This opinion piece by HonestReporting Managing Editor Simon Plosker is republished from The Times of Israel.
The Irish Times is currently one of the most viciously anti-Israel media outlets and has been the subject of numerous recent HonestReporting critiques. In January, one blogger, Paula Stern, writing on The Times of Israel, responded to anti-Israel tweets from the Irish Times’ Environmental Editor Frank McDonald.
The post caught the attention of McDonald who has responded in his own Times of Israel piece. McDonald, however, goes beyond defending himself and instead, launches into a hate-filled diatribe against Israel. Most notably, he abuses the Holocaust as a means to attack Israel.
Comparing Gaza with the Warsaw Ghetto
McDonald writes:
I stand over my comparison of Gaza with the Warsaw Ghetto in terms of how they operated, though not in terms of outcomes, of course; we all know that the Jews crowded into the ghetto in Warsaw who didn’t die there later perished in the Nazi death camps. …
Inhabitants of the ghetto managed to survive by selling their remaining possessions to buy extra food, usually at exorbitant prices. Smuggling was rife, with hundreds of Jewish children wriggling through tunnels or holes in the wall, “sometimes several times a day . . . returning with goods that often weighed more than they did”. Just like Gaza boys do now in the tunnels at Rafah, in fact.
This isn’t the first time that this offensive and historically inaccurate comparison has been made by individuals and organizations who are more concerned with anti-Israel propaganda than the truth. 1943 Warsaw is nothing like 2014 Gaza for the following reasons:
1. Ha’aretz’s Bradley Burston notes that this comparison:
… denies and diminishes and exploits the Holocaust, does disrespect to Holocaust victims and survivors alike, alleviates European guilt over complicity with the Nazis, alleviates American guilt over inaction in the face of the annihilation machine, misrepresents both the cruel reality of the Gaza Strip and the cruel reality of the ghetto, dismisses the humanity and the vulnerability of the million Israeli Jews and Arabs within rocket range, and ignores completely the role of Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, the Popular Resistance Committees, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, in having sent thousands and thousands and thousands of rockets and mortars into Israel.
2. As Eamonn McDonagh expounded:
The Jews in the Ghetto didn’t have their very own international aid organization to provide for their basic needs and there was no Jewish political entity down the road which enjoyed a limited measure of peace and prosperity despite being occupied by Germany. No Jewish organization had ever sworn to destroy Germany and turn it into a Jewish state. No Jewish organization had ever fired thousands of rockets at Germany towns and cities. No Jewish organization had sent suicide bombers into Germany and slaughtered hundreds of Germans while they went about their lawful business.
3. According to Middle East historian Mark LeVine on the Al Jazeera website:
Gaza is not the Warsaw Ghetto. Even after the latest war, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank remain rooted to the soil, not buried beneath it.
The Warsaw Ghetto was used by the Nazis to confine Jews into the smallest possible space, eventually in preparation for their ultimate extermination – which became official Nazi policy within a year of the ghetto’s creation. Out of an initial population of over 400,000 Jews, 100,000 had died of disease and starvation by the time the uprising began in 1943. To be comparable, by 2007 over 300,000 Gazans would have to have died from similar causes.
Read the rest of this article at The Times of Israel.
