By Kathleen Kern

A little boy wearing a cap and short pants raises his hands while a Nazi soldier, glancing at the camera, trains his gun on the child. Millions have grieved over that photo, a Holocaust icon.

Last year, I recoiled when I saw Israeli settler news venues had doctored the photo by pasting the heads of settler children onto the body of the Jewish boy in Warsaw. They were equating the plight of the settlers leaving Gaza with the suffering Jews experienced under the Third Reich.  

Sharing my feelings, a Holocaust survivor wrote in an Aug. 22 letter to the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz: “They’re getting new houses and money, they have a future, yet they have the nerve to compare themselves to Holocaust victims! I could tell them a different story: We were taken at night from our beds by the SS; we had to leave our homes and everything behind — most of us never to return!”

Instead of comparing the Gaza settlers to Jews living under the Third Reich 60 years ago, one can more appropriately compare them to the other 99.5 percent of the people currently living in Gaza. Another Aug. 22 letter to Ha’aretz did just that:

“To deal with the Jewish extremists in Gaza, whose very presence there breaches internationally recognized laws and conventions, the Israeli soldiers attended ‘sensitivity training’ courses.

“But there was no ‘sensitivity training’ for Israeli troops, no buses to drive the expellees away, no generous timetables for getting ready, no compensation packages for their homes and no promise of government-subsidized alternative housing when the bulldozers went into Rafah. . . . The Palestinian families in Rafah were usually given a maximum of five minutes’ warning before their houses, and life savings, were crushed. . . . 

“As many as 13,350 Palestinians were made homeless in the Gaza Strip in the first 10 months of last year by Israel’s giant armor-plated Caterpillar bulldozers — a total that easily exceeds the 8,500 leaving Israeli settlements this week. In Rafah alone, according to figures from the UNRWA relief agency, the rate of house demolitions rose from 15 per month in 2002 to 77 per month between January and October 2004.

“It isn’t hard to figure out what type of training was given to the Israeli bulldozer driver who murdered American peace activist Rachel Corrie as she was trying to peacefully prevent him from demolishing yet another Palestinian home.”  

I have told people who ask for it that I am withholding my opinion on the Gaza pullout for six months. I fear for the security of Palestinians in the West Bank if the Israeli government uses the Gaza pullout to justify confiscating even more land there.

But, since hope is a Christian obligation, I offer these cheering thoughts: The behavior of the Israeli settlers in Gaza and their supporters has alienated the majority of Israelis. The water the settlements used — one quarter of all the reserves in Gaza — will now be available to Gazans, who’ve had to drink from tanker trucks and salty, sewage-contaminated wells.  

Most important, Israeli peace activists say, the world now knows that the Israeli government can dismantle settlements in the Occupied Territories if it chooses to do so.

My final positive bit of news: During my research for this column I learned that the Jewish boy in the famous photo, Tsvi Nussbaum, survived the Bergen Belsen camp and lived to become a father and grandfather. His story and picture may be found at www.auschwitz.dk/Star/Nussbaum.htm.