Holocaust survivor Rene Lichtman: ‘Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza. We’ve got to fight back.’

What do you think about what the IDF is doing in Gaza?

Yeah, I think [that] it’s all planned and again, I’m sad to say, there are parallels to what the Nazis did. The [Fascists] were very conscious of—if they didn’t have to waste a bullet on some Jews or communists—you can’t forget the communists, you can’t forget the Bolsheviks—the [Fascist] plan was, if you could starve them, that’s fine, or diseases. And the [neocolonists] are very conscious of that and they’re proud, you know, they brag about all that stuff.

You compared the […] siege on Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto. Can you elaborate on that?

So, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising seemed to me like a parallel to what Hamas was doing. They were very conscious, they were going to die in the Warsaw Ghetto and they were going to take some [oppressors] with them. The Warsaw Ghetto fighters were these young people, they were idealistic, they were all socialists, they were all on the left. The Jewish world has forgotten that. They were like my father. [Most Gazans’] grandparents originally came from the Nakba of ’48, and they have been in these open‐air concentration camps with guard all around them their whole lives! That is why I think [that] there is a parallel.

And the other issue that I think is really significant about Hamas, when you study the African‐American rebellions, the Nat Turner rebellions, they were not polite, you know, tea and cookies type thing[s], they were extremely violent. There were excesses, because… because the process of liberation includes that, there is so much anger built up and hatred that excesses are done and to be expected, but the abolitionists […] understood the anger and the hatred, and they did not criticize Nat Turner and these other rebellions, so I think [that] you have to put Hamas in that context.