Israeli Warsaw Ghetto Methods:
U.S., Europe Are Accountable
by Paul Gallagher
Repeated public warnings by U.S. Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche against "the insane fascism of Ariel Sharon," were terribly confirmed by an Israeli officer's report to the daily Ha'aretz on Jan. 25: The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have been studying the 1943 military tactics of the Nazi SS against the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto, for application against the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza today.
LaRouche, in response, emphasized that the revealed intention of the IDF and Israeli Prime Minister Sharon, to adopt specifically Nazi methods of war against a resisting population, must be brought to the doorstep of the European governments and especially the U.S. Bush Administration. The White House has increasingly given a green light to Sharon's campaign to assassinate and eliminate the Palestinian leadership in past weeks. LaRouche will throw his authority on this matter—established by his precise warnings since Sharon first made his move for power in September 2000—into the drive to hold the U.S. and European governments accountable for the consequences. "The United States has the leverage to stop this," LaRouche said.
No Denying Reality
The anonymous IDF officer's shocking confession was reported in a Jan. 25 article by veteran Ha'aretz reporter Amir Oren, on Sharon's moves toward eliminating Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. The admission in the English-language edition of Ha'aretz two days later. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, on Jan. 27, heatedly refused to answer EIR's questions on it, saying that he "does not respond to reports with no names attached." But Sharon's own press spokesman, Ra'anan Gissen, was unblushing. Asked by EIR on Jan. 30 about IDF officers studying the Nazi Warsaw Ghetto strategy, Gissen replied, "Some officers may have been looking at that. They thought that it was similar, because you would be fighting street-by-street against the Palestinian Authority."
"The real problem," Gissen claimed, in answer to a second question, "is those who refuse to serve." A movement has begun among Israeli reservists, resisting the IDF's strategy. "They may have to face a court-martial. They will have to face the consequences, if they do not serve when they are called up; that is the real problem."
The European Union, on Jan. 28, did issue a statement including the demand that "the Israeli government must withdraw its military forces and stop its extrajudicial executions, lift the closures and all restrictions imposed on the Palestinian people and its leadership, and freeze [Israeli] settlements [in the Occupied Territories]." The EU also protested Israel's deliberate "destruction of Palestinian infrastructure and other facilities which help Palestinians in their economic, social, and humanitarian development"—such destruction was a hallmark of the Nazi SS liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto and other populations.
But this is a pale reflection of the action the United States must take—similar to President Dwight Eisenhower's strong moves in 1956 which forced Israel to withdraw from its invasion of Egypt (see article in this section). That strong pressure will have to be backed up with serious financing for an economic development strategy for peace in the region.
'Jewish Resistance' in Israel
Within Israel, a backlash against "becoming fascists" had already begun to rise before Jan. 25—even after the Sharon government's success over the past year in making the Israeli public increasingly hysterical against the Palestinian leadership and the Oslo peace process. Close to 100 Israeli military reservists (as of Jan. 30) have signed a public statement declaring, "We will no longer fight beyond the Green Line for the purpose of occupying, deporting, destroying, blockading, killing, starving, and humiliating an entire people." The reservists want to get 500 behind the statement and launch a broad social campaign.
Israeli Knesset (parliament) member Roman Bronfman has formed a new Democratic Choice party in an effort "that will prevent Israel from deteriorating into a state of ordinary fascism," he told Ha'aretz on Jan. 28. Bronfman wants to push Labor Party leaders, such as Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg, Labor Party leader Yossi Beilin, and Deputy Defense Minister Dalia Rabin Pelossof, to pull the Labor Party out of Sharon's national unity government. All three have themselves made dramatic statements about the consequences of Sharon's policies.
Well-known Israeli journalist Gideon Levy issued an open letter to Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, a Labor Party leader, demanding that he leave the government and pull down Sharon's coalition. It has been reported that in cabinet meetings during January, Peres warned other cabinet members that Israel was committing acts for which they might wind up being prosecuted as war criminals. "A government," says Levy's letter, "that deliberately sabotages every Palestinian effort to achieve quiet, that utterly humiliates their leaders, for whom vengeance is the sole motivating force ... can no longer be forgiven."
