Crystal Night Redux: Israel's Pogrom on the Palestinians

Red Rag ­ November 1938 ­ November 2006
By Gideon Spiro, translated by Zalman Amit

published on November 15, 2006 in Hagada Hasmalit
Hebrew original


During the night of November 9, 1938, When the German Jews slept, the Government of Germany initiated a Pogrom on the Jews that became established in History as Crystal Night. In the early morning of November 8, 2006, when the residents of Beit Hanoun in the Gaza Strip slept, the Israeli Army fired, under the initiative of its commanders and its government, artillery shells on a residential neighborhood occupied by peaceful residents. A temporary title: The Beith Hanoun Massacre.

There are similarities between the two events.

On the 7th of November, Herzel Greenspan, a 17 years old Jewish refugee who lived in Paris, shot the Third Secretary of the German Embassy in Paris, Ernst Von Ratt. He died of his wounds the next day. BY his act. Greenspam voiced his protest of the suffering of his family that was exiled to Poland, as part of an expulsion campaign of 17 thousand German Jews of Polish origin.

The assault on the German diplomat was used as an excuse for a revenge operation by the German Government on the Jews. During Crystal Night, Jewish property was destroyed, Synagogues were set on fire, 36 Jews were murdered and hundreds more were injured. Thousands of Jews were detained according to pre-existing lists. (The number of fatalities was actually higher if one adds to the count those who lost their lives during the detention).

In June 2006 Palestinian Guerilla fighters surprised a position of the Israeli Occupation Army, they killed two soldiers and captured one, Gilad Shalit.

The Palestinian operation which was an expression of the uprising and revolt against the occupation and the suffering of the Palestinian people was utilized by the Government of Israel as a pretext to s series of pogroms in the Palestinian population. If you wish, a series of Crystal Nights that exacted the lives of hundreds of civilians, among them women as well as children and babies while those were still sleeping. Hundreds of Palestinians were arrested without trial.

The destruction in Beit Hanoun left behind it a town in ruins in a way that reminded me of the ruins of Jewish property destroyed during Crystal Night.

In Germany of 1938 as in Israel of 2006, most of the people supported the pogroms. Protest was only expressed by a few.

The pistol of Herzel Greenspan was the Kassam of an oppressed people confronting the violence of a German Empire armed to the teeth.

What was for the Germans the Diplomat Ernst Von Ratt, was for the Israelis Gilad Shalit.

The two governments reacted to the protest of the oppressed with an outburst of suppressive acts of a racist nature directed at a weak minority whose life doesn¹t count for much.

Recently the newspapers reported on a young German man, 19 years old, who knocked on the doors of Holocaust survivors because he felt the need to apologize after he discovered that his grandfather was a soldier whose duty was as a guard in a German Labor Camp. This 19 years old young man, a third generation after World War Two, obviously does not have personal responsibility for past evils of his people, but he feels that he is not exempt from doing something about it.

I am walking around these days with a similar feeling. I do not think that I have personal responsibility for the crimes of the Government of Israel. After all, I have been fighting for years against its policies. Nevertheless, because I am a citizen here I felt a terrible shame for the Government¹s actions. The least I could do was to demonstrate against theGideon Spiro government¹s crimes and help a little, together with other good people, to the wounded and their families who survived the killing fields and were hospitalized in the Tel Hashomer amd Ichilov Hospitals. In Tel Hashomer lies two years old, Ahmad Atamanah who was wounded in the head. A stunningly beautiful child whose Grandmother who is accompanying him commented that they saw the Kassam shooter. The parents of the infant, also wounded, are hospitalized in a hospital in Gaza.

I can already hear the self-righteous voices from the Right and the Center saying: ³How can you compare²? I hasten to respond that Germany during the 30¹s, up to the start of the World War, was still in its Libermanian phase. Israel is revealing today symptoms of a social disease, from the point of view of Values and world¹s view that are reminiscent of Germany of those days.

There are obviously also differences. A column like this one would have certainly entitled its writer in Germany of the 30¹s to an arrest, and during war, also execution. But we are on our way, Liberman is at the gate.