I support the Harbour Bridge protest – not in spite of my Holocaust heritage, but because of it

The Age

2 days ago

I grew up in a Jewish family with the 'crime of crimes' – the Holocaust – burnished into my soul. My father, grandfather and step-grandmother fled the Nazis in April 1939, just before the gates of hell slammed shut. My mother lost 41 relatives to the Nazi execution squads in the Rumbula forest, a few kilometres outside Riga, in 1941.
I grew up with several questions I wanted to ask German people. What was your father or mother doing during the war years? What about your grandfather or grandmother? When did you find out about the gas chambers and ovens? What did you do with that knowledge? How have you reconciled yourself to those horrors since?
These are some of the questions I think we should all be asking right now, because, as Egyptian-Canadian journalist Omar El Akkad wrote recently: 'One day, everyone will have always been against this.'
For the past 21 months, the world has watched in growing horror as the bodies have piled up. At first, they were all inside Israel, with Hamas' murderous assault on the country on October 7, resulting in about 1200 slaughtered and another 250 abducted. Since then, it is Palestinian suffering that has galvanised and sickened the world.
Within the first three months after Hamas' attacks, nearly 22,000 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli forces, including an estimated 8120 children under the age of 18. By September 2024, that number had risen to 42,000, nearly 17,000 of them children. As of this week, that number stands at over 60,000 dead, more than half comprising women and children, although this tally doesn't account for the thousands still buried under the rubble, or those who have died from lack of food or medical care.
That could bring the figure closer to 100,000 dead, according to Israel's leading English-speaking newspaper, Haaretz.
But as has been said of statistics, these are 'just people with the tears wiped off'. No way to truly grasp the elimination of entire bloodlines – four generations in a single missile strike. No way to grasp that between October and December 2023 alone, about 1000 children lost one or both legs, and that, as of this month – according to the UN Global Protection Cluster – an average of 10 children per day have been losing a limb. On a per capita basis, this means Gaza now hosts what the UN describes as 'the largest cohort of child amputees in modern history'.
But that's just a fraction of the nightmare. Cities like Rafah and Khan Yunis – once teeming with life – have been razed; farmlands, orchards, greenhouses, most of Gaza's plant life, totally obliterated; water supplies decimated, contaminated or both.