Condemed to repeat it

It's late and I should be getting to bed, but I'm too riled up. I downloaded a couple or programmes from the BBC that I missed and have just been watching them - the first episode of the Diary of Anne Frank (a very good, low key adaptation) and in the same vein, a short documentary about another 14 year old diarist, but Polish, called Rutka Laskier who died in Auschwitz. Both bright, vivid, dark haired and dark eyed writers who chafed against the constraints of their lives, their foreshortened possibilities. Where Anne was stuck in a small hell of other people, Rutka lived with Nazi round ups and murders on the streeet, was pushed into the local ghetto and may or may not have died the day of her arrival in the camp - one witness left an account of her succumbing, like Anne, to disease, but being taken alive to a crematorium. It's a hideous story, only come to light though a local Polish official publishing, with Yad Vashem, her slim school book diary and her Israeli half-sister's delight in finding out about a sibling she only heard about in her own teens.

And all the way through both programmes, as I watched the Franks in their crowded, fearful annexe and listened to Rutka's sister discuss the dehumanisation programme that her sister and her fellow Polish Jews went through -"loss of dignity, of hope, of freedom" - all the other pretty, bright, vibrant dark haired teenage girls of Gaza seemed to echo through the black and white photographs of those lost Jewish girls. When Anne and Rutka railed against the incessant greyness of their surroundings, the fear, the incarceration, the pictures of the five little Palestinian sisters killed last week haunted the screen, who won't grow up to know if they could write well, or fancy their classmates or dream of escape. No, I am not drawing exact historial parallels of scale, but I am drawing human ones.

Beyond the appalling carnage of each individual life that has been lost in the last weeks, the terror and rage and despair that would be equally despicable whether it were done by Finns to Lapps or Mexicans to Guatamalans, the Israeli action in Gaza is haunted by a second, ghost laden layer of horror that it should be Israelis of all people now meting out a punishment far beyond deserving. What is Gaza but a huge ghetto, walled off, starved out and now burnt and bombed? Who are the Palestinians in the Israeli media but Other vermin who should not be? How can anyone sit in Israel knowing their history and say that this is what they should have come to? There was a time when such actions were called reprisal killings. When Heydrich, the architect of Wannsee, was all but assassinated, hundreds of Czechs died for it. No one in Israel had been killed in the latest round of rocket attacks until after they launched their shock and awe strategy that will do nothing but solidify the hatred for another generation.

There is far more expert and in-depth analysis of everything behind what has been going on and this is just a visceral reaction. I'm not advocating turning the other cheek entirely, but as one (Israeli) commentator I read earlier put it, the Israeli action is more an eye for an eyelash. And for all the monuments, money and rhetoric that goes towards memorialising the Holocaust, towards the mantra of 'never again', what kind of people chooses to honour their brutalised dead with the blood of their historical heirs?

Psalm 137 starts with the words made famous by Boney M:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, and yea we wept when we remembered Zion.

The last two lines are these:

O daughters of Babylon, who art to be destroyed, happy shall he be that rewardeth thee as thou has served us;
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

For Anne, and for Rutka, and the small bodies in new graves in Gaza, I hope the happy they have unending nightmares.

Update:
Since writing this, I've heard about the accusations by the Red Cross of that four children had been found with the bodies of their mothers, amongst many others, in the wreck of an attacked house and that Israeli soldiers nearby had done nothing to help the surviving and wounded of the attack on Monday. The image of those traumatised kids is hard to face. As is the idea that anyone could have left them in a charnel house. No one people's childen have greater value than another's - a child is a child. I add these four to my list above.