There are in modern history at least two examples of captive populations; one group, the Jews, being the victims in the first instance and the perpetrators in the second instance. I am talking about the Warsaw Ghetto and the Gaza Strip. Regardless of one's prejudices one way or the other, the facts speak for themselves and there are many similarities. Eliminating the dissimilarities first- the Gaza Strip is much larger and has more people. The Jewish population of the Warsaw Ghetto was about 400,000 and that of the Gaza Strip is approximately 1.4 million. The Warsaw Ghetto was only about 3 square miles in extent and the Gaza Strip is 131 square miles.

A concrete fence topped with razor wire surrounded the Warsaw Ghetto and an Israeli fence completely surrounds the Gaza Strip. It is similar to the Nazi fence in the Egyptian area and is just wire and barbed wire the rest of the distance around the perimeter. The only way one could leave either area legally was to obtain a pass, reserved only for certain travelers like workers. There were underground tunnels under the Warsaw Ghetto and tunnels are presently in existence under the Gaza Strip, the majority of them in the Gaza Strip being near the Rafah border with Egypt. Since both the Nazis and the Israelis inhibited the flow of food, medicine, energy, water and other essential supplies, tunnels were dug to alleviate this distress and to bring in weapons because as I analyze this situation, any captive population subject to slow death is entitled to self-defense. Naturally, anyone trying to cross either the Israeli or Nazi border illegally was dealt with very harshly. Also, in the case of the Warsaw Ghetto, there was an escape route for a few of the resistance fighters through the sewer system, ending up in a forest near Warsaw. From time to time the Nazis would come and take away Jews to the Nazi extermination camp at Treblinka. In January, 1943 a resistance fighter named Mordechai Anielewicz organized opposition to this deportation and drove the Germans out. This was when SS chief Heinrich Himmler decided to eliminate the Warsaw Ghetto entirely and Nazi troops under Jurgen Stroop entered to eliminate all resistance and burn the ghetto to the ground. The Jews fought very bravely with only small arms and Molotov cocktails for over 20 days, but resistance to an army of such mechanized might was futile. It is just as futile as Palestinians fighting Israeli forces equipped with F-16s, helicopters and Merkava tanks and themselves armed only with vastly inferior weapons.

One may object here and say the Nazis were taking the Jews to extermination camps, while the Palestinians were only subject to phosphorus bombs, cluster bombs, depleted uranium in bunker buster bombs and even experimental weapons that hadn't been used before like DIME weapons. I took down the name of an Israeli spokesman called Mark Regev, who admitted that phosphorus bombs had been used in Gaza, but only on houses containing ammunition, far from other civilian houses. What! Houses won't burn and ammunition explode unless one uses phosphorus on them! To quote Sir Walter Scott: "Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive." DIME stands for Dense Inert Metal Explosives. Small pellets of a tungsten alloy are packed into a highly explosive bomb. The injuries produced by these bombs are unlike any shrapnel wounds seen before, and the fatality rate is very high. Tungsten is also carcinogenic in experiments on mice.

These weapons resulted in an enormous number of wounded and the Shifa hospital in Gaza City was overburdened. Therefore, ambulances tried to take the seriously wounded to Jordan or Egypt and were subject to border delays of up to fourteen hours. Often, these Palestinians died. Is it just my suspicious mind, or is the state of Israel with its repeated bombing raids, and then delaying tactics, trying to reduce the Palestinian population, much as the Nazis tried to eliminate the Jews, although not so aggressively? I have my suspicions because of one incident in particular. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, Ariel Sharon allowed the Lebanese Christian Falangists, who are fascists, to murder hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children in the refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila. Ariel Sharon was never brought to justice, just as Dick Cheney has never been prosecuted for running his own torture and assassination squad.

Exports and Imports into the Gaza Strip become much more constricted directly after an Israeli bombing operation, just when one would think the Palestinians would need it most. I remember a Palestinian fisherman who said he was no longer allowed to sell fish in Israel, and he was limited to only 3 nautical miles from shore or the Israeli navy would intercept his small fishing vessel and turn it back. I wonder what is next- Palestinians only allowed to breath air in specially approved locations or a daily allotment of sunshine. Only today, I read that Israeli helicopters had opened fire on Gaza fishermen who were beyond the 3 mile limit, damaging their boats, but fortunately not killing them. I wonder if the fish need to be stamped "illegal" if any reach port.

