Norman Finkelstein and I have argued in emails about awful stuff Hamas did or didn’t do during the ’08-09 war. I say they used human shields, Finkelstein says there’s no evidence of this in the human-rights reports. Though yes, he says, the reports show that they carried out revenge killings of collaborators.
Last week Finkelstein and I had a meal with a third friend and Finkelstein told some stories about his mother and father in the Warsaw Ghetto. I’d known that his parents were concentration camp survivors, I didn’t know they were in the Warsaw Ghetto. I said, How do you feel when I say that Gaza reminds me of what I learned about the Warsaw Ghetto as a boy?
Finkelstein said, I don’t really have a problem with it. My mother never said, "Do not compare." She always told about her experience not to keep it hers, but to embrace others with her suffering. She didn’t see it as the unique property of the Jews.
That said, Finkelstein went on, I don’t know that you have to compare Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto. It is its own situation, and its own horror. Why not talk about each thing in its own right?
We asked how Finkelstein had learned about his parents’ experience, and he said it was when he was 8 and 9. The Holocaust was being explored in popular works, and his mother brought them home in the stack of books she got every week from the library in Brooklyn. Leon Uris’s Mila-18, John Hersey’s The Wall.
Finkelstein looked up from the books to his prim mother, not believing she had been in such a place.
He related some of the shocking stories. People dug catacombs to hide in with their bare hands. No one had implements. There were bodies littering the streets, and no one had anything to eat. Anyone who had a gun used it. The Jewish police were the worst collaborators. Some brought the Nazis to their own parents. When the head of the Jewish police was killed by the Jewish resistance, a sign was put next to him: “He lived like a dog, he died like a dog.”
It is for this reason, Finkelstein said, that when I hear stories about desperate or vicious behavior in Gaza, I am loath to judge the resistance.
And he gave me a look.
[I would urge all readers to read the first chapter of Finkelstein’s own memoir, Haunted House]
