Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt

“And now we ask: How can you eat, sleep, live? How guilty will you feel in your hearts if you do not move heaven and earth to come to our aid by the only means available to our people and as soon as possible? (...) For the love of God, do something now, and quickly.“ This desperate cry for help, quoted by Saul Friedländer in his monumental work ”Nazi Germany and the Jews,” [1] is not new and does not come from the Palestinians in Gaza. It was made 81 years ago by Slovakian rabbi Michael Bar Weissmandl, who was trying to save the Jews of Slovakia from deportation—and death—in Auschwitz by appealing to the Zionist leadership in Palestine and to the American and British governments.

But that was not all. Weissmandl, whose appeals to the Allies to bomb both Auschwitz and the railways leading Slovak Jews to Auschwitz went unanswered, did not mince his words when he addressed them in very harsh terms, as well as the Zionist organization in Palestine, which systematically refrained from assisting Jews in Europe: “And you—our brothers in Palestine, in all free countries, and you ministers of all these countries—how can you remain silent in the face of this great murder? Silent while thousands upon thousands, now six million Jews, were being murdered. Silent while tens of thousands are still being murdered or are about to be murdered? Their hearts are broken and they implore you for help while lamenting your cruelty. You are brutal and murderers because of the cold-blooded silence with which you observe”.

If the brave Weissmandl goes so far as to call the Zionists and the Anglo-American rulers, who refuse to help the victims of the Holocaust, murderers, then how would he describe the current rulers of countries such as the United States, Germany, France, and so many others who are not content to remain indifferent to Palestinian suffering, but go so far as to arm, finance, and diplomatically support the genocide of the State of Israel against the Palestinians in Gaza?

We already know the answer from those concerned, supported by the cream of neo-fascists and other nostalgics for the Third Reich around the world: “what is happening in Gaza has nothing to do with the Holocaust, and any comparison is sacrilegious and... anti-Semitic”. And yet, thanks to the relentless efforts and perverse inventiveness of the political successors of those (Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir...) whom Einstein already called “fascists” and “terrorists” in 1948, [2] the comparisons are obvious because they are staring us in the face. For example, the one between the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw and the Palestinian ghetto in Rafah, cynically called a “humanitarian city” (!) that Netanyahu and his accomplices are preparing to cram 600,000 starving Gazans on the brink of death into. And if there are any differences between the two ghettos, they are not necessarily in favor of the Israeli war criminals’ plan: the Rafah ghetto is already a field of ruins, unlike the Warsaw ghetto, which was only destroyed at the end and during the crushing of the heroic revolt of its last defenders. For the rest, it is the same organized famine and the same genocidal intentions and practices of the supremacist executioners who are not afraid to dehumanize their victims (Jews then, Palestinians today), calling them “subhumans” or “wild animals” and “cockroaches that must be crushed”...

Moreover, wasn’t it Marek Edelman, the last leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, who had already described the whole of Gaza as a veritable ghetto, even comparing it to the Warsaw Ghetto, which Edelman could claim to know much better than the various Netanyahus, Smotriches, Katzes, and Gvirs? Marek Edelman always declared his solidarity with the Palestinian fighters because he had foreseen the inexorable racist and genocidal drift of the Zionist state and warned the Israelis that “if you want to live among millions of Arabs, you have to mix with them, let assimilation and mixed marriages do their work.” [3] He knew...

But the similarities, or rather the affinities, between what the Nazis did to the Jews and what Israeli leaders are now doing to the Palestinians are legion. For example, it took only a few days of macabre exploits by the infamous Gaza Humanitarian Foundation for the whole world to describe as a “Death Trap” this diabolical ‘structure’ that the Netanyahu-Trump duo invented from scratch to replace the UN humanitarian organizations, UNRWA in particular, which they themselves had previously destroyed and banned. Why “death trap”? Because, according to the UN and hundreds of humanitarian NGOs, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation serves only to lure starving Palestinians into narrow, well-defined food distribution areas surrounded by barbed wire, where they are trapped and become easy prey for Israeli soldiers who shoot at them, killing 60, 90 or even 120 of them every day, mostly women and children!

This current “death trap” is obviously reminiscent of another, even more infamous “death trap,” the gas chambers of the Nazi extermination camps, presented to deportees as shower or disinfection rooms so that the victims would enter without suspecting that they were about to meet one of the most atrocious deaths. If there is a difference, it is that while those who entered the Nazi gas chambers did not know—with rare exceptions—what awaited them, the Palestinians who enter the deadly traps of the so-called “humanitarian” foundation of Netanyahu and Trump’s killers, know in advance what awaits them, but they go there because they are forced, as they say, to “choose between death by starvation or by bullet.”

However, choosing one’s death has often been a heroic act in the past, allowing victims of fascist and other barbarities to assert their human dignity. This was the case, for example, of my Jewish compatriots from Corfu who were deported to Auschwitz, whose sacrifice is aptly recalled by Hermann Langbein in his terrible “Men and Women in Auschwitz”, which is unparalleled in the bibliography of the Holocaust: “On July 22, 1944, four hundred and thirty-five Jews deported from Corfu and assigned to the special Kommando refused to do this work. They were all sent to the gas chambers. The daily chronicle compiled by the Auschwitz Museum notes this fact, which no one knew about. Too often, heroism remained unknown in Auschwitz.”  [4]

Remembering these 435 Jews from Corfu and their final act of resistance against the inhumanity of their executioners, just a few days before the 81^st anniversary of their death, seems to us to be in keeping with the spirit of this text...