Holocaust survivor: Why I support Palestinian rights

In Canada, Holocaust Memorial Day has been established by Heritage Canada to be on April 11. It is a good opportunity to review what we learn from the Holocaust experience and how we apply these lessons to the troubled situation in the Middle East.

This year, students in more than 60 cities took part in educational meetings on conditions in Palestine as part of Israeli Apartheid Week, held March 1-7. It is a controversial event, not popular in Canadian government circles. It is criticized for supposedly dishonouring the victims of Hitler's Holocaust.
I am a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust, the Nazis' mass murder of Europe's Jews. The tragic experience of my family and community under Hitler makes me alert to the suffering of other peoples denied their human rights today -- including the Palestinians.

True, Hitler's Holocaust was unique. The Palestinians are victims of ethnic cleansing and apartheid. Hitler started with that, but went on to extermination. In my family's city in Poland, Piotrkow, 99 per cent of the Jews perished.

Yet for me, the Israeli government's actions toward the Palestinians awaken horrific memories of my family's experiences under Hitlerism: the inhuman walls, the checkpoints, the daily humiliations, killings, diseases, the systematic deprivation. There's no escaping the fact that Israel has occupied the entire country of Palestine, and taken most of the land, while the Palestinians have been expelled, walled off, and deprived of human rights and human dignity.

Many levels of the Canadian government have recently been attacking the movement against Israeli apartheid, saying that it is anti-Jewish in character. This is bizarre. When Nelson Mandela opposed South African apartheid, was this anti-White? No, Mandela proposed that all South Africans, Whites included, join on a basis of democracy and equality in freeing the country from racial oppression. And that is precisely the proposal that the movement against Israeli apartheid makes to all inhabitants of Israel/Palestine.

We are told that Israeli Jews will never accept such a democratic solution. Why? Is there something wrong with their genes or their culture? The very notion is absurd -- in fact, its logic is anti-Jewish. Opposition to Israeli apartheid is based on hope -- a hope founded on the common humanity of the region's Jewish and Palestinian inhabitants.

My family and their community in Piotrkow, Poland, suffered a hard fate under Hitler. The Nazis forced the city's 25,000 Jews into the first ghetto in occupied Poland. The resistance movement in the ghetto was unable to link up with resistance outside. Only a couple of hundred Piotrkow Jews escaped death.

But my mother and father then lived in Paris. They were active in the "Union des Juifs," a Jewish resistance organization closely linked to socialist parties and other anti-Nazi groups. When the Nazis started rounding up Jews in France, the Union des Juifs hid thousands of Jewish children among anti-Nazis across the country. My parents were killed. But a brave peasant family in Auvergne, at great risk, took me in and hid me. And that is why I am here today.

The Nazis were routed, and the resistance dealt blows to racism that are felt in France even to this day.

There is a lesson here for us today. Hitler seemed all-powerful at the time. But he could not crush the resistance, a broad people's alliance embracing many religions and many political viewpoints.

We need that kind of alliance in resisting oppression today -- including the oppression of the Palestinians.

The United Nations has defined apartheid as "inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them."

The apartheid concept was found in North America when indigenous peoples were confined to reservations in remote corners of the lands stolen from them. The South African Dutch settlers and Israeli government further developed the concept.

Eliminating Israeli apartheid involves three simple measures:
• The right of exiled Palestinians to return to their country.
• An end to Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.
• The right of Palestinians within Israel to full equality.

On July 9, 2005, 170 Palestinian civil society organizations called for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against the institutions of Israeli apartheid. The BDS movement helped to end the crime of South African apartheid. Since 2005, the BDS movement against Israeli apartheid movement has won wide support around the world.

Nelson Mandela, the great leader of BDS against South African Apartheid, said that justice for the Palestinians is "the greatest moral issue of the age."

I recently discovered that my name is included in a website list of "7,000 self-hating Jews." Why are Jewish supporters of Palestine labelled as "self-hating"? Because those who make this charge have redefined Judaism in terms of the present policies and character of the Israeli state. They see Judaism as nothing more than a rationale for oppressing Palestinians. What an insult to Jewish religion and culture!

