Reposting my essay in commemoration of the anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

The Spirit of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is Alive in the Al-Aqsa Flood

During the German annexation of Poland in WWII, hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees were herded to Warsaw. As the Nazis approached the capital, they pulled the noose tighter and tighter around the Jewish population. They faced growing violence and degradation: the nazis rationed food, banned communal prayer, curtailed business, robbed homes, and so on. As their grip became certain, they forced the construction of a walled ghetto around the Jewish district. The Nazis expelled all Jewish people from the rest of the city, confiscating their land, homes, and possessions.

Conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto were dire and extremely overcrowded with more than 400,000 people forced into a 3.3 square kilometer area, 9 people to a room.1 Rations were carefully kept at or below the survival level.2 Virtually no medical supplies or cultural materials were allowed into the ghetto.3 The means of survival let alone full human life were non-existent.

In 1942, one quarter of the ghetto’s population were sent to their deaths in Treblinka under the guise of “resettlement”. This lie was uncovered, and the Nazi-imposed Jewish government lost all credibility. The leader, Adam Czerniakow, committed suicide. At this point, resistance factions became the dominant political force. Residents in the ghetto realized anything short of all-out mobilization was tacitly accepting their genocide. They would not do this.

Sparsely armed, on 18 January 1943 resistance fighters engaged the nazis in direct armed struggle. They were able to prevent or delay the deportation of 3,000 people and condemn the silence of the world. Battles continued off-and-on until late April. Rather than quietly shuffle a compliant population into cattle cars. the resistance fighters compelled the Germans to announce their genocidal intent to the world and burn them out, block-by-block.

The remainder of the ghetto residents were martyred as they would have been without struggle, but the world could no longer ignore the Nazi genocide. The partisans of the Warsaw Ghetto will be remembered as heroes for all time. They proclaimed their pride, their dignity, and their humanity until the end.

Now the Zionist Fascists invoke this memory and the holocaust to justify their own genocide. The Zionist fascists invoke this memory and order over a million people to move into a smaller section of their own walled ghetto. Now the Zionist Fascists invoke this memory and bomb hospitals. Now the Zionist Fascists invoke this memory and call Palestinians “subhuman animals”.4 It is an abomination. It is every Jew’s responsibility (mine included!), to condemn this anti-Semitic invocation of our past. We must declare ‘NOT IN OUR NAME!’ as the Zionist Fascists do everything in their power to play out the role of the Nazis.

The tragedies the Zionists inflict on Palestine mirror the tragedies the Nazis inflicted on the Jews. As the Nazis cheered the demolition pf the Warsaw Synagogue, IDF soldiers recorded themselves applauding the demolition of the Palestinian Justice Palace.5 It is important to note that Judaism is not Zionism and Zionism is not Judaism no matter how loudly the Israelis proclaim it. Nor was the special feature of Nazism anti-semitism. Instead their special feature was fascism: the construction of a ethnonationalist garrison state organized for the destruction of a racial enemy as a false solution to its internal contradictions.

The Zionists do not have the same enemy as the Nazis, but their ideology is the same. We should not see resistance against one any differently than resistance against the other.

While aspects of the resistance actions of October 7th are horrible, they must be understood in the context of a people facing genocide. The reaction of the Zionist entity confirms this. They have shown the world who the true ‘terrorist’, the true fascist, the true victim is.

At time of writing, more than 18,000 Palestinian people—principally non-combatants and children—have been killed under weeks of relentless bombing.6 Every institution of Palestinian civil society is labelled a ‘Hamas Base’ and rendered into dust. And when international investigators fail to find the promised evidence of military installations hidden below ruined hospitals, ruined lives, the Zionists shrug.7 At most, one or two squeamish Americans shoot and cry while Washington and Berlin proclaim “an absolute right to self-defense”.

