Gideon Levy: “Israel is building a ghetto, then will it build a death camp?”

Edward Said , perhaps the greatest Palestinian intellectual, wrote that the tragedy of the Palestinian people is "being a victim of victims." Now, anyone who refers to the victims of the Holocaust has become a perpetrator . With the intellectual courage that characterizes him, Gideon Levy writes in Haaretz : " If Mordechai Anielewicz were still alive, he would be dead today. The head of the Jewish Combat Organization during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising would have died of shame and dishonor if he had known of the Defense Minister's plans, with the full support of the Prime Minister, to build a 'humanitarian city' in the southern Gaza Strip. Anielewicz would never have believed that anyone, 80 years after the Holocaust, could conceive such a diabolical plan. Had he known that this plan had been conceived by the government of the Jewish state, founded on the sacrifices of its ghetto, he would have been devastated. Had he discovered that the mastermind behind this plan was Israel Katz, the son of Holocaust survivors Meir Katz and Malcha (Nira), née Deutsch, originally from the Romanian region of Maramures, who had lost much of their family in the extermination camps, he would never have believed it. What would they have said to their son? Had Anielewicz realized the apathy and inertia the plan had caused in Israel and, to some extent, in the world, including Europe and even Germany, he would have died a second time, this time of a broken heart.”

And here Levy touches a raw nerve for Israel. “The Jewish state ,” he denounces, “ is building a ghetto. What a horrible phrase. It's bad enough that the plan was presented as if it could somehow be legitimate: who is for a concentration camp and who is against it? But from there, it could be a short step to an even more horrific idea: someone could suggest an extermination camp for those who fail the selection process at the ghetto entrance. Israel is mass-murdering Gazans anyway , so why not streamline the process and spare the lives of our precious soldiers? Someone could even propose a compact crematorium on the ruins of Khan Yunis, to which access would be purely voluntary, like in the nearby Rafah ghetto. Voluntary, of course, like in the 'humanitarian city.' Only leaving the two camps would no longer be a voluntary choice. That's what the minister proposed.”

Levy then remarks: “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 both the Jews in Germany and the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank experienced, each in their own time, comes demonization, as both nations experienced. Then comes the phase of fear: there are no innocents in the Gaza Strip, and October 7th represents an existential threat to Israel that could happen again at any moment. Then come the calls to evacuate the population, before anyone even raises the idea of extermination. Now we have reached this final phase, the last before the genocide. Germany moved its Jews east, and the Armenian genocide also began with deportation, which at the time was called 'evacuation.' Today we talk about evacuation south of Gaza.” Evacuation: a term sweetened to avoid using the appropriate words: deportation, final solution.

Levy confesses: “ For years, I avoided making comparisons with the Holocaust. Any such comparison risked distorting the truth and harming the cause of justice. Israel was never a Nazi state, and once that was established, if it wasn't a Nazi state, it had to be a moral state. You don't need the Holocaust to be shocked. You can be shocked by much less, such as 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.' Anyone who has turned the Gaza Strip into a mass graveyard and a wasteland of ruins, and treats it with indifference, has lost all connection with humanity. Anyone who sees only the suffering of Israeli hostages in the Gaza Strip, without noticing that every six hours the Israeli Defense Forces kill as many Palestinians as there are hostages still alive, has lost all trace of humanity. If 21 months of killing babies, women, children, journalists, doctors, and other innocents weren't enough, the ghetto plan should set off all alarm bells. Israel is behaving as if it were planning genocide and expulsion. And, even if it has no intention of doing so at the moment, it has exposed itself to the serious risk of quickly and unwittingly sliding into committing either crime. Just ask Anielewicz.

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Umberto De Giovannangeli