The Jewish state is building a ghetto

The ruins of Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, January 2025

Gideon Levy writes in Haaretz on 10 July 2025:

If Mordechai Anielewicz were alive today, he’d have died. The leader of the Jewish Combat Organization during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising would have died of shame and disgrace at hearing the defense minister’s plans – with the full backing of the prime minister – to erect a “humanitarian city” in the southern Gaza Strip. Anielewicz would never have believed that anyone would dare conceive of such a diabolical plan 80 years after the Holocaust.

When hearing this plan was envisioned by the government of the Jewish state, established on the sacrifices of his ghetto, he would have been devastated. After becoming clear to him that Israel Katz, the man who brought forward this idea, was the son of Holocaust survivors Meir Katz and Malcha (Nira) née Deutsch from Romania’s Maramures region, who lost most of their family in the extermination camps, he would never have believed it. What would they have to say to their son?

When Anielewicz became aware of the apathy and inaction the plan provoked in Israel and to some extent in the world, including in Europe, even in Germany, he would have died a second time, this time from a broken heart.

The Jewish state is erecting a ghetto. What a horrifying sentence. It’s bad enough the plan was presented as if it could be in any way legitimate – who is for a concentration camp and who is against it? – but from there the path may be shortened to an even more horrific idea: someone might suggest next an extermination camp for those who do not get through the screening process at the ghetto’s entrance. Israel is killing Gaza’s residents en masse anyway, so why not streamline the process and spare the lives of our precious soldiers? Someone might also suggest a compact crematorium on the ruins of Khan Yunis, to which admittance, like the nearby ghetto in Rafah, will be purely voluntary. Of course, voluntary, like in the “humanitarian city.” Only leaving the two camps will no longer be voluntary. That is what the minister proposed.

The nature of genocide is that they are not born overnight. One does not wake up one morning and go from democracy to Auschwitz, from civil administration to the Gestapo. The process is gradual. After the dehumanization phase – which the Jews of Germany, and the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank both underwent each in their own time – they move on to demonization, as both nations have also experienced. Then comes the fear phase – there are no innocents in the Gaza Strip, October 7 as an existential threat to Israel that could occur again at any moment. After which come the calls to evacuate the population before anyone raises the idea of extermination.

We are now in that latter phase, the last phase before genocide. Germany transferred its Jews to the east; the Armenian genocide also began with deportation, which back then was called an “evacuation.” Today, we are talking about an evacuation to the south of Gaza.

For years, I have 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 having established that fact, it followed that if it was not a Nazi state, it must be a moral one. You don’t need the Holocaust to be shocked. You can be shocked by much less, for example, by 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 what it is – a mass graveyard and a wasteland of ruins – and treats it with equanimity has lost all connection to humanity. Whoever sees only the suffering of the Israeli hostages in the Gaza Strip and fails to see that every six hours the Israel Defense Forces kills as many Palestinians as there are living hostages has lost all of their humanity.

If 21 months of seeing the death of babies, women, children, journalists, doctors and other innocents was not enough, the ghetto plan should be turning on all the warning lights. Israel is behaving as if it is planning genocide and expulsion. And, if it is not thinking of doing so right now, it has put itself at serious risk of quickly and unknowingly sliding into committing one crime or the other. Ask Anielewicz.

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