Two British MPs compare Gaza Strip to Warsaw ghetto
By The Associated Press
LONDON - Two lawmakers who recently returned from Israel compared Palestinian living conditions in the Gaza Strip to those of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II.
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Legislator Oona King of the governing Labor Party said Thursday that the Gaza conditions are "the same in nature but not extent" as the notorious walled ghetto in Poland's capital, where Jews were corralled and oppressed by Adolf Hitler's Nazis.
"No government should be behaving like that - least of all a Jewish government," said King, who represents the east London district of Bethnal Green and Bow and is herself Jewish.
King, who traveled to Israel with Jenny Tonge of the Liberal Democrat party, stressed the "very, very big difference" between Gaza and the Warsaw ghetto is that "Palestinians are not being rounded up and put in gas chambers.
"What makes it similar is what happened to the Jewish people in that time which was the seizing of land, being forced from property, torture and bureaucracy - control used in a demeaning way over the smallest task," she told a news conference.
"On top of that building a wall around them, and that is precisely what the Israeli government is doing," King said. "In doing so it is building a political ghetto. I don't think it can escape that conclusion."
Tonge said Palestinians in Gaza could get in or out without scrutiny and "they can't work, they can't sell anything. There is this gradual squeeze."
"I feel it was an apartheid system and it is certainly getting worse - the area where the Palestinians live is getting smaller," she said.
During their visit, King and Tonge said they were caught up in the aftermath of an Israeli assassination attack on a leading Palestinian militant. A building they had been in minutes earlier was attacked by retaliating Palestinians.
The women said they had also been confronted by an Israeli soldier wielding a grenade as they tried to leave the Gaza Strip.
King, who is a member of the Jewish Council for Racial Equality, said she recognized "the terror many Israelis live with as a matter of their daily lives.
"I was more surprised perhaps by the everyday terror that Palestinians live, the detail and nature of which I had not understood," she said.
"We must support the moderate voices as opposed to strengthening extremists."
Officials at the Israeli Embassy in London declined to comment on the legislators' claims, which they made shortly before Prime Minister Tony Blair held previously scheduled talks with Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
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