The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah in Hebrew, was a genocide, where approximately 11 million people, including 6 million Jews were systematically killed by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime from 1941 to 1945. The Holocaust was conducted methodically; first, a denigrate propaganda was initiated against the Jewish community, then a financial and social embargo was created to out cast them and in the end they were captured, imprisoned and systematically murdered.
Perturbing stories of death, rape, flagrant destruction and plethora of other atrocities, have come out of the darkness of the Holocaust. We have read and heard most of these stories, but none of them delineate the tacit horrors of the great genocide, than the story of a young girl, who lost everything. Her family was murdered, she was cut from the social services, her home destroyed, her friends killed, her land confiscated by a powerful army, while she was forced to live in a camp.
For her the ominous contention started slowly; in the beginning she was not allowed to go to school or go outside, due to the apprehension of being attacked for her religion. Her father’s bakery was destroyed by a bomb and the family wasn’t allowed to rebuild. The worst was when her mother was executed by the army on some fallacious transgression, when she went to the market to buy food for the family. The sporadic bombing based on garbled information, also destroyed her home and the embargo stopped them from purchasing new construction material to rebuild. The girl had to live in a tent, but the coming winter killed her remaining family, as the embargo made it impossible to buy medicine.
Her sufferings were exacerbated, when one day she saw a sign at the site of her obliterated home which said, “Site for New Jewish Settlement (Land not utilized)”. And she thought to herself, “How can the Jewish Government of Israel, once prosecuted by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime in Europe, can now use the same methods and atrocities to prosecute the people of Palestine?” And in her despair she wondered, “Why the United Nation (UN) allow such genocides to be conducted, when the core reason for establishing the UN was to avoid genocides in the World by any country?”
But unlike the Holocaust of Adolf Hitler against the Jews, the Jewish Government of Israel’s Holocaust against the Palestinian people is conducted under the presence of the UN and without any World war. The 8 year long embargo against the people of Palestine has denied them access to medicine, education, construction material, industrial goods etc, leaving the entire nation in turmoil. While the methodical destruction of Palestinian homes by the Israeli Army is slowly eliminating an entire nation into oblivion, while the Government of Israel are confiscating their land. If the frivolous Government of Israel were truly sincere, they would have mitigated the damage to the people of Palestine by rebuilding their homes and allowing the commerce to continue, after every illegal bombing/rocket attacks by Israel.
How can the Jewish nation and the powerful nation’s of the World allow the disingenuous Government of Israel to continue their genocide against the people of Palestine? How can the leaders, that disdained the atrocities of the “Shoah”, sit back and allow the incontrovertible zealot war crimes of Israel?
ENGR SHAHRYAR KHAN BASEER,
Peshawar, September 16.