Shadow of Warsaw Ghetto over Gaza-Israel border

By Alastair Macdonald

YAD MORDECHAI, Israel, Jan 10 (Reuters) - The shadow of the Warsaw Ghetto hangs over Israel's border with the Gaza Strip.

On a hilltop that gave a good view last week of the smoke of battle rising over Gaza and helicopters hunting Palestinians who aim rockets at Israel, that shadow is cast literally by a statue of the man who led the 1943 Jewish uprising against the Nazis.

The bronze figure of Mordechaj Anielewicz, who died fighting rather than follow millions of Jews to the gas chambers, towers in the low winter sun over gardens and a swimming pool at the kibbutz named after him by fellow Jewish socialists from Poland, whose move to Palestine in the 1930s spared them the Holocaust.

But figurative shadows from that time also hang over the Yad Mordechai communal cattle and honey farm, a mile or so north of the Gaza border: "It's very heavy to live in the shadow of Mordechaj Anielewicz," said Raya Passi, the kibbutz spokeswoman.

"The statue and the story of the war hang over the kibbutz."

She recalled how horrors in Europe brought Jews to the area but also how the kibbutz, set up just after German troops razed the Warsaw Ghetto, went down five years later in the founding epics of the Jewish state as the site of a David-and-Goliath battle against overwhelming odds and helped define the border.

The shadows hang, too, over Palestinians crammed miserably into the Gaza Strip, most descended from refugees who lost homes in what became Israel on May 14, 1948. They hang over vanished Arab villages, crumbled into the farmland north of the walls and fences Israel erected to stop attacks by people from Gaza.

MEMORY IN CONFLICT

Symbolic clashes of memory and imagery that burden histories of Israelis and Palestinians resonate nowhere louder than around Yad Mordechai, where the real-life soundtrack this week was a mixture of lowing cattle, birdsong and heavy machinegun fire.

For Israelis, it is where a few dozen Jewish farmers, living Anielewicz's example, held off an Egyptian army of Biblical proportions, thousands strong, for six days in May 1948. They bought time and blunted an Arab attack that might otherwise have reached Tel Aviv, the main Jewish city, further up the coast.

A shell-shattered water tower still stands at a crazy angle, next to the Anielewicz statue, in memory of the battle.

For Palestinians, 1948 was the "catastrophe", when Western colonial powers, shocked by the Holocaust, handed half of their country to Jewish immigrants from Europe and stood by as the new Israeli army, driving them before it, expanded its borders in a war against the chaotic forces of neighbouring Arab nations.

Each side interprets history in its own way, often shocking the other. Comparisons by Palestinians of the Islamist fighters confronting Israel's army in Gaza for the past two weeks to the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto who fought the Nazis dismay Israelis, who say they are acting only in self-defence. Arabs are equally angry and frustrated that most Israelis do not see their point.

In the story of the Battle of Yad Mordechai, many Israelis see inspiration for the triumph, in Anielwicz's words, of "the few against the many", and for their attachment to a God-given land from which Jews were themselves forced out 2,000 years ago.

For today's 600 residents of Yad Mordechai, now a neat community of lawn sprinklers and bougainvillea, Passi describes the battle's legacy: "It is a common feeling -- that we belong here, that we keep the border and we will never leave again."

She notes that the U.N. plan to partition Palestine, put forward in 1947, would have placed the kibbutz deep inside the proposed Arab state. "But luckily war broke out," she said, and, helped by the defenders of Yad Mordechai, Israel pushed its border southward to within a few miles of the Arab city of Gaza.

SHADOW OF THE GHETTO

In that same war, tens of thousands of people fled in terror to the area around Gaza held by Egyptian forces. In 1967, Israel seized and occupied what had become known as the Gaza Strip and by the time it pulled back in 2005, the Palestinians in the enclave, still without a state, numbered 1.5 million.

Some of these people lay claim still to the lands around Yad Mordechai. Many voted for Hamas, which wants to turn back the clock, send Jews "back" to Europe and destroy their state. All in Gaza view 1948 as a calamity that still blights their lives.

In Yad Mordechai, where Hamas rockets have done occasional damage and where parents are anxious this week for sons in the army now fighting just a few miles from home, Passi remembers fondly the time up to a few years ago when Palestinian workers were a daily presence in the kibbutz and says she and others feel "very sad" for Gaza's civilians, though not for Hamas.

Now, the Palestinians are penned in, grimly, behind 50 km (30 miles) of wall and fencing, their backs to the sea, and Hamas guerrillas cast themselves in the role of the underdog, battling the tanks and jet fighters of the Middle East's only nuclear power with rifles and improvised bombs and rockets.

At demonstrations around the world and in chatter on the Web, protests crackle with shock-value comparison between Israel today and Jewish history, from the Vatican cardinal who called Gaza a "concentration camp" to bloggers who see in it a new Warsaw Ghetto, Gaza's fighters in the role of Anielewicz.

"The Gaza Ghetto Uprising will mark both the latest chapter in Palestinian resistance to colonialism and the latest Israeli colonial brutality," Joseph Massad, an associate professor at Columbia University in New York, wrote in one blog this week.

Such comparisons incense Israelis. They note Hamas's backing from Iran, whose president questions histories of the Holocaust and has said Israel should be "wiped off the map". They see themselves as peace-seeking democrats fighting anti-Semitic, quasi-Nazi religious bigots who are bent on their destruction.

"Comparisons of Israel to the Nazis are a deeply cynical perversion of history," said Abraham Foxman, a Holocaust survivor and director of America's Anti-Defamation League.

On both sides, past pain overshadows the present, looming over Israel, the Gaza Strip and beyond as concretely as the pugnacious shape of Mordechaj Anielewicz on his hilltop. Grasp that and the violence and intractability of the conflict still churning up the Gaza plain below may make more sense.

"They wanted peace with their neighbours," Passi said of Yad Mordechai's pioneers as a helicopter gunship flew overhead. "But maybe it was destiny. When the war started, they were divided into enemies that wanted to fight for the same land."