As a poster named Jonathon once so succinctly said:

• "Will nobody rid me of idiots who make Nazi analogies? Anyone who equates Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto obviously has no idea what life was like in the Warsaw Ghetto."

Perhaps some people around here need a little education as to what exactly the Warsaw Ghetto was all about.

The Warsaw Ghetto


The city of Warsaw, capital of Poland, flanks both banks of the Vistula River. A city of 1.3 million inhabitants, Warsaw was the capital of the resurrected Polish state in 1919. Before World War II, the city was a major center of Jewish life and culture in Poland. Warsaw's prewar Jewish population of more than 350,000 constituted about 30 percent of the city's total population. The Warsaw Jewish community was the largest in both Poland and Europe, and was the second largest in the world, second only to New York City.

Following the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, Warsaw suffered heavy air attacks and artillery bombardment. German troops entered Warsaw on September 29, shortly after its surrender.

Less than a week later, German officials ordered the establishment of a Jewish council (Judenrat) under the leadership of a Jewish engineer named Adam Czerniak?w. As chairman of the Jewish council, Czerniak?w had to administer the soon-to-be established ghetto and to implement German orders. On November 23, 1939, German civilian occupation authorities required Warsaw's Jews to identify themselves by wearing white armbands with a blue Star of David. The German authorities closed Jewish schools, confiscated Jewish-owned property, and conscripted Jewish men into forced labor and dissolved prewar Jewish organizations.

WARSAW GHETTO

On October 12, 1940, the Germans decreed the establishment of a ghetto in Warsaw. The decree required all Jewish residents of Warsaw to move into a designated area, which German authorities sealed off from the rest of the city in November 1940. The ghetto was enclosed by a wall that was over 10 feet high, topped with barbed wire, and closely guarded to prevent movement between the ghetto and the rest of Warsaw. The population of the ghetto, increased by Jews compelled to move in from nearby towns, was estimated to be over 400,000 Jews. German authorities forced ghetto residents to live in an area of 1.3 square miles, with an average of 7.2 persons per room.

The Jewish council offices were located on Grzybowska Street in the southern part of the ghetto. Jewish organizations inside the ghetto tried to meet the needs of the ghetto residents as they struggled to survive. Among the welfare organizations active in the ghetto were the Jewish Mutual Aid Society, the Federation of Associations in Poland for the Care of Orphans, and the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training. Financed until late 1941 primarily by the New York-based American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, these organizations attempted to keep alive a population that suffered severely from starvation, exposure, and infectious disease.

Warsaw 1939 – 1944
View timeline

Food allotments rationed to the ghetto by the German civilian authorities were not sufficient to sustain life. In 1941 the average Jew in the ghetto subsisted on 1,125 calories a day. Czerniak wrote in his diary entry for May 8, 1941: ?Children starving to death.? Between 1940 and mid-1942, 83,000 Jews died of starvation and disease. Widespread smuggling of food and medicines into the ghetto supplemented the miserable official allotments and kept the death rate from increasing still further.

Emanuel Ringelblum, a Warsaw-based historian prominent in Jewish self-aid efforts, founded a clandestine organization that aimed to provide an accurate record of events taking place in German-occupied Poland while the ghetto existed. This record came to be known as the "Oneg Shabbat" ("In Celebration of Sabbath," also known as the Ringelblum Archive). Only partly recovered after the war, the Ringelblum Archive remains an invaluable source about life in the ghetto and German policy toward the Jews of Poland.

From July 22 until September 12, 1942, German SS and police units, assisted by auxiliaries, carried out mass deportations from the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka killing center. During this period, the Germans deported about 265,000 Jews from Warsaw to Treblinka; they killed approximately 35,000 Jews inside the ghetto during the operation.

In January 1943, SS and police units returned to Warsaw, this time with the intent of deporting thousands of the remaining approximately 70,000-80,000 Jews in the ghetto to forced-labor camps for Jews in Lublin District of the Government General. This time, however, many of the Jews, understandably believing that the SS and police would deport them to the Treblinka killing center, resisted deportation, some of them using small arms smuggled into the ghetto. After seizing approximately 5,000 Jews, the SS and police units halted the operation and withdrew.

