The Warsaw Ghetto.

[cali]

The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of the Jewish ghettos located in the territory of General Government during World War II, established by Nazi Germany in occupied Warsaw, the prewar capital of Poland. Between 1941 and 1943, starvation, disease and mass deportations to concentration camps and extermination camps such as during the Gross-aktion Warschau, reduced the population of the ghetto from an estimated 450,000 to approximately 71,000. In 1943 the Warsaw Ghetto was the scene of the The Warsaw Ghetto was established by the German Governor-General Hans Frank on October 16, 1940. At this time, the population of the Ghetto was estimated to be 440,000 people, about 38% of the population of Warsaw. However, the size of the Ghetto was about 4.5% of the size of Warsaw. Nazis then closed off the Warsaw Ghetto from the outside world on November 16, 1940, building a wall with armed guards.

During the next year and a half, thousands of the Polish Jews as well as some Romani people from smaller cities and the countryside were brought into the Ghetto, while diseases (especially typhus) and starvation kept the inhabitants at about the same number. Average food rations in 1941 for Jews in Warsaw were limited to 184 kcal, compared to 669 kcal for gentile Poles and 2,614 kcal for Germans.

Unemployment was a major problem in the ghetto. Illegal workshops were created to manufacture goods to be sold illegally on the outside and raw goods were smuggled in often by children. Hundreds of four to five year old Jewish children went across en masse to the "Aryan side", sometimes several times a day, smuggling food into the ghettos, returning with goods that often weighed more than they did. Smuggling was often the only source of subsistence for Ghetto inhabitants, who would otherwise have died of starvation. Despite the grave hardships, life in the Warsaw Ghetto was rich with educational and cultural activities, conducted by its underground organizations. Hospitals, public soup kitchens, orphanages, refugee centers and recreation facilities were formed, as well as a school system. Some schools were illegal and operated under the guise of a soup kitchen. There were secret libraries, classes for the children and even a symphony orchestra. The life in the ghetto was chronicled by the Oyneg Shabbos group.

Over 100,000 of the Ghetto's residents died due to rampant disease or starvation, as well as random killings, even before the Nazis began massive deportations of the inhabitants from the Ghetto's Umschlagplatz to the Treblinka extermination camp during the Gross-aktion Warschau, part of the countrywide Operation Reinhard. Between Tisha B'Av (July 23) and Yom Kippur (September 21) of 1942, about 254,000 Ghetto residents (or at least 300,000 by different accounts)<1> were sent to Treblinka and murdered there.<2> In 1942 Polish resistance officer Jan Karski reported to the Western governments on the situation in the Ghetto and on the extermination camps. By the end of 1942, it was clear that the deportations were to their deaths, and many of the remaining Jews decided to fight.<1>


<snip>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto

No UNRC, no Red Crescent/Red Cross. No hospitals. Not a shortage of medical supplies, but no medical supplies. Real starvation, not food shortages. Gaza is hell, but it's not the death sentence that Warsaw was.

What Israel is doing in Gaza is horrendous. It's murder. It's (imo) a crime against humanity, but it is not genocide. The Warsaw Ghetto was simply about genocide, and nothing else. And what happened to the inhabitants of Warsaw, happenned in a very short period of time. In Gaza, the population has been steadily increasing for decades.

I understand, I think, the urge to contrast the irony of the persecuted becoming the persecutors, but even so, the Warsaw Ghetto is not analogous to what's happening in Gaza.

Whatever it is that Israel is trying to do, genocide isn't one of its goals.

Israel should be condemned for what its done to the Palestinians, not for what it hasn't done.

[glowing]

1. Its not? It may look more humane, but I think the end result is what they wish..

the riddence of the Palestineans... however that it occurs.

[Pavulon]

3. They could burn gaza down today..

but they dont. Warsaw was a holding ground for people to be exterminated.

You think israel is going to kill them all? I think this comparison is all about drama and pr.

Time for hamas and fatah to hit the bargaining table. Their little war after oslo has obviously failed.

This you are talking about really looks like.

[glowing]

5. AND the retribution in todays world would be extremely hostile.. much easier

to peck away at it.. OR in another perverse thought, chaos keeps the PTB in power for protection and in division. If you have someone to fear, hate, and view as the enemy, its much easier to accept killing the enemy without thinking in terms of humanity... Would you call Iraq and what the US has done genocide? I would.

[mike_c]

2. yes, there were certainly administrative differences...

...between the Warsaw ghetto and Gaza. But the primary purpose of the European ghettos was to confine and control the urban jewish population, with a healthy dose of ethnic cleansing thrown in. Using them as staging grounds for extermination came later. Precisely the same can be said of Israel's conduct in Gaza. Israeli leaders have also called for the forcible transport of muslim CITIZENS from Israel into the Palestinian enclaves. There are too many similarities to ignore the irony, IMO.

