Janna Jihad may be unaware of the real history of Israel

Don Krausz, chairperson of the Association of Holocaust Survivors Johannesburg

I was Jewish and 13 years old. My father and 40 close members of my family had been murdered by the Nazis, I was later to discover. We took to each other and became friends. In the course of our many conversations, it became clear that she was an ardent Nazi.

It was not appropriate to ask the reasons that had placed her in a concentration camp where 50 000 women and 20 000 men were to die without there being a gas chamber at that time. German nationals were sometimes incarcerated as hostages for the loyalty of family members or even if they were not sufficiently accommodating to their Nazi boyfriends.

She was most enthusiastic about Hitler and would relate the many “miracles” that he had performed to put Germany back on its feet after World War I. And all the while she was expounding these beliefs in a concentration camp, where, under the prevailing torturous conditions of work, food and treatment, the lifespan was measured in months.

I remember standing with her at one of the windows of our barrack, looking out over the camp and deciding to risk a question: What would Der Fuhrer (Hitler) have said if he had seen what we were looking at? She stared at me. “Why,” she said, “he would never have allowed it!”

This brings us back to Janna Jihad Ayyad. As her second name, Jihad, implies, she has also been brought up to see nothing wrong in her indoctrination. Jihad means armed insurrection, and in the Middle East can include the murder of children, the suicide bombing of youths at a discotheque and of people attending religious gatherings, or driving vehicles into pedestrians.

She may be quite unaware that when the State of Israel was declared in 1948 in territory that had had a Jewish population for thousands of years, the local Palestinians – aided by five neighbouring Arab states – attacked their Jewish neighbours, resulting in 6 000 fatalities and 30 000 people wounded, according to the British Encyclopaedia. Five major wars were to follow, all of which the Arabs lost.

Gaza had been occupied in one of these wars and a flourishing export trade developed from there with Europe. In 2005, Israel withdrew all its troops and settlers from Gaza, abandoning its infrastructure, synagogues and trained Palestinian workforce, who were thus able to continue their commercial activities. The grateful and jubilant Gazans responded by destroying the hothouses and synagogues abandoned by Israel, and instead, switched to the manufacture and import of missiles, 14 000 of which were then launched across the border at civilian settlements in Israel.

We are constantly reminded of Palestinian losses and suffering blamed on Israel. Where are the statistics and the losses/damage reports due to the bombardment by 14 000 missiles at civilians? My home was destroyed by bombing during World War II and I know what it is like to be bombarded day and night. It was only after the number of launched missiles reached 80 a day that Israel sent in its army to Gaza.

Israel sent its troops to the border to protect the civilian settlements behind them. How do you expect them to react when confronted by masses of howling, stone-throwing youths, intent on overrunning them and breaking through to the civilians?