Similarities Between Hitler’s Handling of the Warsaw Ghetto and How Netanyahu is Handling Gaza are Disturbing

History repeats itself as the “good Germans” of the Israel and the US close their eyes to Netanyahu’s, Trump’s and Biden’s Gaza Genocide, but globally the ground is shifting

Sde-by side Images of the Warsaw Jewish Ghetto (L) after the defeat of the uprising by Jewish partisans. and the all-out attack on the Ghetto by the Luftwaffe and two thousand troops of the German Army, and of Gaza (R) after 22 months of imre;emtomg air and ground attacks on the enclave by IsarEL’SA Air Force, Navy and Army,

Since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas breakout assault on Jewish communities located just outside the walled-off Israeli “protectorate” of Gaza, when Israel launched its devastating retaliatory war on the entire 2.3 million captive population there, the disturbing parallels between Hitler’s hellish treatment of the Jews and other “untermenschen” living under his control in the Jewish Ghetto of Warsaw and the criminal way Netanyahu and his Zionist henchmen are treating the Palestinians under their control, have all become hard to miss or ignore.

When a group of Jewish partisans in early January1943 launched a heroic but doomed uprising against their Nazi captors and tormentors in a refusal to to die like sheep headed for slaughter, some 56,000 Jews were still alive, if barely, in the Ghetto. Many died or were killed along with the partisan fighters during the four-month urban warfare against Nazi troops trying wipe out the surprise Jewish uprising. Others died in the final vengeful month-long aerial and ground assault on the walled-in 840-acre Ghetto district. The rest died in Treblinka or other smaller nearby death camps. The 56,000 dead represented roughly 10% of the half-million people who lived and died in the Ghetto.

Compare that horror to today’s Gaza, where the the death toll is much larger, but the percentage is remarkably similar. Before the start of this latest and most massive and deadly Israeli war on Gaza, the territory’s population was 2.3 million. Today it is estimated at just 2.1 million. Very little of the population decline represents people who fled. That’s because Israel, controls all crossing points to and from the walled-off territory and tightly restricts departures. Getting out of Gaza also costs money and a requires finding a place the refugee will be accepted.

According to the British medical journal The Lancet, by July 2025 over 186,000 uncounted Gazans had likely been killed under mountains of rubble from bombed and collapsed buildings, were burned and blown to unrecognizable bits of flesh and bone by direct bomb hits, or died of disease or starvation, and were buried by their families with no report filed. That’s a number that won’t become known for certain, if ever, once the fighting ends and heavy equipment can begin the work of removing the rubble from sites riddled with unexploded bombs. (That of course assumes such an accounting is ever allowed, given criminal plans by Trump and Netanyahu to pave the region over, remove the remaining Palestinians, and develop Gaza as a new Riviera for the wealthy, not to mention limiting official word of the real death-toll of this very one-side “war.”) So far, over 60,000 Gazans are known dead from Israeli bombings, starvation and disease.

The 246,000 dead which those two numbers add up to represent 11 percent of the Gaza population on Oct. 7, 2023. By November 7, 2024, Israeli planes had dropped on the Gaza Strip over 85,000 tons of bombs—more explosives per square kilometer than the US dropped during the entire Vietnam War. The pace of destruction hasn’t slowed since then either. By July 16, 2025, after almost two years of constant pummeling by one-ton blockbuster bombs, canon and tank fire, Adi Ben Nun, a lecturer in the Department of Geography and head of the Geographic Mapping System Unit at the Hebrew University, said satellite imaging showed over 70% of Gaza buildings had been destroyed to the point of being unlivable. A January UN report found a staggering 98% percent of homes across Gaza had been destroyed or damaged.

At the same time, shelterless trapped Palestinians in the hundreds of thousands have been driven like cattle to slaughter by Israel’s unrelenting bombing, tank fire and targeted killing by IDF troops to the thoroughly destroyed north of Gaza, then back south, then onto the beach and again back to the south like wastewater sloshed around in a square wash pan before being poured down the drain. Nor are the tent cities they are now forced to shelter in exempt from Israeli bombs and rockets. The surviving Palestinians in Gaza, without food or access to clean water in any significant quantity since early March dddd, are not much better off than the dead and missing.