On April 19, 1943, a new SS and police force appeared outside the ghetto walls, intending to liquidate the ghetto and deport the remaining inhabitants to the forced labor camps in Lublin district. The ghetto inhabitants offered organized resistance in the first days of the operation, inflicting casualties on the well-armed and equipped SS and police units. They continued to resist deportation as individuals or in small groups for four weeks before the Germans ended the operation on May 16. The SS and police deported approximately 42,000 Warsaw ghetto survivors captured during the uprising to the forced-labor camps at Poniatowa and Trawniki and to the Lublin/Majdanek concentration camp. At least 7,000 Jews died fighting or in hiding in the ghetto, while the SS and police sent another 7,000 to the Treblinka killing center.

For months after the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, individual Jews continued to hide themselves in the ruins and, on occasion, attacked German police officials on patrol. Perhaps as many as 20,000 Warsaw Jews continued to live in hiding on the so-called Aryan side of Warsaw after the liquidation of the ghetto.

On August 1, 1944, the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa; AK), a non-Communist underground resistance army with units stationed throughout German-occupied Poland, rose against the German occupation authorities in an effort to liberate Warsaw. The impetus for the uprising was the appearance of Soviet forces along the east bank of the Vistula River. The Soviets failed to intervene; the Germans eventually crushed the revolt and razed the center of the city to the ground in October 1944. Though they treated captured Home Army combatants as prisoners of war, the Germans sent thousands of captured Polish civilians to concentration camps in the Reich. 166,000 people lost their lives in the uprising, including perhaps as many as 17,000 Polish Jews who had either fought with the AK or had been discovered in hiding.

When Soviet troops resumed their offensive on January 17, 1945, they liberated a devastated Warsaw. According to Polish data, only about 174,000 people were left in the city, less than six per cent of the prewar population. Approximately 11,500 of the survivors were Jews.


http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php...uleId=10005069

my bolds...

Added by David Zarnett on March 07, 2007 09:02:05 AM.

German Bishops see Nazi Germany in Israel/Palestine

Yesterday a group of German Bishops, after having visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel, said “this morning we saw pictures of the Warsaw ghetto at Yad Vashem and this evening we are going to the Ramallah ghetto.” While we all may wonder what tour these bishops were taken on, the Nazi use of ghettos is a part of what made the Holocaust unique - the mass campaign of industrialized killing. This is entirely absent from Palestine. When faced with this type of analogy, we need to consider the impact it has on the understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Although today we see with much more frequency comparisons between Zionism and Nazism, and Israeli policy and Nazi policy, it is important to understand that this is not a new phenomenon. In 1943, British propagandist Freya Stark on a trip to America wrote in a letter to the British Foreign Office of her dislike for the Nazi principles in Zionism. Two years later, Sir Edward Grigg wrote of the Zionist plan to create a Nazi-like state in the Holy Land. In the early 1960s at McGill University, Arnold Toynbee, in a debate with Israeli Ambassador to Canada Yaacov Herzog, compared Israeli military policy to the Arabs as comparable to Nazi policy and atrocities. Fast forward to more current times and we can find posters in Paris naming Sharon as Hitler’s son; we can see billboards in Oleiros, Spain calling Sharon a neo-Nazi; and we can read polls indicating that many believe that what the Zionists are doing to the Palestinians is equivalent to Nazi crimes.

One significant question, amongst numerous others, to ask yourself when hearing of the use of the Zionist-Nazi analogy to describe the Israeli-Palestinian dynamic is why do some feel the need to use comparisons to describe the conflict? Can it not be described on its own terms? Significantly, the Nazi analogy is not one that has been commonly used to describe modern genocidal events. Visiting northern Iraq in 1988, American Ambassador April Glaspie described the horrors of the Iraqi use of chemical weapons against the Kurds as representative of Ba’thist Iraq not Nazi Germany. When Romeo Dallaire visited Darfur, he saw the Janjaweed not the Einsatzgruppen. But when a group of German Bishops arrive in Israel and Palestine they do not see Jews and Arabs fighting for a homeland of their own and for some form of co-existence but rather they see visions of their own country under Nazi rule. Aside from the numerous conceptual, contextual, and statistical inconsistencies in the analogy, why is this view unreasonable?

