Holocaust Survivor Defends Palestinian Rights

By Suzanne Weiss

January 23, 2008! Remember the day— It was the greatest jailbreak in history.

Palestinian militants of Hamas set off 20 coordinated explosions that destroyed a wall separating the Gaza Strip from Egyptian territory. By early afternoon that day, according to the United Nations, 350,000 Palestinians had flooded into Egypt to stock up on the basic necessities to live.

Because Gaza is under siege. Its borders are sealed. It is the largest prison on earth, a concentration camp with 1½ million inmates.

On October 28, Israel began its plan to collectively punish residents of the strip because they are governed by Hamas, which was democratically elected by the Palestinian people in the occupied territories. The Israeli government declared Gaza “an enemy entity” and began systematic cutbacks of fuel and electricity.

By mid-January, blackouts were lasting 12 hours a day. On January 20, the main power plant shut down for lack of fuel. With no electricity, there is no water supply or sewage treatment.

Meanwhile, arbitrary Zionist killings of Palestinians continue—more than 100 since the beginning of the year.

The Zionist government has been denying the people of Gaza medical supplies and hospital necessities—incubators for premature babies, dialysis machines, pumps for water and sewage.

Palestinians in desperate need of medical attention are prevented from leaving the strip. More than 72 people have died at the borders in the past three months, denied entry into surrounding countries.

The Israeli organization— Physicians for Human Rights— reports that Israeli police have been telling desperately sick Palestinians that they can receive treatment only if they become informers. Spokesperson Miri Weingarten compared this “to Nazi practices in the concentration camps during World War Two.”

For me, this awakens memories of my family’s experience under Hitlerism, imprisoned in the ghetto of the Polish city of Piotrkow. The inhuman walls, the checkpoints, the daily humiliations, the killings, the systematic deprivation – it is all so familiar.

True, Israel has no gas chambers. Hitler aimed to kill all the Jews. In Piotrkow, 99% perished.

Zionism has a different goal. It does not aim to kill all the Palestinians. It aims to kill enough of them, to punish them sufficiently, so they will flee their homeland and disappear as a people. They aim to remove Palestine from the world’s family of nations.

But that, too, is a form of genocide.

With the establishment of Israel in 1948— 800,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their homelands. Their descendants today live for the most part in refugee camps in the neighboring Arab countries.

Other Palestinians are confined to the occupied territories of Gaza (1.5 million) and the West Bank (3 million) under Israel’s military occupation and siege.

About 1.2 million live as second-class citizens within Israel’s borders.

All this flagrantly violates international laws and norms of civilized behaviour. Israel refuses to stop building illegal Jewish colonies on occupied Palestinian land and pushing Palestinians into small ghettos and concentration camps.

Israel isolates Palestinian communities from each other by an Apartheid wall, Jewish-only roads and by a policy of military control and collective punishment.

What is the crime of the Palestinians? It’s that they are in the way. The Israeli government exists to build a Jewish state on the land of Palestine. To make this possible, it makes war on the Palestinians. The non-Jewish residents have been swept aside, expelled, their land stolen, their homes destroyed. This started more than 60 years ago. It’s still going on today.

This whole project is financed by the United States and supported by the government in Canada.

Sometimes— Palestinians strike out against their oppressor— throwing stones, firing primitive rockets or setting off bombs.

Israel uses this as a pretext for its rejection of peace. Israel demands that Palestinians “stop the violence” as a prerequisite to peace. But when Palestinians have observed a truce, they get nothing in return but continued attacks on their right to exist.

There was the prerequisite of the “recognition of Israel,” then Israel’s of “right to exist,” and now we have a new prerequisite: recognition of Israel as a “Jewish state”.

The so-called peace process is just another name for war.

A true peace process must start by defining a goal: equality of rights for all Israelis and Palestinians. Whether in one state or two, an equal right to vote, right to travel, and right for the exiles to return to their homelands.

Historically, the Palestinian movement has proposed that Palestinians and Jewish Israelis live together in a single democratic state. This one-state concept is heard more and more these days. As a Jewish person, I believe this proposal is generous and is the path to reconciliation. It should be joyfully accepted.

The Canadian government has a different view. It stands with George Bush in stubborn, hard-line support of Israel and its wars.

Stephen Harper tells us that Canada must support Israel because of the holocaust— I’d like to tell you a bit about my personal experience in the holocaust, because I think it helps to point the way forward in the Mideast.

I was born to a Jewish family in France during the Second World War. The French government was then rounding up the Jews, solely because of their religious and ethnic background, and deporting them to Hitler’s death camps. But I survived.

That’s because there was something called a “resistance.”— I was in France, occupied by Hitler’s army. Thousands of brave people got together to fight for their country’s freedom. My parents joined this movement too. One of the things the resistance did was to organize a network to save Jewish children.

In my case, the resistance arranged for me to live in hiding with a family of French farmers. What they did was against the laws of Hitler and his French supporters. If the family protecting me had been denounced to the police, they could have been executed. But they and their community kept the secret and hid me well. That’s why I’m here today.

Hitler killed every member of the resistance who he could catch, including my mother. But the resistance grew strong. Hitler grew weak and his dictatorship was overthrown.

There’s a lesson here for us all. The resistance united people of many faiths — Christian, Jewish, and Muslim — and many points of view. At first they were few in number. But their goals of justice and freedom won broad support, and they changed France for good.

After the war, I came to North America, and learned that the United States and Canada had not resisted the slaughter of European Jews. In fact, when Jews managed to escape Hitler, the U.S. and Canada would not let them in.

But as time went by, I saw the U.S. pouring more and more resources into Israel, mostly military weapons. Israel was fighting one war after another against the peoples in neighboring countries. Their army was occupying more and more Palestinian land, shooting defenseless people.

To me, all this is horrifying, especially because the government of Israel falsely claims to speak on behalf of the Jewish people. The Jewish people are the most hated people in the world today —because they are associated with the Zionist policies of Apartheid.

Israel’s war policies in the Middle East are against the interests of Jewish people and Palestinians alike, all of whom would benefit in a peaceful and united Middle East.

A jailer is not free until he sets the prisoners free. We must stand for freedom for the Palestinians. Their freedom will offer the Jewish people in the Middle East the possibility of brotherhood and peace.

What should we do? The resistance that saved my life in Hitler’s time is a good model. We need a united campaign for peace and justice in Palestine, in which all inhabitants, Jewish and Palestinians, have an equal voice and equal rights. All the Palestinians expelled from the country should have the right to return.

Such a campaign exists in Toronto; it is called Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid (CAIA). It calls for boycott, divestment, and sanctions to pressure the Zionist state to seek a peaceful and democratic solution. CAIA takes as its model the great international campaign against South African apartheid, and the democratic solution achieved in that country. To get to know CAIA, come to its demonstration tomorrow at Avenue Road and Bloor, outside the Israeli consulate, at 2 pm.

I belong to “Not In Our Name: Jews Against Israel’s Wars.” We support CAIA’s campaign. We invite you to our meeting March 20, which will protest the use of Canadian tax dollars to support Zionist organizations engaged in the destruction of Palestinian communities.

The day will come that the Apartheid wall will fall and we will see the liberation of the Palestinians. It will be a blow for freedom of us all around the world.

Against the bullies of the world; freedom for the Palestinians!

Statement

Holocaust Survivor Defends Palestinian Rights