The images of starving children in Gaza, with their stick-like limbs, swollen bellies and hollow eyes, look eerily like the starving victims in photos taken during the liberation of Germany’s death camps, except the they are now displayed in color.

The Warsaw Ghetto was subjected to planned starvation. Desperate Ghetto inmates climbing the walls trying to seek out food, many of therm starving kids, were routinely shot by wisecracking SS guards. As Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of occupied Poland wrote in his diary entry, “That we sentence 1.2 million Jews to die of hunger should be noted only marginally.”

In a particularly sick twist on such cruelty, we learn from a report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, based upon what some appalled IDF soldiers and officers have told reporters, that Israeli troops are under orders to shoot and kill desperate Palestinians, including mothers and young children—with up to 1000 killed at this point—as they head towards or try to line up at one of several military-run “food distribution” points. (These grotesque shootings have continued even after Haaretz’s exposé , with the IDF and Israeli government simply denying the story and calling it a “monstrous Blood Libel.”)

As evidence mounts and warnings are issued about a famine crisis underway and worsening daily in Gaza, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich sounded as cold and heartless as the Nazi wartime Polish governor Frank did nearly 80 years ago. In responding to global condemnation of Israel’s weaponized locking of food shipments being called a war crime, he said, “It’s not possible in today’s global reality to manage a war—no one will allow us to starve 2 million people, even though that might be just and moral until they return the hostages.” This shocking comment denying that food shipments in any signifidat size are being blocked by Israel from entering Gaza, while at the same time asserting that if it were happening it would be a legal practice in war and occupation, drew condemnations around the world and from Israeli human rights groups, as well as from an the respected Jewish Forward newspaper in New York, which ran an opinion piece headlined “Starvation in Gaza is a moral test for Zionists. We’re failing. ” In it the author, Sruli Fruchter concludes:

One need only glance at the photos and videos of Gaza to see the horror unfolding there — skeletal children, famished mothers, defeated hope — and recognize how grossly Israel is failing. The greatest treason is allowing this starvation to continue, not admitting that it’s happening.

In today's Germany, some older Germans still insist that Germans in the Hitlerzeit didn’t know what was being done to the nation’s Jews or to the Jews caught in lands captured by the Nazis, like France, Belgium, Netherlands, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. But I know better. As a 15-year-old American student in the Justus Liebig Gymnasium in Darmstadt for a year in 1965 during my Dad’s sabbatical leave, I had a young German literature teacher who during one lesson told our class, “Don’t let your parents try to tell you they didn’t know the Nazi government was killing the Jews or claim that they were told the Jews were being sent away to work camps.:” He added, “Nobody watching how the Jews were being rounded up and sometimes summarily shot, nobody who saw how whole families were left outdoors in places like this very school’s recreation yard in freezing rain, with no tents or even tarps or blankets, could have had any doubt about the fate in store for those people.”

My classmates were horrified and I believe that at least in West Germany that generation born during or soon after the war was even more alienated from their parents than were we American kids in the 1960s and ‘70s (which may explain why the rise of a new fascist right in that country didn’t happen until another generation or two had reached adulthood).

We Americans aren’t much better. We have now elected two presidents — Joe “I’m a Zionist!” Biden and Donald Tump, who was re-elected—both of whom have unquestioningly backed Israel’s genocidal slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. Those two US administrations have provided Israel and its military not only with diplomatic cover through predictable vetoes of periodic motions in the UN Security Council for condemnation of Israeli genocide and calls for creation of an international peacekeeping force to put an end to it. Worse yet, both presidents have supplied an uninterrupted stream of over $20 billion worth of all the advanced weapons, planes, tanks, two-ton blockbuster bombs, tank shells and other weaponry to continue the violence and killing for the past almost two years. (That’a in addition to the $3.3 - 3.8 billion annually in military aid the US has supplied Israel for most of the 77 years since Israel’s founding, pouring a staggering $310 billion in military aid into the small country and making it the largest recipient of such US support in the world.

