Opinion | What Does Israel Expect? | Common Dreams

I was a close friend of Alina Margolis-Edelman who was part of the armed 
resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in World War II. Her husband, Marek 
Edelman, was the deputy commander of the uprising and the only leader to 
survive the war. The Nazis had sealed 400,000 Polish Jews inside the Warsaw 
Ghetto. The trapped Jews died in the thousands, from starvation, disease, and 
indiscriminate violence. When the Nazis began to transport the remaining Jews 
to the extermination camps the resistance fighters fought back. None expected 
to survive.

Edelman, after the war, condemned Zionism as a racist ideology used to justify 
the theft of Palestinian land. He sided with the Palestinians, supported their 
armed resistance, and met frequently with Palestinians leaders. He thundered 
against Israel’s appropriation of the Holocaust to justify its repression of 
the Palestinian people. While Israel dined out on the mythology of the ghetto 
uprising, it treated the only surviving leader of the uprising, who refused to 
leave Poland, as a pariah. Edelman understood that the lesson of the Holocaust 
and the ghetto uprising was not that Jews are morally superior or eternal 
victims. History, Edelman said, belongs to everyone. The oppressed, including 
the Palestinians, had a right to fight for equality, dignity, and liberty.

“To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed and never the oppressors,” 
Edelman said.

The Warsaw uprising has long inspired the Palestinians. Representatives of the 
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) used to lay a wreath at the annual 
commemoration of the uprising in Poland at the Warsaw Ghetto monument.
Chris Hedges

  


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