For three years, I shared a house with a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto.
It was a beautiful old Palestinian house in West Jerusalem, a house that Israelis had seized in the Nakba in 1948, which was divided into two.
I lived in the front and he lived in the back.
He used to wait for me every day in the garden that both sides of the house shared, and tell me stories about the ghetto – about the scenes of destruction, and how he managed to sneak food to his family.
I am sitting today in what was his room, where he spent his last days, and writing these lines for my newsletter with the horrific images of starvation in Gaza swirling around my head.
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My former neighbour had to hide his Jewish identity, and pretended to be Irish to get food to his family.
But this didn’t stop him from feeling guilty. “The thought of hunger and epidemic in the ghetto haunted me and would not let go, while I spent my days surrounded by the green grass and the blue sky,” he told me.
Two million people starving
He retained a sensitivity to the issue of food, and I had to learn the hard way how to handle it.
Once, I made the mistake of bringing his wife, who was also a Holocaust survivor, a loaf of a special bread she asked for from occupied East Jerusalem. My neighbour was very angry: “Do you think we cannot feed ourselves?”
He still harboured wounds about hunger and starvation from the ghetto, which hurt decades later. I learned to be sensitive with him about the subject of food.
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It was not new for me; as the daughter of two Nakba survivors, I knew food was an issue in my family. Even though we had enough at home, my mother would ask the same question every day: “Was there enough food left in the pot?” She was trying to make sure everyone ate.
She would also eat the leftover bread that had gone dry to ensure her children had the fresh loaves.
But nothing that has happened in the past compares with what is happening today in Gaza. My father, who lived through both eras, bears witness to that.
Even though Palestinians went through war and a lack of food in the Nakba in 1948, it didn’t reach this level, my father says. “We would at least have wheat and make bread,” he says. “Nothing compares to the situation in Gaza.”
A young boy clutches a tin of beans. He won’t let go of it, because he knows that whatever happens, it’s his insurance policy
In Gaza today, money cannot buy wheat. Even wheat mixed with sand and insects is not available any more. The world is watching two million people starve.
For more than two months, Israel has imposed a total siege. It has been preventing all food and humanitarian supplies from entering the Gaza Strip.
On 16 April, Defence Minister Israel Katz announced that the entry of food and aid into the Strip would not be resumed, effectively admitting that Israel was using starvation as a method of warfare.
The scenes of children and babies, their bones poking through their skin, dying from starvation, is not pushing any politician to make a statement or call to allow aid to Gaza.
In fact, the opposite is happening. The more the Palestinians resist by showing their determination to survive and not move from their land, the more frenzied and extreme the calls from ministers in the Israeli government become.
Inflammatory rhetoric
Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu on Monday called for the bombing of Gaza food warehouses, in the latest Israeli inflammatory statement against Gaza, which endures ongoing Israeli genocide.
“They need to starve. If there are civilians who fear for their lives, they should go through the emigration plan,” he said.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir also called for the bombing of food stores in Gaza.
Ayelet Shaked, the former justice minister, said: “Stopping humanitarian aid and the blockade of Gaza – that’s what brings victory.”
And the international community just looks on as if nothing out of the ordinary is happening.
Abdullah Kora, 40, a widower and father of three, and a resident of the city of Khan Younis, said: “My children beg me to get them meat or eggs, and I have to tell them that there is none and that I cannot. What crime have my children committed? Why do they deserve to starve? The hunger that is being imposed on us now is excruciating.”
Ahmed Dermly, a Middle East Eye journalist, told me that for weeks, he couldn’t find a lemon to ease the pain he had in his throat.
“We are always sick, drinking salt water, and walking like ghosts. It isn’t easy, especially with the children. They ask me what an apple or tomato or watermelon tastes like.”
A young boy clutches a tin of beans. He won’t let go of it, because he knows that whatever happens, it’s his insurance policy.
Crossing a line
What remains today of the state that was built on the memory of the Holocaust, on the images of hungry children in the ghettos that all citizens of Israel were obliged to learn about since we were children?
Israeli politicians are queuing up to urge the starvation and death on.
Settlers destroy bags of wheat in trucks waiting for two months at the border. Soldiers shoot at a group of Palestinians who are trying to seize a bag of wheat – the image of blood mixed with white wheat is on my iPhone.
Public opinion in Israel is oblivious to the fate of the people they live next to. The restaurants are full just an hour’s drive from Gaza.
War on Gaza: This is what starvation feels like. I cannot feed my children
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There is a famous quote attributed to the British and Irish 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke, which has become embedded in Israeli consciousness about the Holocaust, even though Burke is unlikely to have used the actual words attributed to him.
Every Israeli knows this sentence, and like the phrase “Never again”, it is repeated endlessly, especially on the day two weeks ago that marked the Holocaust. It goes: “All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”
Throughout my career as a journalist, I have studiously avoided making a comparison between the Holocaust and the Nakba. But I find it impossible to avoid the scenes of children with bones showing under their skin.
I could never have imagined that Jews whose ancestors had suffered the pain of the Holocaust could cross this line, a line that traduces the very essence of their humanity.
I wonder what the Holocaust survivor I shared a house with would say now, if he were still alive.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
