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“There is a question of historical responsibility towards injustice, genocide, and fascism,” said Stephen Kapos. “If you are indifferent, if you do not take a stand, you acquire a degree of guilt.”<\/p>\n
A Holocaust survivor opposed to Israel’s war on\u00a0Gaza<\/a>\u00a0on Wednesday told U.S. student protesters they’re on the right side of history, and that the global wave of demonstrations against the slaughter and starvation of Palestinians will soon force Western leaders to face up to their complicity in genocide.<\/p>\n Stephen Kapos, 86, was 7 years old in 1944 when he was separated from his family during the Nazi extermination of Jews in his native Hungary. Most of his family was murdered in the Holocaust but Kapos survived and moved to the United Kingdom after the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary.<\/p>\n Kapos is part of a small group of Shoah survivors and their descendants who “demonstrate disagreement with the use of the Holocaust experience as a cover by the Zionists and the state of\u00a0Israel<\/a>.” They attend protests wearing signs around their necks reading, “This Holocaust Survivor Says Stop the Genocide in Gaza!”<\/p>\n “As a Holocaust survivor, my message to the brave student protesters in America is just keep doing it. Don’t give up,” Kapos said in video published by\u00a0Double Down News<\/em>. “We are doing exactly the same, and in the long term we are going to prevail.”<\/p>\n Kapos’ comments came amid a growing wave of pro-Palestine student protests\u2014many of them Jewish-led\u2014on dozens of U.S. university and college campuses in response to Israel’s U.S.-backed war on Gaza, which the International Court of Justice in January\u00a0found<\/a>\u00a0“plausibly” genocidal and which many Israeli and international experts\u00a0say<\/a>\u00a0is\u00a0undoubtedly<\/a>\u00a0a genocide.<\/p>\n According to<\/a>\u00a0Gazan and international officials, more than 122,000 Palestinians have been killed or maimed during 202 days of near-relentless Israeli attacks. This figure includes around 11,000 people who are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed-out buildings. Around 90% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been forcibly displaced. Starvation and dehydration caused by Israel’s bombardment and\u00a0blockade<\/a>\u00a0of Gaza are killing children and other vulnerable people.<\/p>\n Instead of condemning Israeli leaders, the Biden administration has\u00a0lavished<\/a>\u00a0them with billions of dollars in U.S. military aid while providing\u00a0diplomatic cover<\/a>\u00a0for Israeli crimes and\u00a0blocking<\/a>\u00a0recognition of Palestinian statehood at the United Nations.<\/p>\n As the suffering in Gaza continues, U.S. students have set up encampments or staged other forms of protest, some of which have been\u00a0brutally repressed<\/a>\u00a0by police\u2014who have also\u00a0attacked<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0arrested<\/a> journalists and bystanders.<\/p>\n On Wednesday, far-right Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu\u00a0implored<\/a>\u00a0U.S. authorities to crack down even harder on the students, whom he called an “antisemitic mob.”<\/p>\n Highlighting video footage of Netanyahu comparing the student protests to what happened at German universities during the rise of Nazism, Kapos said that “the way that the Israeli government is using the memory of the Holocaust in order to justify what they’re doing to the Gazans is a complete insult to the memory of the Holocaust.”<\/p>\n He said he is also protesting “the conflating of Jewishness with Zionism, which is what the Israeli state is trying to do, which does nothing but increase antisemitism.”<\/p>\n Kapos predicted that “today’s marches are having a very hopeful aspect that is so large, so persistent, so global that eventually the Western leadership\u2014which are trying to deny what is actually going on\u2014will be forced to face up to it, and I think we are not far from that.”<\/p>\n “Today’s marches are having a very hopeful aspect that is so large, so persistent, so global that eventually the Western leadership\u2014which are trying to deny what is actually going on\u2014will be forced to face up to it.”<\/p>\n “There is a question of historical responsibility towards injustice, genocide, and fascism,” Kapos asserted. “If you are indifferent, if you do not take a stand, you acquire a degree of guilt without any doubt and I think it is imperative to assert opposition and even some degree of disadvantage and risk if you want to be guilt-free when history judges what’s happening.”<\/p>\n Kapos and his comrades are part of a long history of Holocaust survivors speaking out against Israeli crimes against Palestinians.<\/p>\n Long before today’s\u00a0growing acknowledgment<\/a>\u00a0that Israel is an apartheid state, the late Suzanne Weiss\u2014whose parents were murdered in Nazi-occupied France\u2014said<\/a>\u00a0in 2010 that “the Palestinians are victims of ethnic cleansing and apartheid” and that “the Israeli government’s actions toward the Palestinians awaken horrific memories of my family’s experiences under Hitlerism.”<\/p>\n Hajo Meyer, who survived 10 months in the Auschwitz death camp in Poland,\u00a0argued<\/a>\u00a0during his lifetime that “what is happening to the Palestinians every day under the occupation” was “almost identical” to “what was done to the German Jews before the ‘Final Solution,'” and that instead of making Jews safer, Israeli policies and practices were stoking the flames of antisemitism.<\/p>\n Holocaust survivors who stand up for Palestinian rights have been condemned by critics as “antisemites” and “self-hating Jews” who, in Meyer’s case, allegedly abused his status as a Holocaust survivor.<\/p>\n Kapos, who has experienced such slurs, is undaunted and says he has no plans to stop protesting. During a recent rally in London he\u00a0vowed<\/a>, “I’ll keep doing it as long as the bombing and apartheid and the injustice is going on.”<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.chillicomment.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/n3jggn8_A8BympS2d8jyGmt_SZ_ASvToIE6DLiBOgy4.jpg\")
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