[Pavulon]

4. Please.

if they wanted to kill them all they have the tools. 300 a second died when we bombed tokyo. In 1945

This is a mk77 bomb, this is how they would do it. Seems they dont. When they start targeting civilians like we did in tokyo you are correct.

[mike_c]

6. you don't think Israel is willfully killing civilians in Gaza?

My perspective is that their failure to exterminate the Palestinian population in Gaza has less to do with their having the means-- clearly they do-- as it has to do with Isreal's desire to maintain the thinnest veneer of justification for their actions.

But this is all beside the point, and even the OP was meant primarily to obfuscate the real issues, IMO.

[cali]

7. It's not about administrative differences.

It's about life and death. And the primary purposes of the European Ghettos during WWII were decidedly NOT about confining and controlling the Jewish population. There's not a scrap of historical evidence to suggest any such thing. The only claims along those lines come from revisionists such as Irving. 100,000 people died in the Warsaw Ghetto of starvation and disease in the first two years. Furthermore, although the final solution wasn't codified untill Wannsee, a million Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis prior to 1942.

"Prior to the beginning of World War II, during a speech given on January 30, 1939 (the six year anniversary of his accession to power), Hitler foretold the coming Holocaust of European Jewry when he said:

"Today I will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!"<2><3><4>"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Solution

And yes, some nuts in the Israeli Gov't have suggested the forcible removal of Israeli Arabs to Palestine- though not as claimed by some by Livni. But so what? Some Palestinians call for the forcible removal of all Jews. Hamas's charter calls for the extermination of all Jews in Israel. There are murderous nuts on both sides.


All this happened within a couple of years of the onset of WWII. And of course such things as the Nuremberg Laws happened well before the onset of war. Israel has occupied Gaza for decades. The death toll has been in the low thousands over those decades. The differences should be apparent, and they're hardly just administrative.

Does any of this excuse the real transgressions of Israeli actions? Of course not, but facts matter. The truth matters. And the distortion of history is just wrong.



Mein Kampf also foretold Hitler's plans for genocide. As did this from Goebbels:

In his diary entry of December 13, 1941, the day after Hitler’s private speech, Joseph Goebbels wrote:

"Regarding the Jewish Question, the Führer is determined to clear the table. He warned the Jews that if they were to cause another world war, it would lead to their own destruction. Those were not empty words. Now the world war has come. The destruction of the Jews must be its necessary consequence. We cannot be sentimental about it. It is not for us to feel sympathy for the Jews. We should have sympathy rather with our own German people. If the German people have to sacrifice 160,000 victims in yet another campaign in the east, then those responsible for this bloody conflict will have to pay for it with their lives."<5>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Solution

[cayuga]

8. Stages of Genocide...according to Wikipedia

Stage 1.
Classification People are divided into "us and them".

Stage 2.
Symbolization "When combined with hatred, symbols may be forced upon unwilling members of pariah groups..."

Stage 3:
Dehumanization "One group denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects or diseases."

Stage 4.
Organization "Genocide is always organized... Special army units or militias are often trained and armed..."

Stage 5.
Polarization "Hate groups broadcast polarizing propaganda..."

Stage 6.
Preparation "Victims are identified and separated out because of their ethnic or religious identity..."

Stage 7.
Extermination "It is "extermination" to the killers because they do not believe their victims to be fully human."

Stage 8.
Denial "The perpetrators... deny that they committed any crimes..."

[mike_c]

9. that's something that Israel's die-hard supporters will never recognize....

Genocide and ethnic cleansing are processes, not just outcomes.

[cayuga]

11. Or to make it simpler for those supporters in denial to understand:

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck - it's a duck

[kickysnana]

10. The Warsaw Ghetto could have been exterminated all at once too. What a dumb argument

The Ghetto was out of sight and this is in plain sight. They acted like they were doing something wrong with the Ghetto. They are acting like this is right. Sheeesh.

[Skidmore]

12. cali, I just can't go there with you.

I fail to see how literally trapping generations of Palestinian people in refuge camps and periodically exterminating them in bombs and raids is any less horrific. That the Israelis try to sanitize their image by providing "humanitarian aid" does not detract one whit from the reality on the ground. Whatever the Israelis are trying to do has had the trappings of genocide and persecution in dribs and drabs over the decades.

I've gotten to the point where I believe that it is time for the world to quit excusing Israel for blatant violations of international law because of the events of the Holocaust over a half a century ago.

[izquierdista]

13. Not analagous

Of course it's not. The persecuted learned what the limits of outrage are and are very careful not to cross that line now that they are the persecutors. That way they can dismiss the accusations of genocide should they ever get to their Nuremburg.