Shadow of Warsaw Ghetto over Gaza-Israel border

By Alastair Macdonald

YAD MORDECHAI, Israel (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 neighboring 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-defense. 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."