Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen does not think Gaza is an “open-air prison.” No, she insists it is something much worse: Gaza, she writes, is akin to a Jewish ghetto in the time of the Nazis, now in the process of being “liquidated.” Does this ring true to you? How is Gaza like a Jewish ghetto under Nazi control? Are its inhabitants — men, women, and children — being systematically murdered, or taken from the ghetto and pushed into cattle cars to be brought to extermination camps? Where are those cattle cars, those mobile gas vans, those “showers” where instead of warm water Zyklon B is piped in to kill millions? Are the people of Gaza being starved to death, as happened to Jews in the ghettos controlled by the Nazis? What about the more than a hundred trucks bringing humanitarian aid — food, water, and fuel — every single day to the people in Gaza, with that number of trucks soon expected to soon quintuple? How could anyone possibly compare what Gazans experience today, to what the Jews suffered in the ghettos where they died from starvation and disease, or from being shot for fun by a German soldier, and the only way out was to be sent to a death camp?
Let’s think of all the ways that Gaza is unlike the Jewish ghettos that the Nazis sealed off, from the outside world, so that no one could get out, and no food or medicine was allowed in. First, before October 7, 20,000 Gazans went every day to work in Israel, where they earned wages that were between three and ten times — depending on the job — more than what they could earn in Gaza itself. Had Hamas not attacked on that day, Israel had been planning to increase the number of work permits distributed to Gazans. Second, in the last decade, tens of thousands of young Gazans have left the Strip to try their luck in Europe and in the Arab countries of the Gulf. They were not prevented from leaving. Before October 7, Israel supplied Gaza with diesel fuel, water, food, and 50% of its electricity. Now international donors are supplying the same essentials. How does the situation of the Gazans, with humanitarian aid now being trucked in from everywhere, compare with that of the Jews when the Nazis sealed them, without access to food or medicine, inside the ghettoes of Warsaw, of Lodz, of Bialystok, and then removed those who survived in order to send them to the death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec? In Gaza, there are now representatives of the UN, UNRWA, the International Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, and dozens of other NGOs and UN bodies, providing succor to civilians. An international army of journalists is reporting round-the-clock on what is happening in Gaza. Compare that to the ghettos, labor camps, and death camps run by the Nazis where not a soul from the outside was let in to offer succor or support, or to tell the outside world what was going on.
Do the Israelis shoot down Palestinian civilians in the streets of Gaza, just for fun, as the Nazis did when they patrolled the ghettos? Do they throw babies up in the air and bayonet them, as Nazis used to do to Jewish children in front of their parents? Does the IDF make Palestinians run up against electrified fences to be electrocuted ? Does the IDF make Palestinians fight each other, with the loser being executed, while the winner stays alive only if he wins the next match, and the next, until finally he loses and is murdered in turn, an entertaining spectacle for the German soldiers? Do the Israelis shoot Palestinians by an open pit or ravine, as at Babi Yar, the bodes toppling in, one on top of another, until they are all covered over with earth including those who were still breathing? Does the IDF throw people alive into crematoria? Does the IDF round up people in the Gazan “ghetto” — as Masha Gessen thinks of it — and send them off to death camps that for some reason no one has noticed? Does the IDF select Palestinians to be experimented on by Israeli doctors emulating the infamous Dr. Mengele? In fact, before October 7 didn’t the IDF routinely transfer sick and wounded Gazans to Israeli hospitals to be treated when advanced care was needed? Even after October 7, Israel has been treating wounded Hamas members in Israeli hospitals. What does Masha Gessen make of that practice?
Israel is in a war for its survival. After October 7, Israelis realize that they cannot live next to an armed-to-the-teeth Hamastan, run by the same people who pushed into Israel by the thousands on that date. They beheaded babies, burned children alive, gang-raped, tortured, and murdered girls, sliced the breasts off women, gouged out the eyes and cut off the genitalia of men, murdered children in front of their parents and parents in front of their children, slit open a pregnant woman’s stomach, removed the fetus, killing it before killing the mother. These things really happened. It is the members of Hamas, not the IDF, that are the real Nazis.