In one short stroke Arab and Jewish aspirations become a cosmic battle between good and evil; oppressed and oppressor; right versus wrong. The humanity of life in Israel/Palestine, the realities of two competing nationalist movements, the realities and histories of Jewish-Zionist and Arab-Palestinian identities no longer seem to matter. What seems matter most in this case is not to describe the Israeli-Palestinian dynamic as it is but rather to describe it as anything but Israeli-Palestinian.

As a result of this analogy, Israeli actions in the West Bank are not borne of some legitimate security concerns but rather an attempt to commit genocide against Palestinians. What the Nazi analogy does is to deny the existence of the Palestinian. Every wrong, every death, and every event is the act of the Israeli. No longer are the Palestinians their own actors – they are mere bystanders, helpless, downtrodden, and invisible. No longer is the situation a product of both Israeli and Palestinian decisions and actions. No longer are we to bother understanding the Palestinian side of the story including the history of their actions and decisions. We might as well begin understanding Israeli action in a vacuum. This is the logic the Nazi analogy conveys. What we do need to do is to start understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as one between Israelis and Palestinians not between Nazis and Jews and not between Afrikaners and Blacks. This is a conflict over land – an unequal conflict and a bloody conflict. It is not a genocide and does not resemble what the Nazi’s did.

David Zarnett

http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/article.php?id=912#

so how would this analogy go?

warsaw ghetto/354,000 victims/gaza/65,000 victims

oops, i made a mistake, the 65,000 it the total for all the wars and all the victims including israelis. from that 65,000 we must subtract all the israelis, egyptians, jordanians, syrians, iraqis, and an assortment of arabs from other countries such as yemen, saudi arabia, etc. after all the palestinians would have us believe that the palestinians were like the warsaw jews, isolated and surrounded by evil. so what would the corrected number of palestinian victims be for all the wars including the intifadas?? let's have ashley give it a go. come now ashley hows about some hyperbolic vitriol about how the gaza is at least as bad as the warsaw ghetto by giving some numbers to support your claim. here's a link to the casualties for the "terrortories" link and here is the link for the warsaw ghetto's numbers

now ashley since 254,000 jews went to Treblinka, where and how many palestinians went to a death camp similar to Treblinka??

also ashley, since you made the warsaw ghetto analogy, what organization similar to unwra supported the warsaw jews??

also ashley since the palestinians increased in population almost 10 times their original number how do you compare that with the warsaw ghetto jews who died almost to a man/woman/child??

it was said that 100,000 jews died of starvation etc. how does that compare with the palestinians who are better off than 1.6 billion of their fellow travellers on the planet earth according to the great UN's H.D.I.?? oh, you want a link to that, sure: link

The European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia:

working definition of antisemitism

"* Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis"

http://eumc.europa.eu/eumc/material/...tion-draft.pdf

well ashley, you antisemite you. what do you have to say for yourself now??

working definition: :antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expresses as hatred toward jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities"
......

Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.
.......................

examples of the ways in which antisemitism manifests itself with regard to the state of Israel taking into account the overall context could include:

Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
.....
drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
.....



http://eumc.europa.eu/eumc/material/...tion-draft.pdf

http://info-poland.buffalo.edu/searc...etto/slow.html

Was Deportation the only method of extermination of the Jews of Warsaw?

No.

The indirect method was used. As recorded by Emmanual Ringelbaum.

The Warsaw Ghetto and the Gaza Ghetto have much in common.

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/...72/1057/a?etoc

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/art...?artid=1172086

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Sto...907727,00.html

FOOD SECURITY ASSESSMENT WEST BANK AND GAZA STRIP

http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/006/J1575E/J1575E00.HTM

Death and Starvation stalked the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto long before the Treblinka deportations.

