Preliminary remark:
In my professional career as a social scientist I continuously benefited from the exchange with numerous Jewish and political emigrants. During my studies of social sciences in Frankfurt, Berlin and the USA, in my professional career in Latin America, and later in Germany I benefited through exchanges with Jewish academics who had emigrated (from Germany) to other European countries and through Pugwash worldwide. In 1992, I met numerous scientists who had emigrated (from Germany) at a workshop in Rehovot and visited Israel. As a German, I have always endeavoured to contribute to reviving relations <Wiedergutwerdung> with Jewish people and rejected the dominant pretension of repairing <Wiedergutmachung – a term created in the early era of Adenauer. After Rabin's assassination, I have followed Israel's policy towards the Palestinians with trepidation. Since Tony Judt's 2003 finding in the New York Review of Books that the settlement policy in the West Bank had made the formation of two states impossible, I have become pessimistic that a solution can be found. In 2019, I wrote on my website that given the political developments under Netanjahu in Israel, Israeli democrats will eventually seek political asylum in Europe, including Germany.
Peter Lock, March 2024.
An uprising in conquered territory and its suppression with militarily superior forces leading to total destruction was a feature of Hitler’s conduct of war. The destruction of Warsaw and the killing of the civilian population is in this respect similar to the destruction of the Gaza Strip and the killing of the civilian population. Similar to Warsaw, it is not yet clear where the surviving civilian population will be forced to evacuate to. In Warsaw, it was the transit camp in Pruszkow. But where will the camps for the evacuation of the surviving Palestinian population from Gaza be?
In Warsaw, which was occupied by the German Wehrmacht, were two competing underground armies, the Armia Krajowa and the Armia Ludowa. Both wanted to liberate Warsaw, in expectation of early support from the Soviet army. However, the Soviet army remained on the eastern bank of the Vistula until the Wehrmacht crushed the Polish resistance and devastated Warsaw(1).
In the Gaza Strip, it was Hamas and Jihad who had started with an atrocious terrorist action and had possibly speculated that Arab states would eventually lend military support.
The similarities between the policy of the Netanyahu regime in Palestine, its military occupation since 1967, beyond the Israeli territory defined by the United Nations after the founding of the state in 1949, and the policy of the German Nazi regime in militarily conquered Poland are frightening. Through aggressive colonization the West Bank was conquered in 1967 and the Golan Heights, annexed and protected by the Israeli military, will increasingly implement the Old Testament’s claim to the whole of Palestine. This will lead to the creeping expulsion of the Palestinian population. Syrian inhabitants of the Golan Heights were immediately expelled. Only Druze inhabitants were tolerated in the Golan Heights.
The German phrase was "people without space" <Volk ohne Raum> and "Germanisation" of the conquered area through the creation of the “Generalgouvernement” was followed by a call to German minorities in other countries to come "home to the Reich" <heim ins Reich> and settle in the “Generalgouvernement” after the expulsion of the Polish and murder of the Jewish population.
After an agreement between Mussolini and Hitler that South Tyrol would remain part of Italy, farming families from Bessarabia and South Tyrol among others followed the slogan "home to the Reich”. This meant settlements in the militarily conquered the “Generalgouvernement” with the "capital” Krakow where Frank ruled from the Wavel, the castle of the former Polish kings. In Nürnberg Frank was sentenced to death and executed in 1946.
The Israeli equivalent, based on the Old Testament, is "Aliyah" and the Jewish colonization of Samaria and Judea, the Israeli name for the Palestinian West Bank derived from the Old Testament. This policy of the Netanyahu regime, which is illegal under international law, is increasingly bringing fanatical, mostly religiously motivated settlers to the occupied West Bank, often also ultra-Orthodox immigrants from the United States, who, protected by the Israeli military(2), are often driving Palestinian farmers off their land, among other things.
Footnotes:
(1) The Polish view assumes that the Soviet army deliberately remained on the right bank of the Vistula until the Wehrmacht had destroyed Warsaw and annihilated the two Polish underground armies. Another view is that the two underground armies prematurely competed for the role of liberator of Warsaw instead of waiting until the Soviet troops crossed the Vistula in any case.
(2) Utra-Orthodox settlers claim the protection of the Israeli army, but at the same time enjoy the privilege of being exempt from compulsory military service for Israeli men and women. They make up 12 per cent of the population and an estimated 66,000 ultra-Orthodox men of conscription age are exempt from military service to devote themselves to the "study of the Old Testament".