LONDON,
June 19 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Israel is subjecting
Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to the same suffering endured by Jews in
the Warsaw ghetto during the Nazi era, two British MPs averred Thursday,
June 19, on returning from a trip to the Middle East.
"Gaza
is the same in nature as the Warsaw ghetto," said Labor lawmaker
Oona King, a Jew and a member of the Jewish Council for Racial Equality,
reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).
"As
a Jewish person I hoped I would never live to see the day I was ashamed
of the actions of the Jewish state," Kin told a press conference.
"No
government should be behaving like that - least of all a Jewish
government," she lamented.
"I
recognize the terror many Israelis live with as a matter of their daily
lives…(but) I was more surprised perhaps by the everyday terror that
Palestinians live, the detail and nature of which I had not
understood," underlined the British legislator.
She
said although "Palestinians are not being rounded up and put in gas
chambers...what makes it similar (to Nazi practices) is what happened to
the Jewish people in that time which was the seizing of land, being
forced from property, torture and bureaucracy - control used in a
demeaning way over the smallest task."
King
charged the Israeli government of establishing "a political
ghetto" in the Gaza Strip by building a wall "around" the
Palestinians there.
"In
doing so it is building a political ghetto. I don't think it can escape
that conclusion," she asserted.
'Apartheid'
|
|
| "You are
almost getting a situation like the Warsaw ghetto," said
Tonge
|
British
Liberal Democrat MP Jenny Tonge also compared the situation to the
Warsaw ghetto, saying the people in the Gaza Strip were living under an
"apartheid system" and could not move in and out.
"They
can't work, they can't sell anything. There is this gradual squeeze. ...
I feel it was an apartheid system and it is certainly getting worse --
the area where the Palestinians live is getting smaller," she
confirmed.
"You
are almost getting a situation like the Warsaw ghetto - people can't get
in or out…Israel says everything it does is for security but they are
not addressing the cause of terrorism, only terrorism itself,"
added the lawmaker.
The
comparison, drawn by King and Tonge, is likely to anger the strong
pro-Israel lobby in the United Kingdom and visiting Israeli Finance
Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, wrote The Guardian.
Later,
a spokeswoman for the Israeli Embassy in Britain said: "It is a
terrible shame that a British MP could make this comparison. We were
shocked by the ignorance of comparing Gaza to the Warsaw ghetto."
The
MPs were also confronted by an Israeli soldier armed with a grenade as
they tried to leave the Gaza Strip, reported the British daily.
In
1940, several months after invading Poland in September 1939, the Nazis
reportedly forced some 500,000 Jews into the Warsaw ghetto, surrounding
it with a high wall.
About
100,000 were said to have died inside from hunger and disease, and more
than 300,000 were allegedly sent to death camps, mainly Treblinka in
eastern Poland, where they were killed, according to AFP.
