From Auschwitz to Gaza: The modern-day concentration camp

Roberto Amaral

GAZA has been transformed into the largest open-air concentration camp ever known to humanity.

An unimaginable “death row” where the Palestinian people, more than half of whom are children, await their sentence without reprieve, dictated by the frighteningly belligerent and perverse Luciferian enemy. And, to the same extent, cowardly.

For months, the Zionist government of Israel has been promoting, under the blind eyes of the cynical international community, an open ethnic cleansing. In this true “concentration and extermination camp,” the wretches do not walk on their own two feet to the gas chambers to which the victims of Nazism were condemned: they are torn apart by the bombs of the ultra-modern army of the State of Israel, founded in 1947 under the auspices of the UN precisely to guarantee a home for the people who survived the Holocaust.

Like the Jews of yesterday, today's Palestinians are incapable of defending themselves; but a powerful army – supersonic planes, drones, missiles, tanks and all sorts of artillery – is raining bombs down on them (as if hunger, vilification and theft of their lands were not enough). This is a genocide carried out in the open and in the shadow of the moral iniquity of an international community that watches everything impassively.

Unlike the prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp, today’s victims cannot dream of liberation from the Red Army, which in January 1945 advanced on Poland on its way to Berlin. No one comes to their aid. They are left “to their own devices,” which has turned out to be a cruel fate.

Those who escape the siege of Gaza are already condemned to no future: without a homeland or land, they will have nowhere to go. They are poor, and do not have a chain of protection spread throughout the world; they are the new condemned of the earth. Without “promised salvation”, they have been condemned to exile, they will wander, their dreams shattered, and their most modest hopes lost.

In 1947, Palestine, then occupied by 600,000 Jews and 1.3 million Arabs (of whom around 700,000 Palestinians were expelled), was to be divided up so that two states could be established, one Jewish (the future State of Israel) and the other Arab. The first was established, and we know what it is today. The other, 78 years later, is awaiting international recognition, which has been denied.

The US and its cohort: the United Kingdom, Germany and most of the European Union are leading the refusal. Israel occupies and blockades the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, where it has been lying and rolling since the 1967 invasion, during the “Six-Day War”.

The Palestinians of Gaza are a captive people in an occupied country waiting to be destroyed, hermetically blockaded, deprived of fuel, electricity, water, food and medicine, with their civil infrastructure destroyed, schools demolished and hospitals at the mercy of bombings. Estimates speak of somewhere between 35 and 45 thousand civilian victims. More than 15 thousand children have already died, and the UN warns that more, more than 15 thousand babies, could still die if the Israeli government continues to block the entry of food and medicine.

While the international community remains silent and Zionism applauds war crimes, Ehud Olmert, former Prime Minister of Israel (2006-2009), defines Zionist policy as “perverse, malicious and irresponsible”. We must listen to him:

“Netanyahu typically tries to obscure the kind of orders he is giving to avoid legal and criminal responsibility in due course. But some of his lackeys say it openly: ‘Yes, we are going to starve Gaza.’” He charges: “Israel is committing war crimes.”

Unlike the Nazis, who tried to hide the Holocaust, the genocide carried out against the Palestinians is exposed to the world, thundered at and extolled by the leaders of Israel and the United States, the imperial power that provides them with political, economic, military and logistical support. Unlike the German people, who claimed to be unaware of the well-known crimes of Nazism, the people of Israel applaud the genocide.

According to a survey commissioned by Penn State University, and analyzed by Tamir Sorek, “82% of Jewish-Israelis support the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, while 56% support the expulsion of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, commonly referred to in the colonial lexicon as Arab-Israelis, and 47% agree with the killing of Palestinians in areas conquered by Israel.”

The fundamentalist, messianic and supremacist view, however, does not change when, according to the survey, the secular public is heard: “69% of secularists support the forced expulsion of Gaza residents, and 31% of them see the extermination of Jericho residents as a precedent that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) should adopt.”

Recent events, however, and the fear that Zionist barbarity will make it impossible to return the hostages still in the hands of Hamas, could change the internal situation. The first popular reactions against the repeated war crimes of the Zionist state are being recorded. Protests are taking place in several European capitals.

The mainstream press calls everything that is known and can no longer be ignored “the Gaza war,” as if we were facing a confrontation between two armies. In this way, it participates in the “war,” manipulating information, one of its most important fronts. It echoes the ideological narrative that is in the interests of Zionism and even distorts it by reiterating that the military actions are targeting Hamas guerrillas when any cold analysis reveals that the object of the massacres is a heinous ethnic cleansing. It is necessary to denounce and repeat it over and over again.

In mid-May, international agencies estimated the number of civilian casualties in Gaza to be between 35,000 and 40,000. It is still impossible to calculate the number of injured, maimed and disabled people. But it is already possible to say that everyone has lost their belongings and the city has been reduced to nothing. Where life was once celebrated, where it was once possible to believe in the future and to bet on the dream of a new home, Zionism has built a great tomb; in it, dead lives and ruins are mixed. Palestinians suffer the anguish of not knowing how long they will be alive.

Our silence, our inaction as a people, as a society, as political agents, the silence of our organizations, the apathy of academia, the slumber of the unions, the misery of our parties, our revolutionary poverty, our retreat before the establishment will be recorded by history as moral complicity. It is fair to expect something more from our government than just rhetoric.

The Nazi misery, which brutally and until then unthinkably affected Jews, communists, progressives and left-wing thought in general, homosexuals, gypsies, the mentally ill, and dissidents – the misery of the war crimes committed in the Second World War – was condemned both by the ethical indignation of the world that was then being reconstituted and by international law, erected by the victorious power of the Allies. Law lacks the strength to impose itself.

Almost all Axis war criminals (apart from those who committed suicide, like Hitler) were tried and convicted by the Nuremberg Tribunal. It turns out that today's criminals are the ones who control the force that controls the law.

The US war crimes in Vietnam were tried by the Russell Tribunal. At the time, this was the maximum possible for a war-making power. It did not entail objective consequences, nor did it prevent new invasions, nor new occupations, nor new war crimes, but at least it can be said that our critical conscience, with that gesture of remarkable symbolic charge, broke with moral inertia, and, unable to intervene in the historical process, we left our testimony. Posterity will judge those who were negligent.

Unprotected by what we still call civilization, which has separated itself from it, Gaza, empty and dead, will soon become the beautiful Riviera of Trump’s real estate dreams. Its beaches, on the eastern shores of the Black Sea, currently off-limits, will soon be free. Well guarded, they will be enjoyed by wealthy white Europeans, Americans and Israelis, free of Palestinians and the poor in general. It will not yet be the great dream, but it could be the nano-suggestion of a promised land.

*Roberto Amaral is a political scientist, former Minister of Science and Technology and former president of the PSB. Author of "History of the present – ​​conciliation, inequality and challenges" 

** This is an edited version of the article originally published at https://www.brasildefato.com.br/

*** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL, Independent Media or The African.