Zionist Israel is becoming more like Nazi Germany every day // Gaza War: Bringing Out the Worst in Israeli Misogyny, Racism
Last Warsaw Ghetto Survivor Calls for Rebellion Against Israeli Occupation
Gaza War: Bringing Out the Worst in Israeli Misogyny, Racism
Aditya Nigam: Last of Warsaw Ghetto Survivors Calls for Rebellion Against Israeli Occupation
Rebel against the Occupation. No–it is forbidden for us to rule over another people, to oppress another [people]. The most important thing is to achieve peace and an end to the cycle of blood[letting]. My generation dreamed of peace. I so want to achieve it. You have the power to help. All my hopes are with you. If only [you could]. - Chavka Fulman-Raban, arrested and imprisoned at Auschwitz, two of her family members died as resistance fighters.
on APRIL 9, 2013
On Yom Ha-Shoah, one of the few remaining living survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto, Chavka Fulman-Raban, delivered a fierce denunciation of evil and injustice, including the Israeli Occupation. Her speech was offered to guests at the ceremony of Beit Lohamey Ha-Getaot (the Ghetto-Fighters House). I’ve translated it based on the speech she uploaded to Facebook:
There is a unity in this commemoration–70 years since the [Warsaw Ghetto] Rebellion. We’re also nearing the end of the Shoahgeneration and the last of the [ghetto] fighters. Most of you in front of me, you are the generations of continuity: the second, third and fourth generations. I have mixed emotions and thoughts about the past, present, and future.I will tell you about one experience from that time. Spring 1942. I was a courier for an underground operation. I arrived to visit my friend from the youth movement, Dror Bachrubishov, in occupied eastern Poland very close to the Nazis.I stood in the small railroad station and from the window I could make out, on a field next to the railroad tracks, a great multitude, thousands of men, women, and children. Overseeing them were Germans running wild on horseback. A few meters from me, through the window, I saw four boys digging a hole. The soldiers shot them and they fell into it. The next morning the field was empty. At night, the trains had gone on their way: to the camps, to death.
These were the moments at which I understood and which I feared: this is the beginning of the end. This is the Shoah. With this terrible truth, I returned to the Warsaw ghetto, to my family which remained there, to my comrades. The [Warsaw Ghetto] rebellion became for us [at that moment] necessary and clear. We continued educational activities and seminars, the underground school and newspapers. It was important to strengthen the sad, dying ghetto youth.But at this point, it became most important to find weapons sources. The deportation of 300,000 Warsaw Jews to Treblinka in the summer of 1942 strengthened us and determined for us that the last battle–the armed rebellion–neared. That it must break out. On April 19 1943, seventy years ago, the first rebellion in occupied Europe broke out–the Jewish rebellion. I wasn’t part of it. As a courier, I had been arrested during resistance operations in Kharkov and had been brought to Auschwitz a number of months earlier. All of my nearest, most beloved comrades fought from the rooftops, in the fires, from the bunkers. Most of them perished. I hurts me that I can no longer remember all their names. We memorialize only a few. But in my heart I am not parted from them, from the forgotten.Leave in your hearts and memories a place for them, younger generations. For the beautiful and bold, so young, who fell in the last battle. I wish for the thousands of you before me, lives enriched with love, beauty, laughter, and meaning. Continue the rebellion. A different rebellion of the here and now against evil, even the evil befalling our own and only beloved country. Rebel against racism and violence and hatred of those who are different. Against inequality, economic gaps, poverty, greed and corruption. Strengthen humanistic education and values of ethics and justice. These too are [a form of] rebellion against alcoholism among our youth and the terrible phenomenon of attacks against the elderly.Rebel against the Occupation. No–it is forbidden for us to rule over another people, to oppress another [people]. The most important thing is to achieve peace and an end to the cycle of blood[letting]. My generation dreamed of peace. I so want to achieve it. You have the power to help. All my hopes are with you. If only [you could].