The Gaza Ghetto has the same conditions reported by Ringelbaum.

comparing gaza to the warsaw ghetto is antisemitic Thu Dec 20, 2007 8:19 pm

so how would this analogy go?

warsaw ghetto/354,000 victims/gaza/65,000 victims

oops, i made a mistake, the 65,000 it the total for all the wars and all the victims including israelis. from that 65,000 we must subtract all the israelis, egyptians, jordanians, syrians, iraqis, and an assortment of arabs from other countries such as yemen, saudi arabia, etc. after all the palestinians would have us believe that the palestinians were like the warsaw jews, isolated and surrounded by evil. so what would the corrected number of palestinian victims be for all the wars including the intifadas?? let's have ashley give it a go. come now ashley hows about some hyperbolic vitriol about how the gaza is at least as bad as the warsaw ghetto by giving some numbers to support your claim. here's a link to the casualties for the "terrortories" link and here is the link for the warsaw ghetto's numbers

now ashley since 254,000 jews went to Treblinka, where and how many palestinians went to a death camp similar to Treblinka??

also ashley, since you made the warsaw ghetto analogy, what organization similar to unwra supported the warsaw jews??

also ashley since the palestinians increased in population almost 10 times their original number how do you compare that with the warsaw ghetto jews who died almost to a man/woman/child??

it was said that 100,000 jews died of starvation etc. how does that compare with the palestinians who are better off than 1.6 billion of their fellow travellers on the planet earth according to the great UN's H.D.I.?? oh, you want a link to that, sure: [url=http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/statistics/]link

The European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia:

working definition of antisemitism

"* Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis"

http://eumc.europa.eu/eumc/material/...tion-draft.pdf

well ashley, you antisemite you. what do you have to say for yourself now??

Drawing comparisons where there was not comparison would be anti-Semitic but the Warsaw Ghetto and Gaza are good comparisons. The slow starvation noted by Ringlebaum in Warsaw is occurring in Gaza and has been noted by medical professionals. The way that Gaza has been enclosed making it into a Ghetto makes the comparison valid. The Nazi incursions into Warsaw and the Israeli incursions into Gaza are very similar.

And as has been said before an organisation that finds wearing of a Keffiyeh an anti-Semitic action bring into disrepute anything that organisation says.

Your opinions are worthless hasbara 2.

Disagreeing with you Hasbara 2 does not nor ever will make a person anti-Semitic, agreeing with you, on the other hand, may be indicative of a person being a racist.

When you are caught in a despicable analogy you respond by calling the other person "racist." Your starving Gazans can get help from their Arab/Muslim brothers and sisters in Egypt with whom they share a border. They can start working for a living instead of murdering for it.

I'm of the opinion that people who support Ghettos are racists.

You Hasbara1 support Ghettoisation of a people, that makes you a racist.

Ghettos have been used throughout history as a means of controlling a minority. Europe had been getting over the use of Ghettos until the Nazis re-invented the use of Ghettos. Israel has now followed suit.

Your [Hasbara1] denial of the Palestinian as a people is also an attribute of your racism. Many Israeli citizens now consider themselves as Palestinians first and Israeli citizens second. While you have been in denial, the debate has moved on.

http://www.bitterlemons.org/previous/bl111102ed41.html

You should note the use of the term "Palestinians in Israel". It has taken a while but there is now a Palestinian nationality. Get use to it.

ashley: arabs themselves have denied the existence of the palestinian people. it that an attribute to their racism? or your ignorance?

Way back on March 31, 1977, the Dutch newspaper Trouw published an interview with Palestine Liberation Organization executive committee member Zahir Muhsein. Here's what he said:

worldnetdaily

source

perhaps the palestinian identity came into being with the UNWRA definition.

two year residency and or loss of livelihood or as person in need of a begging bowl because they had no means of carrying for themselves. i do beleive that the palestinians have as a "people" been at the begging bowl longer than any other people.

source