How can Jews stand and watch horrors of Holocaust in Palestine?

Eighty-two years ago this year, a group of starving Jewish communists and socialists took up arms against Nazi German troops and tanks inside the Warsaw Ghetto. Facing starvation and deportation to the infamous Treblinka extermination camp, our Jewish ancestors and comrades made a stand. As a community, we should know better than anyone that the only option in the face of fascism and genocide is the resistance of the people. 

Jewish fighters picked up any weapons they could find: handguns, bolt-action rifles, shovels, knives, and even furniture pieces and made war on the Nazi occupiers. Completely outgunned and outnumbered, lacking food and water, the Jewish anti-fascist fighters held on against overwhelming Nazi forces for an entire month. 

Socialist activist and Jewish Combat Organization Commander Marek Edelman stated that the resistance found inspiration in not allowing “the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths.” This is the exact same brutal calculus taking place in the hearts and minds of the resistance fighters and all Palestinians inside Gaza as these words are written. In this modern holocaust, the Palestinians are clearly playing the role that the brave Jewish revolutionaries did in 1943 in Poland. 

It should be noted that Marek Edelman, Mordechai Anielewicz, and many other leaders in the Jewish resistance were explicit anti-Zionists. One of Edelman’s last public statements before his death in 2002 was in support of Palestine. Edelman specifically warned that “Jewish self-defence” was being weaponized to rationalize the oppression of the Palestinian people. 

Even with this history, in this same modern holocaust, the Jewish community finds itself playing the role of the Nazi SS. This dynamic can further be seen in the U.S.-Zionist imposed artificial famine in Gaza. In 2025, the United Nations estimates that tens of thousands of children are suffering from malnutrition. In the last two weeks alone, at least sixteen children under the age of 5 have died of starvation. Again, the Palestinians play the role of Jews in our Warsaw Ghetto metaphor. 

In 1942, a year before the uprising, a group of Jewish doctors performed a study of starvation inside the Ghetto. The public health and nutrition situation in the Ghetto at the time was stunningly similar to the present-day Gaza. Food could only be obtained through soup kitchens that were themselves the targets of the Nazi occupiers. Vaccines, antibiotics, and other crucial medications were all withheld from the Ghetto prisoners by the Nazis. 

Their stated purpose was to track the impact of genocidal policies on a community to help future generations of oppressed people be prepared. To this day, it remains the most extensive study of starvation conducted. The 28 Jewish doctors who conducted it were themselves starving. All of these doctors but one died from malnutrition or were executed by the Nazis – but not until they completed and ensured the security of their work. This was certainly as much an act of resistance as the armed uprising in 1943. 

The same can be said for the Palestinian families who persist through artillery shells and bullets to seek out food at aid stations. Every step they take to try to feed their families is an act of human defiance against an inhumane U.S. regime. 

Yet, even with these parallels, the Jewish community globally remains completely fooled on the issue of Zionism. We need to listen to our revolutionary ancestors. We need to listen to our humanity. The legacy of Judaism should not be one of enforcing imperialist greed. It should be one of resistance.

Lev Koufax is an anti-Zionist Jewish activist.