Desi Diary

By Adnan Gill

The ‘Final Solution’ was Nazi Germany’s plan of systematic elimination of the European Jewry. Hitler termed it: “the final solution of the Jewish question” (“Endlösung der Judenfrage”). Instead of throwing Hitler’s playbook down in the deepest bowls of Earth, the Jewish leadership took a page out of it and applied to the Palestinians.

Joseph Hell quoted Hitler: “…my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. …I will have gallows built in rows… Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink… As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews.” Replace ‘Jews’ with ‘Palestinians’, ‘Munich’ with ‘Gaza’ and ‘Germany’ with ‘Israel’ and you would think Hitler was referring to the genocide of the Palestinians. Ironically, the same Jews who at one time were at the receiving end are now carrying out the genocides.

When the Jews were massacred on mass scale, some Nazis considered yet another plan to solve the Jewish problem. It was named, the ‘Madagascar Plan’. The plan was to ship all European Jews to Madagascar. Heydrich called it a “territorial final solution”. Sadly, the victims of the territorial solution didn’t waste much time following in the footsteps of the Nazis. In 1949, close to 1 million Arabs were forced out of the newly-created Jewish State.

Whenever the Third Reich conquered new territory, specialized units called ‘Einsatzgruppen’ murdered the Jews in masses. Similarly, in1953, Ariel Sharon was given command of one such unit, ‘Unit 101′. Its sole mission was to terrorize the Palestinians into fleeing Israel. The UN commander, at the time, Major-General Vagn Bennike reported, “bombs were thrown” by Sharon’s men “through the windows of huts in which the refugees were sleeping and as they fled, they were attacked by small arms and automatic weapons.”

Nazis built concentration camps to systematically kill millions of Jews. At these camps, the most common method of mass exterminations was the gas poisoning; while others fell victims to mass shootings, starvation or torture. The modern-day equivalents of the concentration camps are the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and phosphorous shells and cluster munitions replaced the poison gas. Cluster munitions in the Israeli inventory include, Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) with M26 warhead and M77 submunitions, Israeli M85 cluster bombs and DPICM cluster artillery munitions.

International Law prohibits the cluster ammunitions and phosphorous shells. The Convention on Cluster Munitions, adopted in Dublin in May 2008 and signed by 94 nations on 4 December 2008 in Oslo, prohibited all forms of cluster ammunitions. The UN too calls for a freeze on the use of these weapons in or near populated areas. These weapons scatter several dozen “bomblets” over a given area. According to the UN Mine Action Coordination Center, usually between 30-40 percent of such bomblets fail to explode on impact. Therefore, many of these later detonate by accident, wounding and killing civilians.

But that hasn’t kept Israel from using the prohibited weapons on the Lebanese and Palestinian civilians. Israel has repeatedly used cluster munations on heavily populated civilian areas, resulting in mass casualties. In 2006, an Israeli commander disclosed, they fired more than a million cluster bombs in Lebanon. The head of an IDF rocket unit in Lebanon said, “What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs [and phosphorous shells]“. The commander stated that highly inaccurate MLRS platforms were heavily used to fire the cluster munations.

It was further disclosed, in order to cause fires in Lebanon, the IDF fired trucks loads of phosphorous rounds. A direct hit from a phosphorous shell typically causes severe burns and a slow, painful death. Carving out the phosphorous from victim’s body is the only way to stop the human flesh from further burning. International Law unambiguously forbids the use of phosphorous weapons, because they cause “excessive injury and unnecessary suffering”. According to the International Red Cross too, International Law forbids the use of phosphorous and other types of flammable rounds against personnel that were used by the Israelis in Lebanon and now in Gaza.

For the obvious reasons, Martin Gilbert believed in a man’s inalienable right to resist force, oppression and occupation. He wrote in ‘The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy’, “In every ghetto, in every deportation train, in every labor camp, even in the death camps, the will to resist was strong, and took many forms. Fighting with the few weapons that would be found, individual acts of defiance and protest, the courage of obtaining food and water under the threat of death, the superiority of refusing to allow the Germans their final wish to gloat over panic and despair. Even passivity was a form of resistance. To die with dignity was a form of resistance. To resist the demoralizing, brutalizing force of evil, to refuse to be reduced to the level of animals, to live through the torment, to outlive the tormentors, these too were acts of resistance. Merely to give a witness of these events in testimony was, in the end, a contribution to victory. Simply to survive was a victory of the human spirit.” Switch ‘Germans’ with ‘Israelis’ and you may think Gilbert was feeling proud of the Palestinian resistance. Perhaps, one day, someone could explain, why the Jewish resistance was a matter of principal and survival, but the Palestinian resistance is a matter of criminality and terrorism?

In 1938, the Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels said, “Our starting point is not the individual: We do not subscribe to the view that one should feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, or clothe the naked … Our objectives are different: We must have a healthy people in order to prevail in the world.” One has to wonder, did Goebbels somehow foresee the 21st century, State of Israel?

However, the problem is, history has a nasty habit of repeating itself. The world stood by and did nothing when 6 million Jews were systematically exterminated. As a result, the Jews are now venting their pent-up anger on the militarily weak and politically abandoned Palestinians. If history is any guide, will it repeat itself, this time around too? Who will be the recipient of the Palestinian retributions? Time will tell.