{UAH} From Creating to Hating Israel

A Dutch who fought the Nazis and defended Jews right to create Israel has turned into its critic four decades later after an Israeli airstrike flattened a house in the Gaza Strip, killing six of his relatives by marriage.

"My sister lost her husband, who was executed in the dunes of The Hague for his involvement in the resistance," Henk Zanoli, 91, wrote in a letter to the Israeli ambassador cited by The New York Times.

"My brother lost his Jewish fiancée who was deported, never to return."

Zanoli continued, "Against this background, it is particularly shocking and tragic that today, four generations on, our family is faced with the murder of our kin in Gaza. Murder carried out by the State of Israel."

Zanoli's story with Jews and Israel dates back to 1943 when he took a dangerous trip to smuggle a Jewish boy from Amsterdam to the Dutch village of Eemnes to save his life from the Nazi's Holocaust.

Seventy-one years later, his efforts were rewarded after an Israeli airstrike flattened a house in the Gaza Strip, killing six of his relatives by marriage.

His grandniece, a Dutch diplomat, is married to a Palestinian economist, Ismail Ziadah, who lost three brothers, a sister-in-law, a nephew and his father's first wife in the attack.

Zanoli transformed over the decades from a champion to a critic of the Israeli state.

Not only Zanoli. His case was reflecting a larger shift in Europe, where anguish over the Nazi Holocaust led many to support the founding of Israel in 1948.

This passion has changed after the Israeli occupation of Gaza strip and the West Bank in 1967 with Israeli airstrikes killing thousands of Palestinian civilians over the past decades.

"I gave back my medal because I didn't agree with what the state of Israel is doing to my family and to the Palestinians on the whole," Zanoli said in an interview Friday in his spare but elegant apartment, adding that his decision was a statement "only against the state of Israel, not the Israeli people."

"Jews were our friends," said Zanoli, a retired lawyer who uses a motorized scooter but remains erect and regal, much as he appears in a yellowing 1940s photograph archived at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

Zanoli said he had never publicly criticized Israel "until I heard that my family was the victim."

From Victims to Aggressors

In Gaza, Zanoli's traumatized in-laws, who lost six members of their family, praised his gesture as a fitting response to their losses.

Hassan al-Zeyada, a psychological trauma counselor, said he admired Zanoli and his family for their struggle in World War II against "discrimination and oppression in general and against the Jews in particular."

"For them," he added, "it's something painful that the people you defended and struggled for turn into aggressors."

In his letter to the Israeli ambassador, Zanoli noted that among the bereaved were "the great-great grandchildren of my mother."

He relinquished the honor "with great sorrow," he wrote, because keeping an honor from Israel's government would be "an insult to the memory of my courageous mother" and to his Gaza family.

He added that his family had "strongly supported the Jewish people" in their quest for "a national home," but that he had gradually come to believe that "the Zionist project" had "a racist element in it in aspiring to build a state exclusively for Jews."

He referred to the displacement of Palestinians, including members of the Ziadah family, during the war over Israel's founding as "ethnic cleansing" and said Israel "continues to suppress" and occupy Palestinian areas.

Israel has been launching relentless airstrikes against Gaza since July 8 where more than 1,945 have been killed and thousands injured.

Health officials in Gaza said more than 1900 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed and nearly 10,000 injured since Israel launched its war on the besieged strip.

According to UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), about 80% of deaths in Gaza are civilians, including dozens of children and women.

The large scale of mass destruction in Gaza has left about 5,510 homes completely destroyed and about 31,000 partially damaged, forcing tens of thousands to flee their homes that were caught up in the Israeli air strikes.

Israel occupation forces started a ground invasion of besieged Gaza, home to two millions civilian, on Thursday, July 17.

--
Without God, our week would be: Sinday, Mournday, Tearsday,Wasteday, Thirstday, Fightday & Shatterday. Remember seven days without God makes one WEAK!!"And if Allah touches you with harm, none can remove it but He, and if He touches you with good, then He is Able to do all things." (6:17)

--
UAH forum is devoted to matters of interest to Ugandans. Individuals are responsible for whatever they post on this forum.To unsubscribe from this group, send email to: ugandans-at-heart+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com or Abbey Semuwemba at: abbeysemuwemba@gmail.com.