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EDITORIAL - Israel should be reminded
Published: Wednesday | January 7, 2009
The name Jurgen Stroop, in historical context, is not of immediate recall, but the Warsaw Ghetto is. And it rightly stirs emotions - particularly among Jewish people.
On May 16, 1943, Nazi troops, under the field command of Jurgen Stroop, burnt the Great Synagogue of Warsaw, marking the end of the Jewish resistance in the ghetto in the Polish capital, from where tens of thousands of Jews were sent to their deaths at the Treblinka extermination camp. Stroop had savagely put down the Warsaw uprising.
The scales of the two events are not the same nor are their historical or political contexts exactly parallel. But the moral dimension and practical effect of Warsaw 66 years ago and today's events in Gaza are sufficiently close to cause outrage among decent people.
Complex matter
The Palestinian/Israeli conflict is a complex matter. But for the last three years, Palestinians have been punished economically for electing the radical group Hamas as their government. This is most stark in Gaza, a strip of land 20 miles long by four miles wide, into which one and half million people are crammed and around which Israel has maintained a blockade since Hamas seized full control of the territory during its civil war with the more mainstream Fatah.
There was consensus that life had become unbearably difficult for the people of Gaza, even before the current Israeli assault on the territory which, ostensibly, is in retaliation for the firing of rockets into southern Israel by Hamas partisans since the expiry on December 19 of a six-month truce. Those attacks killed four people and wounded a handful.
In the 10 days of air attacks, mortar bombardment from land and sea, and now troop incursions of Gaza by Israel, some 600 Palestinians have been killed and nearly 3,000 wounded. Gaza is a major humanitarian crisis.
Offensive actions
It also represents something else that ought to be offensive to the conscience of a country like Israel and is likely to evoke names of towns like Lidice, Czechoslovakia, and Oradour-sur-Glane, France - collective punishment.
It is our unequivocal position that Israel has a right to exist within secure borders. Those borders, however, must be what existed before the 1967 Arab/Israeli war and in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 242. Palestinians are entitled to a sovereign state with contiguous borders and not something akin to a jigsaw puzzle.
These are clearly difficult issues that will demand pragmatism from Hamas and, ultimately, reconciliation and consensus among Palestinian factions. However, bombing Hamas may weaken its military capabilities, but the collateral damage of several hundred killed and thousands maimed is more likely to engender grievance than exterminate an idea.
It matters little what any of us think of Hamas if Palestinians do no perceive even-handedness.
This, unfortunately, appears to have escaped people like Tony Blair, the hapless envoy for the Middle East quartet - the United Nations, United States, European Union and Russia - who has failed in a year and half on the job to define a role beyond narrow confines and his own predisposition.
Even as they maintain pressure on Hamas, Israel's friends have a duty to raise before it the moral equations of Warsaw and other ghettos and camps of Europe, and that the youth of Gaza may be vowing never to forget.
The opinions on this page, except for the above, do not necessarily reflect the views of The Gleaner. To respond to a Gleaner editorial, email us: editor@gleanerjm.com or fax: 922-6223. Responses should be no longer than 400 words. Not all responses will be published.
Published: Wednesday | January 7, 2009
The name Jurgen Stroop, in historical context, is not of immediate recall, but the Warsaw Ghetto is. And it rightly stirs emotions - particularly among Jewish people.
On May 16, 1943, Nazi troops, under the field command of Jurgen Stroop, burnt the Great Synagogue of Warsaw, marking the end of the Jewish resistance in the ghetto in the Polish capital, from where tens of thousands of Jews were sent to their deaths at the Treblinka extermination camp. Stroop had savagely put down the Warsaw uprising.
The scales of the two events are not the same nor are their historical or political contexts exactly parallel. But the moral dimension and practical effect of Warsaw 66 years ago and today's events in Gaza are sufficiently close to cause outrage among decent people.
Complex matter
The Palestinian/Israeli conflict is a complex matter. But for the last three years, Palestinians have been punished economically for electing the radical group Hamas as their government. This is most stark in Gaza, a strip of land 20 miles long by four miles wide, into which one and half million people are crammed and around which Israel has maintained a blockade since Hamas seized full control of the territory during its civil war with the more mainstream Fatah.
There was consensus that life had become unbearably difficult for the people of Gaza, even before the current Israeli assault on the territory which, ostensibly, is in retaliation for the firing of rockets into southern Israel by Hamas partisans since the expiry on December 19 of a six-month truce. Those attacks killed four people and wounded a handful.
In the 10 days of air attacks, mortar bombardment from land and sea, and now troop incursions of Gaza by Israel, some 600 Palestinians have been killed and nearly 3,000 wounded. Gaza is a major humanitarian crisis.
Offensive actions
It also represents something else that ought to be offensive to the conscience of a country like Israel and is likely to evoke names of towns like Lidice, Czechoslovakia, and Oradour-sur-Glane, France - collective punishment.
It is our unequivocal position that Israel has a right to exist within secure borders. Those borders, however, must be what existed before the 1967 Arab/Israeli war and in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 242. Palestinians are entitled to a sovereign state with contiguous borders and not something akin to a jigsaw puzzle.
These are clearly difficult issues that will demand pragmatism from Hamas and, ultimately, reconciliation and consensus among Palestinian factions. However, bombing Hamas may weaken its military capabilities, but the collateral damage of several hundred killed and thousands maimed is more likely to engender grievance than exterminate an idea.
It matters little what any of us think of Hamas if Palestinians do no perceive even-handedness.
This, unfortunately, appears to have escaped people like Tony Blair, the hapless envoy for the Middle East quartet - the United Nations, United States, European Union and Russia - who has failed in a year and half on the job to define a role beyond narrow confines and his own predisposition.
Even as they maintain pressure on Hamas, Israel's friends have a duty to raise before it the moral equations of Warsaw and other ghettos and camps of Europe, and that the youth of Gaza may be vowing never to forget.
The opinions on this page, except for the above, do not necessarily reflect the views of The Gleaner. To respond to a Gleaner editorial, email us: editor@gleanerjm.com or fax: 922-6223. Responses should be no longer than 400 words. Not all responses will be published.
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