The difference is that the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto did not shoot rockets at German civilians, invade German homes, shoot up Germans peacefully attending a music festival, behead German babies, rape German women, and take yet additional German civilians back to Warsaw as hostages. Nor were they in the way of stopping Germans from apprehending anyone who had done so.
And that’s notwithstanding the wide gulf of difference between both the origins and conditions of the Warsaw ghetto vs. Gaza.
I cannot ignore what does not exist.
Anyone who can’t see the difference between Israel’s treatment of Gaza before 10/7 and after, or who can see it and think that it has nothing to do with the attack of 10/7 is being intentionally obtuse.
I must admit I’m a bit skeptical of what a captive tells his interrogators, especially since IDF has huge motivation to convince him to say these things, but if he is who he says he is, and the translation is accurate, then what he says has some weight.
Some of the testimonies from the released Israeli hostages highlight how Hamas has been using hospitals for non-medical purposes:
Doron and her two daughters aged 4 and 2, were abducted to Gaza on Oct 7. During the abduction and firefight with Israeli forces, Doron’s mother was killed and she was shot in the back. They were initially held in a Palestinian apartment and guarded by the family who lived there. Doron’s gunshot wound was treated on the family couch without anesthesia, not in a medical facility.
After 16 days of captivity in the home, Doron and her daughters were moved to a local hospital with 7 other Israeli captives. Not for treatment, but as a prison. Hamas kept them there to keep the hostages away from the Israeli army as international calls increased to prevent Israel from going into the hospitals. The 10 of them were kept locked in a 130-square-foot (12-square-meter) room with a sink but no mattresses for 33 days util their release in the hostage deal.
In an alternate history where the Germans forced the Jews into ghettos and surrounded them and kept them living in poor conditions for decades, and the Jews started throwing rockets at the Germans, and one day some Jews escaped the ghetto and massacred German civilians at a music festival and beheaded German babies, how would your attitude be towards how the Germans respond to that horrific attack on their civilians?
I just wanted to check in to say thank you to @Banquet_Bear and @Broomstick (and others) for their posts. I go to bed thinking about Gaza, I wake up in the morning thinking about Gaza. It is depressing. How can this happen? What is wrong with human nature? But I don’t have the energy anymore to debate about it. It is so sick that Israelis, whose ancestors suffered in the Holocaust, are committing the same sin against the Palestinians. When will people learn to respect each other and live in peace?
You’re not going to be able to extend the analogy sufficiently to cover the Israel-Palestine conflict with any degree of fidelity. The Germans didn’t have a constitution that ensured full legal rights for Jews (I acknowledge that in practice the state of Israel often fails to live up to the ideal, but the ideal is there). The Germans elected a party that openly called for the annihilation of the Jewish people, not a (hypothetical at the time) Jewish state. The Jews in Warsaw hadn’t been offered a significant portion of German or Polish territory on which to form their own independent government by the UN, and rejected that offer. The Polish Jews hadn’t elected a government with an explicitly germanophobic/germanocidal agenda. The Polish Jews didn’t (to my knowledge) teach incendiary rhetoric or incentivize martyrdom in their children’s curricula. Prior to the establishment of the Warsaw ghetto, the territory hadn’t been administered by a Jewish-majority empire that only tolerated Christian or German citizens in a diminished dhimmi status. It’s not a useful comparison.
…the IDF haven’t stopped bombing the refugee camps. I spoke about the strike at Jabalia that killed 90 a few days ago. Another one today that reportedly killed 100. Here’s video footage of the aftermath of a strike on Al Salam Charitable Society building at Jabalia.
A Twitter link:
I couldn’t find it on the AJ website at the moment, sorry.
I’m not even going to address this, your attempt at parallelism is not only wildly off-base, but also the suggestion that (given the parallel) the attack of 10/7 was “some escaped and did it” as opposed to a long and carefully planned attack by the ruling regime is provably false. The bottom line is that Hamas did an absolutely horrible thing which they would do again if their status quo position in Gaza is not upended, and Jews in the Warsaw ghetto did nothing even remotely comparable.
…we really haven’t talked much in this thread about the routine use of humiliation, beatings and torture by the Israeli forces in this thread.
So now is a good place to start.
From an Amnesty Report dated the 3rd of November this year:
If you doubt that Israeli forces are capable of this sort of brutality, here’s a video from a few days ago of them beating a journalist in the street, kicking him multiple times in the head, in full view of cameras.
Non Twitter link that doesn’t include the video:
From AJ:
These are not isolated stories. Almost every single Palestinian that has been released from custody, both after and before October the 7th, share the same stories. Former IDF soldiers admit they have taken part in this. This practice has been well-documented by multiple international humanitarian agencies. Here is Palestinian director Lexi Alexander (who directed the only good Punisher movie) talking about her father:
Every Palestinian has a story.
So when Israel have shut down 22 hospitals in Gaza, and have detained the directors and staff from almost all of them, and the families of those detained have not heard any word about where they have been taken or what their status is, I think we have to take the televised confession of just one of those directors with a grain of salt.
For a reminder of the events that went down at Kamal Adwan:
The hospital was under siege for nine days. Israeli snipers took over surrounding buildings and shot at anyone passing by. The IDF bombed the hospitals maternity ward on the 11th December. It killed two women and their two babies, amputating a third women’s legs.
The next day we have the footage that I posted up-thread that shows clear evidence that the people surrendering from the hospital was staged.
And here are the weapons that this alleged “Hamas base” were storing:
From the official COGAT Twitter account:
For those that can’t access the video: it shows an IDF soldier using a tool to dismantle the bottom of a baby incubator, pulling out a bag, opening the bag up, and discovering weapons. Note the complete lack of concern that there might have been booby traps. Note how similar it was to a video taken a few weeks ago of IDF soldiers finding rifles hidden in teddy bears.
Again: note the complete lack of concern for booby traps.
From the Relief Web Report:
The last quote is the most important part of this story. I have documented in this thread the attacks on the Gazan healthcare system since the start of the war. We need to place this “confession” in context. It wasn’t made in isolation. The systematic targeting and destruction of the healthcare system in Gaza are war crimes.
Germans began two world wars, but they developed a national conscience. I believe enough Palestinians have been educated from birth to hate Jews that it will not happen in their case.
Let me start by saying that, given the barbaric events of Oct 7, Israel’s reaction (invasion of Gaza) is justified. It needs to destroy Hamas if possible.
What may not be justified is the lengths to which Israel will go to to defeat Hamas.
In this or its parallel thread, one poster who strongly supports the IDFs actions said that nuclear bombs on Gaza are too much. So, even a strong supporter agrees that there are limits to what the IDF should do to achieve its goals. The question then becomes where are those limits, and different people have different answers to this.
What I was trying to get at with my analogy is not that the situation today is totally analogous with what I wrote above, but that it would be informative to examine what our reaction would be if one group of people are making another group suffer for many years (irrespective of the particulars), and the suffering group reacts with a barbaric act. Are we OK with retaliation from the first group? Most people would be. Are we OK with “anything goes” retaliation? Most people would not be. Yes, it’s an imperfect analogy (especially if you think that the first group are not oppressors), but even if they are not oppressors, I still think people consider there to be bounds on the first group’s retaliation.
