the West Bank. There has been a sharp escalation of Israeli military operations averaging at least five operations a day within these communities. Between February 21st and 27th the Israeli terrorist army had conducted 36 military operations according to Palestinian Human Rights Center. With tanks and armored personnel carriers randomly shooting at everything, the Israeli army had attacked Palestinian cities such as Bethlehem, Hebron (Al-Khalil), Nablus, Yatta, Beit Ummar, Dura, Taffuh and others turning civilian homes into military headquarters and schools into temporary prisons, stealing valuables, destroying properties, demolishing homes, raiding Islamic charity institutions and Young Men Islamic Associations and confiscating their contents; money and records, and sealing them shut. During those seven days the Israeli army had kidnapped 67 Palestinians making a total of 499 hostages since the beginning of this year. 

Fearing the angry reactions of huge Arab and Islamic populations and indignation of international community Israel is perpetrating a graduated Palestinian holocaust, where murdering Palestinians had become a daily occurrence in an attempt to desensitize world opinion. Yet this Palestinian holocaust has all the ugly features of European Jewish holocaust. Where European Jews had suffered from a social racial superiority ideology of the pure Aryan race the Palestinians are suffering from a more extreme religious superiority ideology of God’s chosen people. Where Nazis had confiscated Jewish properties Zionist Israel had confiscated Palestinian properties; homes, farm land and valuables. Where Nazis used to murder Jews; including women and children, for no reason except for being a Jew, Israelis are now murdering Palestinians; especially women and children, for no reason except for being a Palestinian. Israel had massacred hundreds of whole Palestinian communities and wiped their towns off the map. Where Nazis had imprisoned Jews in concentration camps, Israel is imprisoning all Palestinians in larger concentration camps enclosed within 8 feet high by 1300 miles long concrete wall that divides Palestinian territories into separate small concentrations camps with Gaza Strip being the largest concentration camp ever in the whole world. Where Nazis had transferred thousands of European Jews making them refugees in foreign countries, Israel had transferred thousands of Palestinians out of their own country making them refugees in desert refugee camps. Where the, then, unorganized international community had blamed Nazi Germany for the Jewish holocaust and allowed Jewish massacres to go on for a long time, the present more organized and supposedly more civilized international community is blaming the Palestinian victims for their own massacres by denying them the basic human right of self defense against Israeli military occupation, and is allowing the murdering Israeli occupation forces to continue the Palestinian holocaust under the guise of self defense. Where the Nazis had starved their Jewish prisoners Israel is now starving all Palestinian populations through cutting off food stuff, economic and financial siege, and cutting off all energy supplies.  

The sad and unfortunate fact about these holocausts is that the political figures and humanitarian organizations who appointed themselves to defend the victims are the same people who implicitly approved, encouraged and allowed these holocausts to continue either through cooperation with the enemy or through overlooking the genocides. Zionist Jewish leaders and Jewish organizations had openly withheld support, financial and otherwise, to save European Jews from death. In 1938 the Jewish Agency headed by Golda Meir ignored German offer to transfer German Jews to other countries for the price of $250 a head (1). In February 1940 Henry Montor, executive vice-president of the United Jewish Appeal refused to rescue a shipload of Jews stranded on the Danube River because they were old. He wanted healthy young Jews, instead, to enslave them in establishing the Israeli terror state in the heart of the Arab World (2). Zionist Jewish leaders rejected German offers of 1941 and 1942 of transferring European Jews to Spain to be deported to US or to British colonies, and the 1944 offer to safely deport Hungarian Jews to any country except Palestine, knowing very well that such rejection would cause the death of hundreds of thousands of Jews. Yitzhak Greenbaum, chairman of the Rescue Committee of the Jewish Agency expressed such rejection policy in his famous statement “One cow in Palestine is worth more than all the Jews in Europe” (3). The Jewish Agency and Zionist leaders had sabotaged the efforts of Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl, who pleaded for the help of World Jewish Congress and the Jewish Agency to pay the sum of $50,000 to save the lives of 40,000 Slovakian Jews in 1943. (Rabbi Weissmandl’s “Min Hametzar” (Cry from the Depths) published in New York in 1961 in Hebrew, also see TV documentary “Among Blind Fools” trilogy by Verafilm (4).