I am so proud to share a religion and ethnic identity with this woman. She represents the best of all that is Jewish. She represents the best of all that is Israeli.
In last night’s post I noted some of the ghoulish reactions by Israelis to the war, from Prof. Mordechai Kedar’s call for raping the sisters and mothers of Palestinian terrorists to Rabbi Dov Lior’s halachic ruling that it’s permissible both to kill Palestinian civilians and raze Gaza to the ground. Tonight, yet another choice example both of hatred of Palestinians and misogyny toward Palestinian mothers... read more:
Rebel against the Occupation. No–it is forbidden for us to rule over another people, to oppress another [people]. The most important thing is to achieve peace and an end to the cycle of blood[letting]. My generation dreamed of peace. I so want to achieve it. You have the power to help. All my hopes are with you. If only [you could]. - Chavka Fulman-Raban, arrested and imprisoned at Auschwitz, two of her family members died as resistance fighters.
Last year, long before this current round of blood-lust, Chavka Fulman-Raban, among the last of the Warsaw Ghetto survivors delivered, On Yom Ha-Shoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), “a fierce denunciation of evil and injustice, including the Israeli Occupation. Her speech was offered to guests at the ceremony of Beit Lohamey Ha-Getaot (the Ghetto-Fighters House)”, says Richard Silverstein, who has translated the speech into English.
The once-invincible Nazism did not last. Zionazism too will not last, however invincible it might appear today. And we must say it loud and clear: Zionism is not about Jews and Judaism. To oppose Zionism is not anti-Semitism. As if this simple fact needs to be stated. But it seems it does, over and over again. Just as Judith Butler had to recently, contesting Lawrence Summers, President, Harvard University. So virulent is the mobilization of the Zionist fascists, especially inside Israel, that what David Shulman recently referred to as “lynch gangs” and “organized fascist groups”, have been on the prowl attacking, killing Palestinians and protestors against the bombings. And cheering the lynch mobs and fascists gangs are spectators of the kind we see below:
The propaganda war is in full force, paralleling the Israeli blitzkrieg in Gaza, but world public opinion is not quite taken by it,as the huge demonstrations opposing Israel’s genocidal war are erupting all over the world. Veterans Today, “an online journal representing the position of members of the [US] military and veteran community in areas of national security, geopolitical stability and domestic policy”, observes in a report entitled “Zio-Nazis Run Wild in Occupied Palestine” observes
A growing number of Jewish Americans, including Philip Weiss, have developed a more accurate and compassionate view of the conflict in Occupied Palestine. More and more American Jews are facing the horrible truth: Zionist Israel is becoming more like Nazi Germany every day. During the past week, Israeli Jews have been forming lynch mobs in the streets to hunt down and brutalize Arabs. Their actions remind many observers of the Nazi gangs that chased and brutalized Jews in 1930s Germany.
Quoting scholars and close observers of the scene, Veterans Today takes the comparison further
Zionist racism, like Nazi racism, is virulent to the point of being genocidal. As international law professor Francis Boyle says, “Zionism’s ‘final solution’ to Israel’s much-touted and racist ‘demographic threat’ allegedly posed by the very existence of the Palestinians has always been genocide, whether slow-motion or in blood-thirsty spurts of violence.” Just as the Nazis dedicated themselves to building an ever-expanding Reich free of the taint of lesser races, the Zionists are likewise bent on ethnically-cleansing an ever-larger slice of Palestine. After that, hard-line Zionists promise, comes the entire Middle East from the Nile to the Euphrates.
The Gaza Strip – which some call the world’s largest open-air concentration camp, others the new Warsaw Ghetto – is once again being bombed. Israelis are wondering aloud whether Netanyahu is planning another bloody ground invasion [which has since begun - AN]. Seasoned Mideast observers such as Alan Hart, the former top BBC Mideast correspondent, even warn that one day soon Israel may launch a wider Mideast war that would allow the Zionists to finish the ethnic cleansing of Palestine under the “fog of war.”