LaRouche, since June 2001, has repeatedly reminded Israelis that they cannot win a war fought on fascist principles, in the midst of a global economic collapse which is wrecking Israel's economy as well. The kind of continually spreading religious war which is the fruit of such actual war crimes, will in time destroy Israel itself, LaRouche has warned.
More Israeli civilians and soldiers have been killed since Sharon took power in January 2001 than in the entire preceding six years of the Oslo peace process which he denounces. Car-bombing and suicide-bombing civilian casualties now occur almost daily. Sharon himself is facing a trial in Belgium, in which he will be charged with have committed war crimes as Defense Minister in 1982, in connection with the mass slaughter of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila, during the Lebanese Civil War.
In this darkening situation, a "Jewish resistance to fascism" is beginning to arise in Israel itself!
The Warsaw Ghetto Model
The horror of the IDF studying use of those military methods, by which the Israelis' ancestors were annihilated in Warsaw, sinks in deeper when one looks at the source they must have consulted. Nazi Major General of Police Jürgen Stroop, who commanded that annihilation, recorded and left behind a detailed, day-by-day, almost hour-by-hour account of his strategy and actions during those terrible 28 days in April-May 1943.
In The Stroop Report: "The Warsaw Ghetto Is No More!" the psychotic Nazi general describes how his troops liquidated or deported a population of more than 60,000 remaining Warsaw Jews who were conducting an increasing armed resistance; 300,000 other Jews had already been deported to concentration camps from Warsaw. Many among the remaining 60,000 worked in, or managed, arms factories in the Ghetto, which were supplying the German army. Thus they could arm themselves; and for the same reason, the German regular army resisted orders from Berlin to deport them.
Heinrich Himmler sent Stroop to Warsaw to solve this "problem" with SS and Nazi police forces. In all his pronouncements and orders, Stroop referred to all Jews as "the armed enemy bandits and terrorists," and portrayed his units as being in heroic and dangerous warfare against this armed enemy.
Stroop progressively walled and fenced iff the Ghetto, and began a strategy of destroying it, residential block by block. The Nazi troops burned and/or blew up apartment buildings and shops; as Jews were forced out of them, resistance fighters were assassinated and the rest immediately deported to camps. Resistance from a building, was sufficient to have the entire block destroyed and burned, cellars pumped full of poison gas. Electrical and other infrastructure was systematically destroyed by Stroop's forces; sewers where Jews were hiding were walled and flooded or filled with gas. Stroop saved for last, the ceremonial dynamiting of the Warsaw main synagogue on May 16, 1943: his signal that all the remaining Jews had been killed or "removed."
The same methods were used again in 1944 against non-Jewish Polish resistance fighters in Warsaw.
Nuremberg War Crimes Evidence
This all chillingly brings to mind the 100 Israeli reservists' declaration, quoted above, of what they refuse to take part in any longer. It throws light on the strategy of walling off the Palestinian area and expelling all Palestinians from Israeli areas, put forward by Sharon backer Samuel Bronfman, and reportedly now under discussion by security officials of Sharon's government.
If it is the Warsaw Ghetto "war" the IDF is studying, The Stroop Report is that source. The crazed Nazi general had his report bound in leather, illustrated, and presented formally to Himmler as a gift. It was later "presented" in a different sense, to U.S. Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor Robert Jackson, who first made it public. At Nuremberg in 1946 this report—now apparently a tactical tool somewhere within the Israeli Defense Forces—was introduced as prime evidence of the worst war crimes.
Stroop was captured in 1945 by the Soviet Red Army, underwent a personality disintegration during his brief imprisonment, was tried for war crimes, and executed.
The entire Stroop Report was republished in book form in 1998—as a warning to today's nations—by the Holocaust History Project, and has been translated into English in full on its website since 1999. On Lyndon LaRouche's authority, this warning has now become a crucial matter of national morality, and war and peace.