As for the 7,000 self-haters, the critics need to add a couple of zeros to that total. In my experience, support of Palestine is stronger in the Jewish population than in society as a whole. And Jewish people work alongside their Palestinian brothers and sisters as a strong component of the Palestine solidarity movement.

Holocaust Awareness Week is an appropriate time to review our proud history as Jewish universalists, welcoming and encompassing humanity. We, as Jewish supporters of the Palestinians, stand on the finest traditions of Judaism, its great contributions to human religion, philosophy, science, and solidarity through the ages. The rights we expect for the Jewish people, we demand for all humanity -- above all, for the Palestinians that the Israeli government oppresses in our name.

Comments

Submitted by LimeJello on April 9, 2010 - 10:35am.

Ms. Weiss is certainly entitled to her opinion. It is also unfair to characterize her as a "self-hating Jew" because she has an opinion on Israeli-Palestinian issues that vary from the mainstream Jewish community.

What is particularly unfortunate about Ms Weiss' presentation is that she attempts to advance her position by mere virtue of her having survived the Holocaust. It is a strange phenomenon that dishonest polemicists like Norman Finklestein have made a career out of claiming that Israel uses the Holocaust to justify its actions when I have yet to hear or see any significant occurance of that on the part of Israel in referrence to the conflict with the Palestinians. It appears the only time the Holocaust is brought into this is when people like Finklestein, British MP Gerald Kaufman or Ms Weiss use it to criticize Israel.

There are Jews who survived the Holocaust who endured far worse than Ms Weiss, who was sheltered by a French family during the war. There are Holocaust survivors who had to endure the daily torture of the death camps and these people strongly support Israel. Does that make their insight more valuable than Ms Weiss'?

Of course, to put the arguments in those terms is spurious and that is the point. Ms Weiss' having survived the Second World War gives her no more insight into the Palestinian-Israeli conflict than being mugged gives someone insight into judicial reform of the criminal code.

There is a regrettable pervasiveness among writers on rabble to take the position that to be pro-Palestinian rights, one has to oppose the middle east's sole democracy. It would be better if more people took the reasonable position of Arab-Israeli journalist Khaled Abu Toameh who describes himself as being both pro-Palestine and pro-Israel at the same time.

But it is shameful that, in attempting to buy credibility, Ms Weiss feels the need to invoke the deaths of millions of innocent people, most of whom would not have perished if at the time of their murders, there had been the Jewish homeland that she so strongly opposes.

Submitted by Gino on April 9, 2010 - 1:07pm.

There is nothing shameful whatsoever about Ms. Weiss' position. She is simply challenging the shopworn use of the Holocaust as a justification for zionist persecution of Palestinians and arguing for the honourable tradition of Jewish universalism instead. I saw her talk at IAW last year in which she calmly and factually compared the massacre in Gaza with the that of the Warsaw Ghetto, not insisting that they were identical but rather that they are uncomfortably similar, especially when an Israeli military leader spoke of visiting a "holocaust" on Gaza (his language, not Ms. Weiss' or mine).

I was once both pro-Palestine and pro-Israel but increasingly couldn't stomach Israel's definition of itself at the expense of Palestinian land and elementary rights. You can't support both parties when one is massacring and oppressing the other, and without a major change of political direction from Israel and its sponsors, there's no finessing that situation.

Submitted by LimeJello on April 9, 2010 - 1:55pm.

Ms Weiss's experiences would not make her an expert on the Warsaw Ghetto which was about 800 miles away from where she was sheltered. And comparing the Warsaw ghetto, where the Jewish population was anihilated for no other reason than being Jewish, to Gaza, where Israel retaliated for rocket attacks against its civiliian population is absurd. During the Gaza offensive, Israel allowed food and medical supplies into Gaza, went to lengths to avoid civillian casualties, and called off a number of attacks when the Palestinians used their own civillians as human shields. If you talk to anyone with a knowledge of military ordinance and strategy they would tell you that taking into account that Gaza is small and one of the most densely populated places on earth, the civillian casualty rate was indicative of an attempt to spare, not anhiliate the population while creating a deterrent to further attacks against Israeli civillians. These are just a few examples, among too many discrepencies to list, that belie any comparison between Gaza and Warsaw.