As the Seleucids turned our Second Temple into a stable, settlers in the West Bank evict Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque to proudly hold and record dance parties.8

One popular slogan holds “resistance is justified when people are occupied.” This sentiment is encapsulated in a speech given by PFLP Leader George Habash to western hostages taken as a reprisal for refugee camp bombings in June 1970 titled “Our Code of Morals is Our Revolution.”

He begins:

I feel that it is my duty to explain to you why we did what we did. Of course, from a liberal point of view of thinking, I feel sorry for what happened, and I am sorry that we caused you some trouble during the last 2 or 3 days. But leaving this aside, I hope that you will un¬derstand, or at least try to understand, why we did what we did. People living different circumstances think on different lines… After 22 years of injust¬ice, inhumanity, living in camps with nobody caring for us, we feel that we have the very full right to protect our revolution. We have all the right to protect our revolution. Our code of morals is our revolution. What saves our re-volution, what helps our revolution, what pro¬tects our revolution is right, is very right and very honourable and very noble and very beautiful, because our revolution means justice, means having back our homes, having back our country, which is a very just and noble aim.

Now the occupation is in its 75th year. Unlike Habash’s day, the recent decades of resistance have taken the form of political negotiations and peaceful protests. They did nothing to gain the world’s attention or support for Palestinian liberation. Clearly, only armed struggle against imperialism can win liberation. Thank God the Palestinians have more than the few handguns and makeshift explosives available to my people 80 years ago.

The Spirit of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is alive in the Al-Aqsa Flood!

Long live Palestine!

Footnotes & References 1 — Compare to 2.3 million people sharing 360 square kilometers (about the size of Detroit) in the Gaza Strip concentrated into a few overcrowded cities void of open space. https://apnews.com/article/israel-gaza-hamas-war-90e02d26420b8fe3157f73c256f9ed6a 2 — Israel (which controls all imports into Gaza) closely restricts the amount of food allowed in to survival levels calculated at 2,300 calories per day per person. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/17/israeli-military-calorie-limit-gaza 3 — Regular and acute drug shortages in the occupied territories were a fact of life prior to the 2023 invasion. Article below for-instance. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-06-08/ty-article/.premium/palestinian-authority-blames-israel-for-acute-medicine-shortage/00000188-9773-df21-a1b8-b7ffbba40000 4 — Jerusalem’s deputy mayor Arieh King: “They are not human beings and not even human animals, they are subhuman and that is how they should be treated.” https://www.middleeasteye.net/live-blog/live-blog-update/israeli-municipality-official-calls-burying-alive-subhuman-palestinian Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu (A Philly native) on the will of the Israeli people: “They are committed to completely eliminating this evil from the world,” https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/benjamin-netanyahu-amalek-israel-palestine-gaza-saul-samuel-old-testament/
SS Solider Jürgen Stroop describing slain ghetto fighters: “180 Jews, bandits and sub-humans, were destroyed.” https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-stroop-report-may-1943 5 — Demolition of the Justice Palace https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/footage-shows-idf-demolishing-main-hamas-courthouse-in-gaza/ 6 — Palestinian Death toll https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2023/12/14/israel-hamas-war-live-rain-brings-misery-to-displaced-in-gaza
Even the most skeptical Israeli sources place the Palestinian death toll at 4x the number of Israeli dead. https://www.newsweek.com/real-gaza-civilian-death-tollwhat-we-know-1849655 7 — No evidence of ‘Hamas Command Center’ found below IDF-bombed Al Shifa hospital https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/16/what-has-israel-found-in-gazas-al-shifa-hospital IDF soldier claims a calendar found at the hospital is a ‘Hamas Names List’. One instance of the farce. https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/truth-or-fake/20231116-idf-claims-to-find-list-of-hamas-names-but-it-s-the-days-of-the-week-in-arabic
8 — Israeli settlers hold dance party in Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque April 18th https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gS_jgsd4JM https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20220419-israel-closes-ibrahimi-mosque-to-palestinian-worshippers-holds-concert-for-settlers/