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From the Warsaw Ghetto to the Gaza Ghetto

By Roy Chaderton Matos

Ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS).

From the Warsaw Ghetto to the Gaza Ghetto: How Nazionism is paving the way to a Palestinian Holocaust - A plea to our Jewish brethren

My awareness and solidarity with the centuries-long misery of the Jewish people began at home when I was just a child, and I learned about the horrific actions of Nazism during the Second World War.

I was already in my teens, when that sentiment became stronger. I researched extensively the topic, and read with a certain degree of naiveté and astonishment some novels written by Leon Uris, like “Mila 18”, its title referring to the address of the headquarters bunker of Jewish-Polish resistance fighters against Nazi oppression at the Warsaw ghetto (ironically, Mila in Polish - pronounced as miua- means delightful). I began my diplomatic career in Poland, and right at the site of Mila 18, there is a monument where sometime in the 1970s, German Chancellor Willy Brandt knelt down as if asking for forgiveness for the crimes perpetrated by the SS and the Gestapo.

Today the situation in Gaza seems like an unfortunate reprise of history. Until 1492, Jews, Christians and Muslims peacefully shared their lives in Spain. This was like a vision of tolerance that came to an end under the rule of Queen Isabella I “the Catholic”, and King Ferdinand II of Aragon. This was the time of the military defeat of the Moors, after eight centuries of presence in Spain. It was also the time where the Jews were forced out of their homes into the Diaspora, after having spent 1300 years in the country. Notwithstanding their misfortune, they found shelter in Near-East and Middle-East Muslim countries.

In 1948, the Israelites expelled the Palestinians from their land, as if blamed and punished for crimes perpetrated by the Nazis.

While in Poland, I paid a visit to the Auschwitz concentration camp, a macabre museum of horrors. I walked through building after building. One of them housed thousands upon thousands of victim´s suitcases, bearing labels and tags revealing their places of origin. Another building exhibited an eyewear repository. This unsettled me. Then, my heart almost stopped when upon entering the next building, I saw in horror that it was filled up with all kinds of prostheses. By the time I reached the last building, I could no longer hold my tears. Right there, at the sight of all the toys and children´s clothes before me, I told myself: NEVER AGAIN!

When I reflect on Gaza, I am haunted by a horrid vision about the suffering of the Palestinian people. Upon seeing pictures of children dismembered by Israeli shrapnel, or pictures of survivors mutilated or disfigured by the ruthless invader, one would have to ask if Israel´s psychopathic hawks – the root cause of endless quakes, drones and white phosphorus attacks aimed at the Palestinian civilian population, schools, shelters and hospitals – are as cruel as the genocidal people behind the Jewish holocaust. Such being the case, in August 2014, I cannot stop from breaking down in tears for the children of Palestine, just as I did once before for the children of Auschwitz.

Who could have ever thought that Israel´s elite of hawks would engage in strategies of pogroms, Diaspora, ghettoes, extermination, and final solution against a guileless people, their brethren since biblical times? This calls for the wrath of God, but it is also a plea to all of the Jewish people in the world, to protest and rise against the current evil rulers of the State of Israel.

Historically, the Jewish people have always shown solidarity with the most progressive causes. Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Hannah Arendt, Irving Berlin, the Jewish martyrs fighting for civil rights in the United States, or against military dictatorships in South America, Albert Einstein, Nobel prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz, Noam Chomsky, Oliver Stone, Woody Allen, Jacobo Timmerman, Ariel Dorfman, Steven Spielberg, Sigmund Freud, amongst many, are some of the heroes and geniuses, who have become a Jewish people´s gift to humankind; thus the need to decry the recurrent social or cultural hate crimes perpetrated by Israel´s governments; reason to have confidence that sooner, rather than later, our own Jewish brethren will subdue the murderers that nowadays slay others in their name.

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