I would also repeat that the "shopworn use" of invoking the Holocaust in the Palestinian-Israeli dispute is seems to be mainly on the side of the Palestinians and their supporters. The Israelis feel they need no other justification than self-defense against an enemy that has vowed their destruction and uses intentional attacks against civillians as their method.

I would not disagree that Palestinian rights are not being fully recognized and many Palestinian civillians are being treated unfairly because of Israel's security concerns and by some of the radical settlers who are motivated by religious nationalism. But there is at least equal blame on the Palestinian side when Hamas refuses to recognize Israel's right to exist, when they use intentional attacks against civillians as a tool, and when there is regular, racist incitement to violence and hatred against Jews by the Palestinian government and media. There is also the ongoing lack of respect for human rights and the violent supression of free speech and internal dissent on the Palestinian side.

There are two sides to this issue. I would repeat, Ms Weiss' attempt to invoke the Holocaust to vilify only Israel in this conflict and to mischaracterize the nature of that country is both dishonest and shameful.

Submitted by Pensive on April 9, 2010 - 5:10pm.

Ahh, Lime, should have known you'd be here asap. It's just not a debate with out you in the mix.

Of course I disagree w/ quite a bit of what you have to say! Where to start?

What is particularly unfortunate about Ms Weiss' presentation is that she attempts to advance her position by mere virtue of her having survived the Holocaust.

I don't see where she's doing that at all. Having survived such a terrifying experience like the holocaust is part of who she is and is not something she can leave at the door like a pair of shoes. Her experience has contributed to her awareness of the kind of suffering that has been, and is being, inflicted on human beings.

...claiming that Israel uses the Holocaust to justify its actions...

No where that i can see in the article, does she state this. But i guess it lets you slip in the dig about Norman Finklestein, and his views on this issue.

First of all, assuming you know the full extent of her situation from this article and comparing her to other survivors is shameful. How dare you discount her experience because she was fortunate enough to find shelter. What about having her parents killed? I see you leave that point out of your carefully worded rebuttal. There are also survivors who endured daily torture in death camps and they also support Palestine.

Ms Weiss' having survived the Second World War gives her no more insight into the Palestinian-Israeli conflict than being mugged gives someone insight into judicial reform of the criminal code.

This statement is completely misleading. Having survived WWII alone may not give insight, but a lifetime of being aware, of research, of writing papers, of encouraging discourse and free speech has certainly helped I would think.

And in regards to your ludicrous example of being mugged... I have a feeling that someone who has experienced a mugging would be more inclined to inform them selves of judicial reform.

There is a regrettable pervasiveness among writers on rabble to take the position that to be pro-Palestinian rights, one has to oppose the middle east's sole democracy.

Who is occupying the Palestinian lands?

Who is stationed at the check points?

Who is enforcing martial law in the occupied territories?

Again and again you misunderstand the stance of pro-Palestinian rights movements in thinking they're attacking the whole of Israel as opposed to the Israeli policies in place that are the cause of these issues.

I don't think she needs to buy credibility at all. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, as you stated in your opening. Her opinion is born from a lifetime of experiences that have culminated in who she is today. Also, where does she oppose the notion of Israel as a country? In fact, the actions she feels are needed to improve the situation are stated as this:

Within Israel she says. Hmm, interesting.

I would also repeat that the "shopworn use" of invoking the Holocaust in the Palestinian-Israeli dispute is seems to be mainly on the side of the Palestinians and their supporters.

I disagree with this as well. What backs this assumption? There is equal invocation of the Holocaust in why Israel was created in the first place? You yourself said; most of whom would not have perished if at the time of their murders, there had been the Jewish homeland. And that's not the first time I've read that point. And I'm not arguing against it either. We can't go back and change what was. All these pro-Palestinian groups are asking for is equal rights! An end to occupation! An end to check points! An yes there is dissent between Palestinian factions, but the US, Israel, the world, must stand up and take responsibility for part of that. I hope with all my being that this conflict is solved within my lifetime, but it must begin somewhere. And Israel Government must do its part as well. It will never be solved while they continue to build settlements in occupied territories and systematically abuse people.