In the late 1920s and ‘30s, as Hitler rose to power and began to build his massive military and to launch the state-orchestrated attacks on Jews, Roma and other ‘“undesirables," the US continued to support Germany, while its financial and industrial corporations offered loans and investment. Now the US government and the US arms industry have actively become the largest supplier of war materiel for Israel to commit its war crimes.

Britain too is culpable. Since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas surprise attack on several villages outside the Gaza wall, the country has been a major supplier of weapons and critical spare parts for Israel’s busy fleet of fighter bombers and has even tried to silence domestic criticism of its complicity in genocide by controversially labeling such speech and non-violent protest, and particularly support for the direct action protest group Palestine Action, a kind of “terrorism,” equivalent to the bombings by Islamic Jihad or the IRA and punishable by up to 14 years in jail.

Here is the reality: Israel has, at least since October 2023, effectively become like Nazi Germany, Netanyahu has become a Hitler, the IDF is the Wehrmacht, the Palestinians are today’s imperiled Jews: loathed and subject to being killed as “regrettable incidents” (for which Hamas, not the IDF, should always be blamed for allegedly hiding among he general Gaza population) or driven from their homeland with no mercy. And the US has once again become what it was through the 1930s: the bankroller of fascism and genocide. This growing similarity between Zionist Israel’s treatment of its subject population of Palestinians, and the Third Reich’s treatment of the Jews in Germany and the territories it captured during the World War will be hard to recover from in terms of world opinion and will likely have a lasting impact on Israel’s (and America’s) standing in the world — especially should Palestine become a recognized nation with a seat and a voice in the UN General Assembly.

Inside Israel the vast majority of the country's Jewish population continues to support the war on Gaza, with 58% actually telling Tel Aviv University pollsters Israel is “using too little firepower.” They have, in other words, come to resemble prewar Germany’s “Good Germans” —who closed their eyes to the suffering of the Jews in their midst and supported Hitler’s increasingly vicious attacks on them, or to sound like the American backers of the long US War on Indochina, when for years many would say American forces, which were killing millions of Vietnamese, Lao nd Cambodian peasants, should '“stop fighting with one hand tied behind their backs.”.

But globally, and most importantly in the countries most supportive of Israel, the ground is shifting.

In Britain, there appears to be growing opposition to continuation of the Gaza onslaught, with a July 29 poll showing 49% of Britons supporting Palestinian statehood with only 13% opposing the idea. The same poll found 52 % of Brits saying they believed Israel to be in breech of international law in its war on Gaza. With support for Gaza growing, British PM Keir Starmer, following an emergency meeting meeting this week with his cabinet, announced that Britain would recognize Palestine as a nation state unless Israel agreed to a genuine cease fire (President Trump has reportedly assured Starmer he wouldn’t oppose the move). France already announced last week that it would recognize Palestinian statehood in September, with no such conditions, as will Canada. Meanwhile a new 7/29 Gallup Poll of Americans in this most important ally and arms supplier to Israel, shows that the for the first time since the latest war on Gaza began, a majority of US adults, 6 in 10, disapproves of the military action Israel has taken in Gaza. That is up from 45% in November 2023. Meanwhile only a third of Americans polled said they support Israel’s war, down from more than 50% when the war was launched in early October 2023.

The turnabout in support for Israel is a huge defeat for the Jewish state, especially the growing number of important countries, including three veto-holding permanent members of the UN Security Council, now threatening to undo six decades of successful diplomatic, propaganda and commercial efforts by Israel to prevent the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank from being more than second-class refugees living on land under Israeli jurisdiction. If the two territories obtain statehood status and assume their place as the 194th member state of the United Nations, Israel’s hope of taking those lands over and evicting the residents in a second Nakba would be dashed.

Israel, meanwhile, risks going down in history as the perpetrator of the worst genocide of the 21st Century — a label it is likely too late for it to avoid.