Burak Bir
01 May 2024•Update: 01 May 2024
- Israel has made clear it wants to ‘obliterate Gaza as a place to live at all’ and is now in ‘the last stages of ethnic cleansing by means of genocide,’ Kapos tells Anadolu
- Israel and its supporters want to ‘conflate being Jewish with support for Israel and Zionism’ but that is ‘a lie and complete untruth,’ says Kapos
LONDON
Israel is manipulating the memory of the Holocaust as a cover to carry out the same atrocities in Gaza, according to a Holocaust survivor.
Stephen Kapos, an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor from Budapest, believes there is no doubt that Israel is committing a “genocide” in the Gaza Strip.
“I am here because I protest against the use of the memory of the Holocaust as a cover and as a justification for perpetrating the same in Gaza as a genocide against the Palestinian people,” Kapos, who lost most of his family in the Holocaust, told Anadolu at a recent pro-Palestine rally in London.
Apart from the human cost of Israel’s war on Gaza, where it has now killed more than 34,500 Palestinians, the vast majority being women and children, Kapos strongly condemned the devastation of the besieged enclave’s infrastructure, including housing, medical facilities and educational institutes.
According to UN figures, at least 60% of the Gaza’s infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, while the Israeli onslaught has internally displaced 85% of its population, leaving them facing famine and acute shortages of food and medical aid.
All of this has led to Israel facing a genocide case at the International Court of Justice, which issued an interim ruling in January ordering Tel Aviv to take steps to prevent its forces from committing acts of genocide and guarantee that humanitarian aid is allowed into Gaza.
“Not only is there heavy indiscriminate bombardment, but even blowing up important institutions like universities after they had been occupied, when there was no Hamas anywhere near and yet they were destroyed, it’s quite clearly a message that they wish to obliterate Gaza as a place to live at all,” said Kapos.
“It is, in fact, the last stages of ethnic cleansing by means of genocide.”
Antisemitism claims ‘a lie and complete untruth’
Kapos vehemently opposed Israel’s strategy of trying to “conflate being Jewish with support for Israel and Zionism.”
“That is a lie and complete untruth. Many, many Jews … do not support Israel and its policies, and trying to claim that Jewishness is to do with support for Israel, not only is it a lie, but it actually increases antisemitism worldwide,” he said.
“Clearly, if all Jews support the horrible deeds of the current Israeli government, it’s not surprising there would be a reaction against it. So we are here as kind of an antidote to those claims.”
Kapos said it was particularly encouraging to see that the movement in support of Gaza and Palestinians has become “global” and is “ever-growing.”
“I think there is hope, so long as this goes on, that we will eventually manage to exert influence on all right-wing governments of the world, including the Western governments,” he said.
“My message to the people of Gaza is that they are all heroes and we understand, particularly Holocaust survivors understand, the pain and the difficulties and the fear that they are going through, as well as the destruction and the danger of being killed.”