Neither the United States or Israel seems to pay much attention to international law, but according to the third and fourth Geneva Convention, Israel is obligated to treat civilians and prisoners of war much more humanely than they in fact do, and according to UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed at the conclusion of the Six Day War in 1967, Israel is required to give back all the territory they won in that war. So far, they have only given back the Sinai peninsula to Egypt. They haven't given back the Gaza Strip, the West Bank or the Golan Heights. Consequently, they are fighting an illegal, aggressive war against another nation. Also, Israel has invaded and bombed Lebanon numerous times on several pretexts. Robert Jackson, the principal American judge at Nuremberg, classified these invasions on spurious pretexts as the worst of all the Nazi war crimes, from which their other atrocities arose. I would conclude that Israel is in violation of the Geneva Conventions, UN resolutions, and the law established at Nuremberg.

I fervently believe that I am destined to be labeled as anti-Semitic. However, from my earliest memories I was very pro-Semitic. I grew up very attached to science and naturally Einstein was one of my heroes. I studied science and have a Masters Degree in Chemistry. It was only later on that I discovered Einstein was a socialist when he wrote an article for the Monthly Review in 1949 called: "Why Socialism?" This only increased my admiration for Einstein, as I believe in socialism myself. Of course, Karl Marx himself was a Jew.

Although, I am opposed to nuclear weapons and war, I was fascinated by the Manhattan Project and the number of Jewish scientists involved in it. I know that part of their inclination to participate was to prevent the Nazi scientists from developing nuclear weapons first, being aware of the Holocaust and the other atrocities of the Nazis, including the Warsaw Ghetto. Also, most of the scientists were leftists and I am confident were cognizant of the fact that if the United States possessed nuclear weapons alone that the US ruling class would try and eliminate the first large scale experiment in socialism, the Soviet Union. The United States and every other capitalist power invaded the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 and tried to destroy socialism then, but the Red Army was victorious. Of course, the Soviet Union was our ostensible ally in World War 2 and bore the brunt of the Nazi attack. How giving secret information to an ally doing most of the fighting against the Nazis made many of these atomic scientists traitors is beyond me? The United States is more concerned with expanding corporate control and sweatshops around the world than it is with spreading democracy and freedom. Ronald Reagan's "shining city on the hill" is one gigantic myth. Think of all the further wars and nuclear blackmail that would have probably occurred if the United States had been the only superpower.with nuclear weapons. These scientists may have saved the world from a lot of destruction.

Robert Oppenheimer's brother was a member of the Communist Party. His wife was formerly married to an Abraham Lincoln Brigade member, who lost his life fighting fascism in Spain. Never the less, General Groves seemed unconcerned about the political affiliations of his scientists as long as they developed the atom bomb. General Groves admitted later on that the atom bomb was developed for use against the Soviet Union. It was used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even though the Japanese, in a number of memos, had indicated a desire to surrender.

Although from recently declassified KGB files, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were evidently minor players in the transfer of atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, there were many others, including a Jewish scientist named Theodore Hall and Klaus Fuchs, who leaked a lot more. Theodore Hall was a genius. He graduated from Harvard in physics at the age of 18. I love leftist geniuses and I don't care a whit if they are Jews. The FBI released Theodore Hall and he emigrated to England, where he did research in biology, until his death just recently.

Anyhow, it was immaterial as Russian scientists were working on an alternative method of detonation, and as it turned out, both methods were successful. However, no one knew at the time. Unfortunately, for any Third World countries, which don't follow US orders or are socialist, the only sure way to prevent a US attack is to possess nuclear weapons, as North Korea obviously has concluded. Anyhow, I am deviating from the subject. What I am trying to impress on others is that Jews have been some of the greatest scientists, intellectuals, writers and artists the world has known, and I am far from being anti-Semitic.

There is little doubt that Jews have been discriminated against for centuries. There was a period in European history when usury or making money from money was considered sinful and therefore, Jews were forced to become the merchants and bankers and looked down upon afterward for being greedy. Both the Jews and the Moors were forcibly expelled from Spain. Famous writers like Shakespeare and Dickens even portrayed Jews as villains. Shakespeare had Shylock wanting his pound of flesh in The Merchant of Venice and Dickens' villain was Fagin, who managed a bunch of street children in a pickpocket ring, in Oliver Twist. To be fair, I would say both writers did depict and give arguments about the discrimination faced by Jews.