Masha Gessen thinks of herself as a brave truth-teller, willing to take on the sacrosanct state of Israel, which for too long, she maintains, has been able to deflect criticism by invoking the Holocaust. She knows better. She “knows it to be fact” that Gaza is a big ghetto, run by IDF emulators of the Nazis, who are now in the process of “liquidating” — reducing to non-existence — the ghetto of Gaza.. And Masha Gessen is determined to break the “code of silence” by which everyone has for too long agreed not to criticize Israel for fear of being labelled “antisemitic.”
Does that describe reality? Is Israel really being treated as above criticism? All over the Western world, in London, Paris, Rome, New York, vast crowds assemble to denounce Israel for its war of self-defense. Tiny Israel, which is now engaged in a fourth war for its survival — the other three were in 1948, 1967, and 1973 — against a terror group hellbent on its annihilation, is already the most vilified country on earth. In 2023, for example, the UN General Assembly passed 14 resolutions condemning Israel, and only seven resolutions condemning the other 192 member countries combined. Has Masha Gessen not been following how Israel is covered and condemned by the BBC, NPR, CNN, AP, and Agence France-Presse? Or read the biased reports on Israel in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian?
A line from Griboyedov — Russia’s greatest playwright, murdered by Muslims — comes to mind as a fitting response to Masha Gessen: ври, да знай же меру. Lie, but know when to stop.
Big Dude says
Where do these nut cases come from. Who is this evil woman
GGP says
I agree. And why do these nutjobs all look the same? Short crazy hair, demented look and funny glasses.
bagsgroove says
She looks like a horrible looking transgender,with an equally horrible mind !
mgoldberg says
https://www.jns.org/two-allegedly-great-thinkers-think-the-jews-are-nazis/ This is an article on Butler and Gessen by the esteemed psychologist, Phyllis Chesler in JNS magazine.
VMS says
Never heard of “it” before. There is no need to give these no names any publicity.
tony wilson says
Really a ghetto?? Check Booking.com for hotels in Gaza and then check on the map the location of the hotel in Gaza! Also check carefully the photo’s of the destroyed houses look behind the rubble you may be a little surprised at what you see. A ghetto, concentration camp, stop pulling my leg
Siddi Nasrani says
Obviously taking mind bending drugs!! She/Him is a self hating Jew.
PRCS says
I heard thru the grapevine: on vacations, she travels to the Fatherland to beat Gulag prisoners.
Westman says
Does this fantasy parallel include a Warsaw Ghetto which had its own duly elected Polish Terrorists like Hamas, “Polmas?”, maybe, who used other Poles for shields and launched rockets from the “Ghetto”? It wasn’t in my school texts. Must we beg forgiveness from this brilliant, holistically ugly, person, Gessen, for not recognizing the fantasy parallels of WW2?
bill says
This a poor piece Mr Fitzgerald we are not told anything about her background, her publications, or where she publishes her ‘journalism’. How anybody so ignorant of the facts of the Holocaust can be given the Hanna Arendt prize of all things is and insult to both Hanna Arendt and humanity
Paul Winter says
Masha must know she is lying. She is the granddaughter of two Polish ladies who found refuge in Stalinist Russia during WW2; she wrote a biography “Ester and Ruzya” of her two grandmothers. Her father was excluded from studying physics in the then USSR because he was Jewish. The family then migrated to the USA where Masha wrote about the abuses of the Putin regime. It seems that her attachment to her lesbian identity groups have overtaken her sense of justice and that she has completely rejected her heritage. Sadly, Masha is distantly related to my wife.
bagsgroove says
She looks like a horrible looking transgender,with an equally horrible mind !
James Lincoln says
Masha Gessen Is a very, very confused person.
It needs weekly visits to a conservative shrink – for about 10 years – for starters.
Scotsman48 says
I thought this was a soy boy until further into the article it was described as she.. Who knew?.
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.