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"It reminds me of the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto."
- Katy Weitz
- May 28
- 1 min read
Hastings Jews for Justice member Teresa Thornhill, a child protection lawyer and writer, explains why she has joined the Empty Pot Protests in Hastings.
"How are we to live with the knowledge that in Gaza, just a couple of thousand miles from Hastings, children are dying of hunger? And that the supplies of food and fuel that could save their lives are sitting in trucks on the Egyptian side of the border, because Israel refuses to let them in?
There are humanitarian crises all over the world but to me this one feels extremely personal. I’m a British citizen, and my government has been and continues to be complicit in the genocide of the Palestinian people, selling weapons to Israel, flying reconnaissance flights over Gaza, providing diplomatic cover for Netanyahu and refusing to grant badly injured Palestinian children visas to enter the UK for medical treatment.
I’m of Jewish heritage. The photos I see of dying children and the information I read in the alternative media about the impact of the blockade on the people of Gaza remind me of… the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto. I’m not saying this to offend anybody, I’m saying it because to me the parallel is obvious.
That’s why I go along to bang an empty cooking pot in central Hastings on Friday mornings. It’s a means of communicating with my fellow citizens, many of whom toot their car horns in agreement with the protest, and it’s a means of expressing my anger and shame about UK and Israeli policy."
Equating any country's actions, let alone Israel's, with Nazism used to be a taboo that could never be taken seriously, and certainly not if made by someone of Jewish descent. I now have no hesitation in declaring it to be so. Comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is, of course, one of the official prescriptions of the IHRA 'definition if anti-Semitism'. My employer signed up to the IHRA definition five years ago in an ill-informed bout of acquiescence to government arm-twisting, so publishing this assertion that Israel's criminal actions are as egregious as those if the Holocaust could theoretically cost me my job. But who can remain silent now? Like Teresa, I'm saying this because the parallel is obvious. To deny…