Washington - On Sunday former Israeli Air Force captain and BDS activist Yonatan Shapira along with "Freedom Flotilla" participant Ewa Jasiewicz visited Poland's Warsaw Ghetto and called for Israel to ends it ghettoization of Palestinians.
Yonatan Shapira said: "I was always taught growing up that the atrocities that happened to the Jewish people here happened because the world was silent. And therefore I cannot be silent. The Jewish people needed to be liberated from the ghettos, and now Israelis need to be liberated from the crimes of their own government. Each one of us can take part in this global struggle for justice, and support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement for the sake of not just the Palestinian people but for Israelis too."
Gaza has been living under a tightened Israeli blockade since Hamas took over the Gaza Strip in 2007. International aid and development groups have called the situation in Gaza a "humanitarian crisis."
Yonatan, who left Israel's military in 2003, explained how the Warsaw Ghetto recalls Gaza for him: "Most of my family came from Poland and many of my relatives were killed in the death camps during the Holocaust. When I walk in what was left from the Warsaw Ghetto I can’t stop thinking about the people of Gaza who are not only locked in an open air prison but are also being bombarded by fighter jets, attack helicopters and drones, flown by people whom I used to serve with before my [military] refusal."
The Israeli youth who visit the Warsaw Ghetto, "subjected to militaristic and nationalistic brainwashing on a daily basis" in Israel, fail to see the dark parallels between the Nazi prison and Israel's treatment of Gaza, Shapira said. "Maybe if they see what we wrote here today they will remember that oppression is oppression, occupation is occupation, and crimes against humanity are crimes against humanity, whether they have been committed here in Warsaw or in Gaza."
Ewa Jasiewicz, who just returned from participating in the Freedom Flotilla said, "Yonatan could have been the pilot in the Blackhawk that dropped commandos onto the Mavi Marmara that killed nine activists from our flotilla." "I could have been one of them."
"Poland is full of the ruins of ghettos and death camps and shrines to those who sacrificed their lives in the defence of not just their communities but in resistance to fascism," Ewa continued. "People here need to wake up and realise that occupations and ghettos did not end with the end of the second world war... Poland can no longer be a Greenzone for the normalisation of Israeli apartheid. We all have the responsibility to end the occupation and ghettoization of the Palestinian people."
Above: Palestinian flag [Rpb 1001 - Flickr]
Uprooted Palestinian
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