In every reply I've ever seen you write, you're constantly replying to your own interpretation of what is said. You assume that anyone who sympathizes with the Palestinians is "vilifying" Israel. Where are you stopping to take note of the many different sides and views and complications of this terrible situation? Where do you ever concede that is it Israel policy that continues to occupy and repress the Palestinian people? How is Susan mischaractizing the nature of the country? Where are the direct lies in this article?

I realize my reply is getting a little long, but I have to make one more point in your dismissal of the Gaza massacre.

Israel...went to lengths to avoid civilian casualties..

Just want to quote something from wiki here:

On 27 December Israel began a wave of airstrikes, damaging or destroying tens of thousands of homes, 15 of Gaza’s 27 hospitals and 43 of its 110 primary health care facilities, 800 water wells, 186 greenhouses, and nearly all of its 10,000 family farms; leaving 50,000 homeless, 400,000-500,000 without running water, one million without electricity, and resulting in acute food shortages.

There is little debate in he international community in terms of the proportionality of force between the two sides.

In war, both sides are to blame, but if you're going to spout about there being two sides to the issue, then your argument would hold more weight were you to address some of Israels policies that have resulted in the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people, instead of dismissing everyone who seeks an end to this conflict.

Submitted by LimeJello on April 9, 2010 - 6:12pm.

Hi Pensive

Always glad to read your contributions. Even though I disagree with much of them, they're thoughtful and considered (if not impartial).

As what you wrote is quite long and I have some errands to run, I won't respond to it all, although I will commend you for the voluminous effort. In the time I have, I feel compelled to point out that I don't dismiss everyone who seeks to end this conflict. Far from it. I do dismiss people like Ms Weiss who sound like propagandists in their allusions to Hitler's Germany and comparing it to a country with free speech and free elections and an independent judicial system.

This conflict, very obviously, isn't goint to end anytime soon and there are indeed people working towards ending it. I know some personally. They're working on a smaller scale towards getting Israelis and Palestinians to meet, get to know each other and realize that they're very much the same in most ways. One of (clearly not the only) the reasons these conflicts are perpetuated is because of the dehumanizing of the other side. By interaction individuals can come to think less of one another as "the enemy" and learn to look at each other as people with whom they may disagree but can work with to find compromises. I think that's what I find most objectionable about Ms Weiss' article: her blatant effort to dehumaize the Israelis with her simple-minded and superficial comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany, which frankly are very deceitful to say the least.

Oh, and on one last note, I've met a number of Holocaust survivors who were both in and not in camps, and I can tell you that in no instance I've ever heard of was the experience outside the camps anywhere near as horrific as those inside.

Be well, compadre

Submitted by Diogenes on April 9, 2010 - 6:59pm.

Great article Ms Weiss and a great rebuttal comment Pensive!

I love how Israeli supporters bring up the "free speech, free elections, independent judical" mantra like some magic elixer that somehow renders comparisons to an apartheid state completely meaningless. It doesn't. BTW - Hamas was also freely elected.

Dismissing Ms Weiss comparison of the Warsaw ghetto and it's armed uprising to Gaza because she did not actually live in the Warsaw ghetto is also pretty lame. This same technique, if it was valid, could be used to dismiss pretty much anything LimeJello has said.

Why is it that some insist the Holocaust must only be referred to in its original context, otherwise it debases the lessons that should have been learned?

Submitted by M. Spector on April 9, 2010 - 7:05pm.

Re: the tired old myth of "Israeli democracy":

Tim Wise wrote:

Webster's New World Dictionary defines democracy as, among other things, "the principle of equality of rights, opportunity and treatment, or the practice of this principle."...

Now, imagine that the United States were to abolish our Constitution, or perhaps had never had one to begin with. No Bill of Rights. No guarantees of things like free speech, freedom of assembly and due process of law.

And imagine that Congress were to pass a law stating that the U.S. was from this point forward to be legally defined as a Christian nation. As such, Christians would be given special privileges for jobs, loans, and land ownership.

Furthermore, political candidates espousing certain beliefs--especially those who might argue that we should be a nation with equal rights for all, and not a "Christian nation"--were no longer allowed to hold office.

And imagine that next month, new laws were passed that restricted certain ethnic and religious groups from acquiring land in particular parts of the country, and made it impossible for members of ethnic minorities to hold certain jobs, or live in particular communities.

