When The Occupied Becomes The Occupier

Sean Mallory looks at some historical parallels with the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Sean Mallory is a Tyrone republican.

A brief historical account of the Warsaw Ghetto provided by that well known internet super highway codex of information – Wikipedia!


Warsaw Ghetto

The Warsaw Ghetto was known as a Jewish residential district in Warsaw by the German authorities: "Jüdischer Wohnbezirk in Warschau“ (Jewish residential district in Warsaw);

From there, at least 254,000 Ghetto residents were sent to the
Treblinka extermination camp over the course of two months in the summer of 1942. 

The Germans closed the Warsaw Ghetto to the outside world on November 16, 1940. The wall was typically 3 m (9.8 ft) high and topped with
barbed wire. Escapees could be shot on sight. The borders of the ghetto changed many times during the next years.

During the next year and a half, thousands of
Polish Jews as well as some Romani people from smaller cities and the countryside were brought into the Ghetto. Average food rations in 1941 for Jews in Warsaw were limited to 184 calories, compared to 699 calories for gentile Poles and 2,613 calories for Germans.[14]

Over 100,000 of the Ghetto's residents died due to rampant disease or starvation, as well as random killings. 
Polish resistance officer Jan Karski reported to the Western governments in 1942 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.[7]

On January 18, 1943, after almost four months without any deportations, the Germans suddenly entered the Warsaw ghetto intent upon a further deportation. Within hours, some 600 Jews were shot and 5,000 others rounded up.

The Germans expected no resistance, but preparations to resist had been going on since the previous autumn.
[18] The first instances of Jewish armed resistance began that day. 

The final battle started on the eve of
Passover of April 19, 1943, when a Nazi force consisting of several thousand troops entered the ghetto. After initial setbacks, the Germans under the field command of Jürgen Stroop systematically burned and blew up the ghetto buildings, block by block, rounding up or murdering anybody they could capture. Significant resistance ended on April 28, and the Nazi operation officially ended in mid-May, symbolically culminating with the demolition of the Great Synagogue of Warsaw on May 16. According to the official report, at least 56,065 people were killed on the spot or deported to German Nazi concentration and death camps (Treblinka, Poniatowa, Majdanek, Trawniki).

The
Warsaw Uprising, in 1944 ended in the capitulation of the city and its near total destruction by the German forces. According to many historians, a major cause of this was the almost complete lack of outside support and the late arrival of the support which did arrive.

The death toll among the Jewish inhabitants of the Ghetto, is estimated to be at least 300,000.


Now replace ‘Warsaw with Gazza’, ‘Poland with Palestine’, ‘Jew’ with ‘Muslim’.....and ‘complete lack of outside support’ with the ‘United Nations’......

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