Excerpt:
Compare Gaza with the Jewish ghetto. After occupying Poland, the Nazis created the Warsaw ghetto in 1940. To realise Reich’s goal to be “free of Jews,” dispersed Jews were ordered to move to one designated area. Unlike Gaza as a concentration camp, the one in Warsaw was smaller: it was 2.5 square kilometres where about half a million Jews lived. Like Gaza, it was encircled with a 3-metre tall wall. The movement from and to the ghetto was policed.
As in Gaza, in the Warsaw camp too, only residents with special permits could leave the ghetto. Food supply was rationed. Stripped of dignity and reduced to subhuman life, when Jews began to be deported to death camps, those remaining in the ghetto were left with the option not between life and death but between dying “with dignity” and dying “like hunted animals.”
Choosing dignity, Jews formed Jewish Combat Organization, ZOB. In April 1943, each of the 500 fighters of ZOB had a pistol and some grenades.
400 members of another resistance group had 31 rifles and 21 submachine guns. Such weapons were, however, no match to the Nazi army’s. In May 1943, the resistance was crushed. Jews were either killed in fighting or deported to death camps and the 2.5 square kilometres of concentration camp reduced to rubble.
Jews who rose to resist were not terrorists; rather, like Palestinians now, at that time they were terrorised by the Nazi occupation.
Like the lives of most Palestinian now, those of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto were signed by degradation and fear of being “humiliated” “at any moment.” In his memoir, Primo Levi, a survivor of holocaust, likened Jews in the concentration camps to Muslims. He wrote: “I, who speak, was a Muselmann, that is, the one who cannot in any sense speak.”
In Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben reformulates Levi’s paradox to link it to the very constitution of modernity. But Agamben seems to be interested more in speaking than in the subject of listening.
The question we face is this: is the world listening to humans in the Gaza concentration camp, who, subjugated yet in love with justice and dignity, have spoken? Importantly, will the world listen? And if it will, when and how?