And imagine that in response to perceived threats to our nation's internal security, new laws sailed through the House and Senate, providing for torture of those detained for suspected subversion. This, on top of still other laws providing for the detention of such suspects for long periods of time without trial or even a formal charge against them.

In such a scenario, would anyone with an appreciation of the English language, and with the above definition in mind, dare suggest that we would be justified in calling ourselves a democracy? Of course not: and yet the term is repeatedly used to describe Israel--as in "the only democracy in the Middle East."

Slimy people like to justify anything Israel does by claiming it's a democracy - as if such a claim (even if it were true) would actually be an excuse.

Submitted by Bruce MC on April 10, 2010 - 5:43am.

As long as people who believe themselves religious, hate or despise their neighbors -nothing will ever change. The article and responses all have some basis but it's easy to see the sides taken. There are no sides when it comes to violent acts and no mater how we justify -wrong is wrong.

I have no side or prejudices, especially toward religious beliefs others may have. I just assume we all pray to the same God and know in our hearts what is right and wrong. There are many on both sides responsible for these wrongs ..but blame is not the issue - ending violence and intolerance is.

At the least, this article reminds us all that these issues are dire...........

Submitted by LimeJello on April 10, 2010 - 11:42am.

Ah.. Saturday morning..having my coffee..what happened since I was last here?

Hmm.. Looks like Bruce MC has very concisely and cogently got to the heart of the matter and I'll quote him because it bears repeating in this sometimes acrimonious (not with you Pensive, but you can see the anger in some of the other posts) debate which, in its own insignificant way, could be seen as a minor reflection of the issue at hand.

Bruce wrote: " There are many on both sides responsible for these wrongs ..but blame is not the issue - ending violence and intolerance is."

I couldn't agree more with Bruce. That is really it in a nutshell.

Now to get to get to the point where that can be achieved requires efforts towards building trust, reconciliation and honesty. That's why I find Ms Weiss' article so objectionable. Aside from being a one-sided finger-pointing exercise, it's patently dishonest in invoking the apartheid comparison and descends to the level of vacuous spurious propaganda by invoking the Warsaw Ghetto and Nazi Germany in comparison to Israel, as Gino pointed out she did during an IAW meeting. (In fairness, she did leave that out of the article here.)

None of this contributes in any way towards building trust and ending violence and in fact, is counterproductive to that end because it shows a level of dishonesty that undermines trust building. It's no more helpful than saying all Palestinians are murderous terrorists that are more interested in killing Jews than they are in living peaceful lives. That too is patently false and would be just as unhelpful to the situation.

So, to the points my friend Pensive takes issue with..

Advancing her position by invoking the Holocaust. .. I'm not sure how else you could describe it when she writes an article under the heading and continually refers herself in the context of the Palestinian/Israeli debate as a "Holocaust survivor." Agreed that is part of who she is but it gives her no special insight into the mideast conflict, and for that matter, as Gino says she has been invoking the Warsaw Ghetto, which her personal experiences would give her no special insight into, is outright misleading.

At this point, I'll grant myself a brief aside and address Diogenes remarks regarding this (I'll address other Diogenes remarks when they are relevant to the point at that time). If you read carefully, Diogenes, you'd realize that at no point did I dismiss "Ms Weiss comparison of the Warsaw ghetto and it's armed uprising to Gaza because she did not actually live in the Warsaw ghetto." I dismissed her comparison of the two for other reasons, and I guess I now need to quote myself from a post above, although it shouldn't be necessary,:

"comparing the Warsaw ghetto, where the Jewish population was annihilated for no other reason than being Jewish, to Gaza, where Israel retaliated for rocket attacks against its civilian population is absurd. During the Gaza offensive, Israel allowed food and medical supplies into Gaza, went to lengths to avoid civilian casualties, and called off a number of attacks when the Palestinians used their own civilians as human shields. If you talk to anyone with a knowledge of military ordinance and strategy they would tell you that taking into account that Gaza is small and one of the most densely populated places on earth, the civilian casualty rate was indicative of an attempt to spare, not annihilate the population while creating a deterrent to further attacks against Israeli civilians. These are just a few examples, among too many discrepancies to list that belie any comparison between Gaza and Warsaw.

