The equation of Gaza with the Warsaw ghetto is perhaps the most prevalent analogy used by Europeans in their attempts to shake off guilt about the Holocaust. Consider the German Catholic bishops Gregor Maria Hanke and Walter Mixa, who, while visiting Israel in March 2007, equated it with Nazi Germany.
“This morning we saw pictures of the Warsaw Ghetto at Yad Vashem and this evening we are going to the Ramallah ghetto,” Hanke said. To Mixa, Ramallah was “ghetto-like” and “almost racism.” While Pope Benedict XVI sacked his Bavarian friend Mixa in April on the basis of financial and sexual improprieties, that view enjoys many proponents across Europe.
The shoddy one-sided accounts of the flotilla raid with which Europeans have comforted themselves, and the continual denial of any Jewish right to self-defense, reveal exactly what the psychoanalyst observed: a Europe that will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.