{"id":299926,"date":"2025-07-28T12:00:06","date_gmt":"2025-07-28T11:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=299926"},"modified":"2025-07-26T08:22:30","modified_gmt":"2025-07-26T07:22:30","slug":"from-the-warsaw-ghetto-to-gaza-starvation-as-a-weapon-of-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/07\/from-the-warsaw-ghetto-to-gaza-starvation-as-a-weapon-of-war\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Warsaw Ghetto to Gaza, Starvation as a Weapon of War"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Democracy NOW!<\/p><\/div>\n

24 Jul 2025 –\u00a0<\/em>In 1516, a 7-acre section of Venice, Italy was designated as the area where Jews would be required to live. As it was located where a copper foundry had been, it was called by the word for \u2018foundry\u2019 in the Venetian dialect, \u201cgeto.\u201d The practice of forcibly concentrating Jews into such \u201cghettos\u201d grew, reaching a brutal, murderous climax under the Nazi regime in the 1930s and 40s. The Nazis built hundreds of ghettos in cities they occupied, creating a system of oppression that, for most Jews, led to death on the street, or deportation to death camps like Treblinka.<\/p>\n

The Warsaw ghetto was the most notorious Nazi ghetto. Germany invaded Poland on September 1st, 1939, and within a year had constructed the walled ghetto. Close to half a million Jews were imprisoned there. Those who attempted to escape were shot on sight. Germany immediately restricted food and medicine, leading to starvation and disease.<\/p>\n

Images of the desperation were actually filmed by Nazi propagandists. Four reels of silent film footage were found in East Germany years after the war. It appears in the 2010 documentary, \u201cA Film Unfinished.\u201d The footage juxtaposes fabricated scenes of wealthy Warsaw Jews enjoying comfortable lives while outside people dressed in rags beg and others collect the dead from the street. The propaganda film was never completed, hence the documentary\u2019s title, but the images of suffering provide a rare look at the inhumanity of the Nazi ghetto.<\/p>\n

That was 1942. Now, in 2025, there is another embattled enclave where people of one ethnicity are imprisoned, dying of starvation and disease, shot on sight if they try to escape. This is Gaza, a manufactured hell on Earth that can only be described as a ghetto.<\/p>\n

This comparison is not new. Two months after Hamas\u2019 October 7, 2023 surprise attack on Israel, The New Yorker published an essay by M. Gessen, titled, \u201cIn the Shadow of the Holocaust.\u201d In it, Gessen makes the comparison between Jewish ghettos under the Nazis and conditions in Gaza. Explaining the point on the Democracy Now! news hour at the time, Gessen said,<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThe similarities are so substantial that they can actually inform our understanding. What\u2019s happening now is that the ghetto is being liquidated.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s important to say, not just because it\u2019s important to describe things in the best possible way that we can, but because, again, in the name of \u2018never again,\u2019 we have to ask if this is like a ghetto. If what we\u2019re witnessing now in this indiscriminate killing, in an onslaught that has displaced almost all the people of Gaza, that has made them homeless, if that is substantially similar to what we saw in some places during the Holocaust, then what is the world going to do about it? What is the world going to do in the name of \u2018never again?\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Israeli-American scholar Omer Bartov, Brown University professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, told Democracy Now!<\/a> of the increasing consensus among academics that Israel\u2019s attack on Gaza amounts to genocide. He described Israel\u2019s plan to build a \u201chumanitarian city\u201d to house 600,000 Palestinians there as<\/p>\n

\u201ca sort of combination of ghetto and concentration camp, that would be built on the ruins of Rafah\u2026this is extraordinary. The state of Israel publicly is speaking about the creation of a vast concentration camp whose goal is removal of the population.\u201d<\/p>\n

Well over 100 Palestinians in Gaza have starved to death, and counting. Michael Fakhri, U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, said on Democracy Now!,<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the fastest famine we\u2019ve seen, the fastest starvation campaign we\u2019ve seen in modern history.\u201d<\/p>\n

The UN\u2019s aid distribution has been essentially shut down, replaced with the shadowy US and Israeli-backed so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Palestinians swarm the inadequate sites seeking food; over 1,000 have been killed there so far, fired upon by the Israeli military and US mercenaries.<\/p>\n

Mahmoud Alsaqqa, Oxfam\u2019s emergency food security lead in Gaza, appeared on Democracy Now!, having himself lost over 30 pounds during Israel\u2019s war on Gaza.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is happening in front of all the world,\u201d he said.<\/a> \u201cAll the world is watching this heartbreaking, without taking concrete action.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Warsaw Ghetto\u2019s Jews launched an uprising, temporarily halting the death camp deportations. By mid-1943, the uprising had been crushed, the remaining ghetto residents killed. Monuments to the ghetto and the uprising dot Warsaw now.<\/p>\n

President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu want all Palestinians removed from Gaza, in what would be a criminal act of mass ethnic cleansing. Trump wants the US to own Gaza, and build what he calls \u201cthe Riviera of the Middle East.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are more than two million Palestinians in the Gaza ghetto, now more than ever in need of food, aid, solidarity and action from us all.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Amy Goodman is the host of \u201c<\/em>Democracy Now!\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of <\/em>Breaking the Sound Barrier, released in paperback and now a <\/em>New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n

Denis Moynihan is the co-founder of <\/em>Democracy Now! Since 2002, he has participated in the organization\u2019s worldwide distribution, infrastructure development, and the coordination of complex live broadcasts from many continents. He lives in Denver where he is developing a new noncommercial community radio station.<\/em><\/p>\n

The original content of this program is licensed under a <\/em>Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 democracynow.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1516, a 7-acre section of Venice, Italy was designated as the area where Jews would be required to live. As it was located where a copper foundry had been, it was called by the word for \u2018foundry\u2019 in the Venetian dialect, \u201cgeto.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":299927,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[3287,1559,1854,101,100,1199,2242,87,865,1029,1966,1644,88,2416,771,427,2897,880,99,70,965,1025],"class_list":["post-299926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-palestine-israel-gaza-genocide","tag-anti-zionism","tag-collective-punishment","tag-crimes-against-humanity","tag-cultural-violence","tag-direct-violence","tag-ethnic-cleansing","tag-famine","tag-gaza","tag-genocide","tag-hamas","tag-hunger","tag-international-court-of-justice-icj","tag-israel","tag-israeli-occupation","tag-nakba","tag-palestine","tag-sociocide","tag-state-terrorism","tag-structural-violence","tag-usa","tag-war-crimes","tag-west-bank"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299926"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299926\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":299928,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299926\/revisions\/299928"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/299927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}