What I do dismiss regarding Ms Weiss is that, by virtue of her having survived the war sheltered by a family in France, and presenting herself as a holocaust survivor in the talks she gives, is that she has any special knowledge of either The Warsaw Ghetto or Israeli actions in Gaza. I'm a Canadian. That doesn't automatically give me a special knowledge of the anatomy of a polar bear and I don't go around saying it does.

Anyway, I'll get back to Diogenes in another post and continue with Pensive's points.

"...claiming that Israel uses the Holocaust to justify its actions...

No where that i can see in the article, does she state this."

You're absolutely right on that point regarding Ms Weiss, Pensive but if you read what I wrote again, I didn't say she did. I said that people like Norman Finklestein do and in reference to Ms Weiss, I said, : "It appears the only time the Holocaust is brought into this is when people like Finklestein, British MP Gerald Kaufman or Ms Weiss use it to criticize Israel."

And clearly that is something she is doing.

Now to your next point Pensive:

"There are Jews who survived the Holocaust who endured far worse than Ms Weiss, who was sheltered by a French family during the war. There are Holocaust survivors who had to endure the daily torture of the death camps and these people strongly support Israel.

OK, there are two critical things here. In the first place, I'm not discounting her experience as a human being who suffered, I'm saying it gives her no special insight into the Mideast conflict. People in the camps had their parents killed too, as well as children and siblings and in those cases, unlike those of Ms Weiss, it was often done right in front of their eyes. But I don't think it's appropriate to start measuring the suffering of one person against another and this point is moot to the greater issue. In your raising this statement of mine, I'm surprised you ignored the next paragraph I wrote which creates the context for the prior one which you found objectionable. I wrote:

"Of course, to put the arguments in those terms is spurious and that is the point. Ms Weiss' having survived the Second World War gives her no more insight into the Palestinian-Israeli conflict than being mugged gives someone insight into judicial reform of the criminal code."

Again, her experiences in the Holocaust have no bearing on her insight into the Mideast conflict and Ms Weiss is quite simply being used as a propaganda tool to vilify Israel by her invocation of the Holocaust and her shameful implied, and if Gino is correct, by outright comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany.

This is getting way too long, so I'll close of here for another time with the explicit statement that I in no way am saying that Israel is blameless and has done a great deal of wrong to the Palestinians which needs to be redressed, but to repeat what BruceMC wrote, " There are many on both sides responsible for these wrongs ..but blame is not the issue - ending violence and intolerance is." and the one-sided and distorted image created by Ms Weiss does nothing to advance that end.

Submitted by Bruce MC on April 10, 2010 - 1:52pm.

I would like to add that I fully support "Palestinian Rights" ... my boss and friend (now a Canadian) was born and raised there. Though I doubt he has the ability to hate anyone nor refers much to his life there he did once say " you won't believe some of the evil I have seen ...." -that was it. He's a very religious person as is his entire family.

If Weiss gets people to feel something or better yet consider how horrid it is to invoke violence on another just because they have different beliefs, then the article has achieved something. I don't practice any religion actively - I do however pray most days. Usually it's just asking for help to be a better person.

There are no sides in this dispute,(as would I suppose also applies to this discussion) both are wrong, segregation or isolation allows false beliefs or notions to fester and is the greatest tool for maintaining a better level of hate. Unless somehow these groups are allowed to interact and be connected the violence will never cease.

Weiss is trying to do something -on that alone, it is by far more than I have ever done to make any kind of impact. I can at least write my MP and demand "Canada" take a more active roll in this. Many of us just sit and watch -as does our governments.

Submitted by alan smithee on April 10, 2010 - 7:56pm.

A round of applause for Ms Weiss....It must be made clear that criticizing Israel or recognizing their ongoing Apartheid has NOTHING to do with judaism.

Clearly,with the world waking up to Israel's atrocities,ruthless Israeli apologists have now decided to brand Israeli criticism as the 'new anti-semitism'..Hence,a hate crime.

Unfortunately for them,an attempt at social humiliation is not going to hide the proverbial elephant in the living room.