By Suzanne Weiss
This speech was given by Suzanne Weiss on March 2, 2010, to a meeting of students at the University of Waterloo in Canada, held as part of the Israeli Apartheid Week. Suzanne Weiss, a holocaust survivor, is a member of Not in Our Name: Jewish Voices Against Zionism and of the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid in Toronto.
The holocaust is linked to Palestine in another way. Many Jewish survivors of Hitler’s slaughter lost their families, homes and communities and sought a new life. There was a campaign to convince them that they needed a homeland – in Palestine. They were told lies that Palestine was an empty land, with few inhabitants. The Israeli government terrorised, brutalised and expelled Palestinians from their homelands. Palestine became a colonised settler state. Thus, the Palestinians were made to pay for Hitler’s crimes.
Like the Nazis, the Israel government enforces collective punishment. It aims to kill enough Palestinians, to punish them sufficiently, drive them out of their homeland, so they will disappear as a people. Israel seeks to remove Palestine from the world's family of nations. That too is a form of genocide.
Israel was founded as a militarised state, and a partner of British and US imperialism, of the apartheid regime in South Africa and of murderous dictatorships in Latin America.
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