I think there is much confusion between Zionism and the beliefs of many Jews. In its modern manifestation, I would say Zionism is fascist in nature and their are great similarities between US leaders like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Israeli leaders like Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu. Noam Chomsky, who is Jewish, has called Israel: "the local cop on the beat" for the United States in the region because of the need to control the oil reserves of the Middle East. Turkey is also a client state and has vied with Colombia for being the largest recipient of US military aid in the world. Colombia is fighting a leftist group called the FARC and Turkey is involved in another war against the PKK or Kurdistan Workers Party. Egypt when Nasser ruled many years ago was definitely not a US client state, but Mubarek is a different person entirely. He is more than willing to participate in the slaughter of other Arabs by closing the Rafah crossing to the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip.

It is my opinion that the best way the Jews can gain retribution and justice from the ghastly events of the Holocaust is to become the exact opposite of what the Nazis were. The present state of Israel is not doing that. They are becoming like the Nazis in so many ways. None of the events of the Holocaust can be undone. As Omar Khayyam wrote: "The moving finger writes and having writ moves on. Nor thy piety nor thy wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it." The Holocaust should not be forgotten, but it seems to me like it is an obsession, which the Zionists would like to use to justify everything they do.

Israel is the strongest military state in the Middle East. The Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are trapped. The only alternatives that I see are to attempt to bring in humanitarian supplies and to ask for mercy from the Israelis, as forlorn a hope as that might be. The most eloquent plea for mercy I have ever read are the lines by Portia in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice:

"The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It is twice blest- it blesseth him that gives and him that takes."

The claim has been made that Gaza is rather like the Warsaw ghetto. Now this claim is either a legitimate comparison, or it's a peculiarly unpleasant smear, insinuating that Israel is akin to Nazi Germany. So let's see if it's a legitimate comparison. The two main features of the Warsaw ghetto were (1) that it was an unspeakable atrocity, leading to the deaths of nearly half a million Jews and others, and (2) that it was part of a genocidal plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe.

Keywords:

Take the first point, and consider the comparison: on the one hand, the number of Palestinian refugees in the late 1940s was approximately 750,000, but it now stands between 4 and 6 million. It would be quite hard to regard this as even an attempted genocide - few genocides end up with an increase in the victim population of the order of several hundred per cent. By contrast, the size of the Jewish population in the Warsaw ghetto after the three years in which it existed was zero. The current life expectancy of a Palestinian woman is 75 years, according to the UN. What was the life expectancy of a Jewish woman in the Warsaw ghetto? Whatever age she was, she had at the very most three more years to live. Not a striking similarity, then.

With reference to the second significant feature of the Warsaw ghetto, which supposedly resembles Gaza, it should be noted that Israel has had control of the skies over Gaza for many years now, and had it wanted to it could have produced the same outcome as the Nazis did in the Warsaw ghetto. The fact that it hasn't done so would demonstrate to most people, even those hostile enough to stand in need of a demonstration, that it has no such aims. People who maintain their suspicion that Israel has genocidal intentions towards the population of Gaza do so in the face of a total lack of evidence to support their view.

Let us now consider whether there is any evidence that Israel is aiming to exterminate the Palestinians in general. Where are the slave labour camps in the Territories, in which tens and hundreds of thousands are worked to death, with a life expectancy of between three and six months? Where are the gas chambers killing thousands every day? Beats me, I just can't see them.

So the comparison is not, to put it mildly, a legitimate one. It is, in fact, a poisonous smear, which derives its repellent quality partly from its exploitation of the terrible history of the Nazis and the Jews. It's hard to know why some people feel the need to paint the swastika on to the foreheads of the Jews of Israel in this way, to covertly suggest that the Nazis have been reincarnated as Israeli Jews and that Israel is the new Third Reich. I think it's unlikely that all boycotters share these views, but insofar as they do, their position is morally polluted by this new version of a very old stereotype, that Jews are secretly planning to kill millions of innocent people.

the only difference is in the degree, not inthe kind, of oppression

The Palestinian causeis charecterized by exageration, prevarication and fabrication. Perhaps if their propaganda had anysemblance to reality, people might listen. It is asstoundingly arrogant to compare Israel's response to the rockets and terror attacks coming from Gaza and the deaths of Hams fighters in battle to the Warsaw ghetto and the mechanized, systemized massacre of un-armed civilians. That is , unless of course, Palestinians are just so super special and privileged that their problems, even if self caused, just matter more than other peoples tragedies .

an apt description of how israel indiscriminantly bombed south Beirut and Beirut International airport in July 2006

Less exageration, hyperbole, and simple fabrication might make anti-zionists more believeable. Their implied message here is that Arab lives are so much more important than Jewish lives that millions of Jews slaughtered in theHolocaust are less important than dozens of Arab killed in a war.

nazis : "we are the Master Race"

zionists: "we are the Chosen People"

the difference is in degree, not kind...