 |
Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos STOP THE WAR
|
“My message to the brave student protesters in America is just keep doing it. Don’t give up.” – Stephen Kapos
A Holocaust survivor opposed to Israel’s war on Gaza
on Wednesday told U.S. student protesters they’re on the right side of
history, and that the global wave of demonstrations against the
slaughter and starvation of Palestinians will soon force Western leaders
to face up to their complicity in genocide.
Stephen Kapos, 86, was 7 years old in 1944 when he was separated from
his family during the Nazi extermination of Jews in his native Hungary.
Most of his family was murdered in the Holocaust but Kapos survived and
moved to the United Kingdom after the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary.
Kapos is part of a small group of Shoah survivors and their
descendants who “demonstrate disagreement with the use of the Holocaust
experience as a cover by the Zionists and the state of Israel.” They attend protests wearing signs around their necks reading, “This Holocaust Survivor Says Stop the Genocide in Gaza!”
“As a Holocaust survivor, my message to the brave student protesters
in America is just keep doing it. Don’t give up,” Kapos said in video
published by Double Down News. “We are doing exactly the same, and in the long term we are going to prevail.”
Kapos’ comments came amid a growing wave of pro-Palestine student
protests—many of them Jewish-led—on dozens of U.S. university and
college campuses in response to Israel’s U.S.-backed war on Gaza, which
the International Court of Justice in January found “plausibly” genocidal and which many Israeli and international experts say is undoubtedly a genocide.
According to
Gazan and international officials, more than 122,000 Palestinians have
been killed or maimed during 202 days of near-relentless Israeli
attacks. This figure includes around 11,000 people who are missing and
presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of
bombed-out buildings. Around 90% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been
forcibly displaced. Starvation and dehydration caused by Israel’s
bombardment and blockade of Gaza are killing children and other vulnerable people.
Instead of condemning Israeli leaders, the Biden administration has lavished them with billions of dollars in U.S. military aid while providing diplomatic cover for Israeli crimes and blocking recognition of Palestinian statehood at the United Nations.
As the suffering in Gaza continues, U.S. students have set up
encampments or staged other forms of protest, some of which have been brutally repressed by police—who have also attacked and arrested journalists and bystanders.
On Wednesday, far-right Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu implored U.S. authorities to crack down even harder on the students, whom he called an “antisemitic mob.”
Highlighting video footage of Netanyahu comparing the student
protests to what happened at German universities during the rise of
Nazism, Kapos said that “the way that the Israeli government is using
the memory of the Holocaust in order to justify what they’re doing to
the Gazans is a complete insult to the memory of the Holocaust.”
He said he is also protesting “the conflating of Jewishness with
Zionism, which is what the Israeli state is trying to do, which does
nothing but increase antisemitism.”
Kapos predicted that “today’s marches are having a very hopeful
aspect that is so large, so persistent, so global that eventually the
Western leadership—which are trying to deny what is actually going
on—will be forced to face up to it, and I think we are not far from
that.”
“There is a question of historical responsibility towards injustice,
genocide, and fascism,” Kapos asserted. “If you are indifferent, if you
do not take a stand, you acquire a degree of guilt without any doubt and
I think it is imperative to assert opposition and even some degree of
disadvantage and risk if you want to be guilt-free when history judges
what’s happening.”
Kapos and his comrades are part of a long history of Holocaust
survivors speaking out against Israeli crimes against Palestinians.
Long before today’s growing acknowledgment that Israel is an apartheid state, the late Suzanne Weiss—whose parents were murdered in Nazi-occupied France—said
in 2010 that “the Palestinians are victims of ethnic cleansing and
apartheid” and that “the Israeli government’s actions toward the
Palestinians awaken horrific memories of my family’s experiences under
Hitlerism.”
Hajo Meyer, who survived 10 months in the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, argued
during his lifetime that “what is happening to the Palestinians every
day under the occupation” was “almost identical” to “what was done to
the German Jews before the ‘Final Solution,’” and that instead of making
Jews safer, Israeli policies and practices were stoking the flames of
antisemitism.
Holocaust survivors who stand up for Palestinian rights have been
condemned by critics as “antisemites” and “self-hating Jews” who, in
Meyer’s case, allegedly abused his status as a Holocaust survivor.
Kapos, who has experienced such slurs, is undaunted and says he has
no plans to stop protesting. During a recent rally in London he vowed, “I’ll keep doing it as long as the bombing and apartheid and the injustice is going on.”
Source: Common Dreams
26 Apr 2024
•
by
Brett WilkinsFree Gaza: Stop the Massacre - End the Siege!
🇵🇸 #MayDay4Palestine 🇵🇸
