The Jewish State Is Building a Ghetto, we are now in the last phase before genocide

When he heard that this plan had been conceived by the government of the Jewish state, established on the sacrifices of its ghetto, he would have been devastated. After it became clear to him that Israel Katz, the man who proposed this idea, was the son of Holocaust survivors Meir Katz and Malcha Nira née Deutsch from the Maramureș region of Romania, who lost most of their family in the extermination camps, he could never believe it. What would they have to say to their son?

When Anielewicz realized the apathy and inaction that the plan was generating in Israel and to some extent in the world, including Europe, even in Germany, he would die a second time, this time of a broken heart.

The Jewish state is building a ghetto. What a horrible sentence. It's bad enough that the plan was presented as if it were somehow legitimate—who's for a concentration camp and who's against it?—but from there, the path could be shortened to an even more horrific idea: someone could suggest an extermination camp for those who fail the screening process at the ghetto entrance. Israel is mass-murdering Gaza residents anyway, so why not streamline the process and spare the lives of our precious soldiers? Someone could also suggest a compact crematorium on the ruins of Khan Yunis, to which admission, like the nearby Rafah ghetto, would be purely voluntary. Of course, voluntary, like the "humanitarian city." Leaving the two camps would no longer be voluntary. That's what the minister proposed.

The nature of genocide is that it doesn't happen overnight. You don't wake up one morning and go from democracy to Auschwitz, from civil administration to the Gestapo. The process is gradual. After the phase of dehumanization—which the Jews of Germany and the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank each suffered at their own time—comes demonization, as both nations experienced. Then comes the phase of fear: there are no innocents in the Gaza Strip; October 7th represents an existential threat to Israel that could recur at any moment. After that come the calls to evacuate the population before anyone raises the idea of ​​extermination. We are now in this final phase, the last phase before the genocide. Germany moved its Jews to the East; the Armenian genocide also began with deportation, which was then called "evacuation." Today we are talking about an evacuation south of Gaza.

For years, I avoided making comparisons to the Holocaust. Any such comparison risked missing the truth and harming the cause of justice. Israel was never a Nazi state, and once that was established, it followed that if it wasn't a Nazi state, it must be a moral state. You don't need the Holocaust to be shocked. You can be shocked by much less, for example, Israel's behavior in the Gaza Strip. But nothing prepared us for the idea of ​​the "humanitarian city." Israel no longer has any moral right to use the word "humanitarian." Whoever turned the Gaza Strip into a mass graveyard and a wasteland of ruins—and treats it with equanimity—has lost all connection to humanity.

Anyone who only sees the Israeli hostage-taking in the Gaza Strip and ignores the fact that every six hours the Israel Defense Forces kill as many Palestinians as they do live hostages has lost all humanity. If 21 months of witnessing the deaths of babies, women, children, journalists, doctors, and other innocents weren't enough, the ghetto plan should have turned on all the warning lights. Israel is behaving as if it were planning genocide and expulsion. And if it isn't thinking of doing so right now, it has put itself at serious risk of quickly and unwittingly sliding into committing one crime or another. Just ask Anielewicz.

Gideon Levy

Source: Haaretz