Summary
A survivor of the Holocaust — the Warsaw Ghetto, labour camps and Buchenwald — and citizen of Israel whose letter to the Israeli press announcing his hunger strike at the height of the bombing of West Beirut in August 1982 opens Rose’s chapter on Lebanon 1982 (Israel: The Hijack State — America’s Watchdog in the Middle East, lines 547-561).
Details
- Shmelzman wrote that in his childhood he had suffered fear, hunger and humiliation passing from the Warsaw Ghetto, through labour camps, to Buchenwald, and that as a citizen of Israel he could not accept the systematic destruction of cities, towns and refugee camps or the technocratic cruelty of the bombing (lines 549-555).
- He heard in 1982 the sounds of his childhood: dirty Arabs recalling the phrase dirty Jews, closed areas recalling ghettos and camps, and the phrase two-legged beasts recalling Untermenschen (lines 555-559).
- Rose presents him among the brave souls in Israel who opposed the invasion of Lebanon and tried to protest about it, against the 80 per cent of Israelis a mid-August poll showed supporting the invasion (lines 606-612).
Related pages
Israel: The Hijack State — America’s Watchdog in the Middle East, Lebanon invasion 1982, Sabra and Shatila massacre