40 Holocaust Survivors Condemn Israel for Gaza War
Some 40 Jewish Holocaust survivors and more than 200 direct descendents of survivors signed a public letter condemning Israel’s military operation in Gaza.
“As Jewish survivors and descendants of survivors and victims of the Nazi genocide we unequivocally condemn the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and the ongoing occupation and colonization of historic Palestine,” reads the letter, which was published Saturday in The New York Times as an advertisement. “We further condemn the United States for providing Israel with the funding to carry out the attack, and Western states more generally for using their diplomatic muscle to protect Israel from condemnation. Genocide begins with the silence of the world.”
The signatories come from 26 countries representing four generations of survivors.
About 50 other relatives of survivors also signed the letter, which was sponsored by the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. The network calls for the “liberation of the Palestinian people and land,” as well as “an end to U.S. economic and military dominance in the region, in which Israel plays a crucial part.”
In a statement, the network said the letter was written in response to an ad campaign in which Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize laureate, compares the murder of children during the Holocaust to Hamas’ actions in Gaza.
“We are disgusted and outraged by Elie Wiesel’s abuse of our history in these pages to justify the unjustifiable: Israel’s wholesale effort to destroy Gaza and the murder of more than 2,000 Palestinians, including many hundreds of children. Nothing can justify bombing UN shelters, homes, hospitals and universities. Nothing can justify depriving people of electricity and water,” the letter reads.
It concludes: “’Never again’ must mean NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
