Would you be less supportive of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising if they did kill more civilians in Nazi Germany?
Masha Gessen
For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every ten minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of ten Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.
The term “open-air prison” seems to have been coined in 2010 by David Cameron, the British Foreign Secretary who was then Prime Minister. Many human-rights organizations that document conditions in Gaza have adopted the description. But as in the Jewish ghettoes of Occupied Europe, there are no prison guards—Gaza is policed not by the occupiers but by a local force. Presumably, the more fitting term “ghetto” would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.
The Nazis claimed that ghettos were necessary to protect non-Jews from diseases spread by Jews. Israel has claimed that the isolation of Gaza, like the wall in the West Bank, is required to protect Israelis from terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinians. The Nazi claim had no basis in reality, while the Israeli claim stems from actual and repeated acts of violence. These are essential differences. Yet both claims propose that an occupying authority can choose to isolate, immiserate—and, now, mortally endanger—an entire population of people in the name of protecting its own.
Adi Callai
Another case that is especially important to me as a Jewish person, having studied our history of persecution and rebellion, is the Sobibor Uprising. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is of course the most famous Jewish revolt of that era, and many people made the analogy, including Refaat Alareer, a Gazan poet who generated controversy for drawing this comparison on BBC, and who was murdered by Israel as a possible consequence. The Sobibor revolt, while much less well known, was more of a success story. Sobibor was a concentration camp where, in 1943, realizing they were all going to get killed, a small group of maybe twenty people, some of them prisoners of war, organized in secrecy, came up with a sophisticated plan to kill high-ranking SS officers, sabotage the electricity and communications infrastructure, take the guards’ weapons, loot the armory, arm the other inmates, open the gates, and let people escape and join the partisans. Launched on October 14, 1943, it worked, to an extent. Approximately half of the camp escaped. But only about fifty rebels survived the war. Still, that’s a much higher percentage than would’ve survived otherwise. And of course, there are infinite differences between these cases, but I instantly thought about it when I got the news from my sister, who lived in one of the settlements of the Envelope until October 7, in the family WhatsApp group, saying that their power went out, that there was some kind of sabotage of the electricity infrastructure in the October 7 operation.
In the Shadow of the Holocaust by Masha Gessen, the situation in Gaza is compared to the Warsaw Ghettos. The comparison was also made by a Palestinian poet who was later killed by an Israeli airstrike. Adi Callai has also written on the parallels in his article The Gaza Ghetto Uprising and expanded upon in his corresponding video
Apartheid is not peace