From the Liveblog of
Monday, December 18, 2023
Israeli mayor calls for turning Gaza into ‘Auschwitz-like’ museum, prompting rebuke
Cnaan Lidor is The Times of Israel's Jewish World reporter
Poland’s Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum strongly condemns an Israeli mayor’s call for depopulating the Gaza Strip and turning it into an open-air memorial, prompting the mayor to lash back and accuse Poles of antisemitism.
The exchange between the museum and Metula Mayor David Azoulai follows a radio interview Sunday in which Azoulai said: “The whole Gaza Strip needs to be empty. Flattened. Just like in Auschwitz. Let it be a museum for all the world to see what Israel can do. Let no one reside in the Gaza Strip for all the world to see, because October 7 was in a way a second Holocaust.”
Israel is engaged in a massive military operation in Gaza following Hamas terrorists’ October 7 incursion into Israel, where they killed 1,200 people in villages and towns near the Gaza Strip, most of them civilians.
Officials there say at least 18,000 people have died in Israeli strikes. Those figures are unverified and don’t differentiate between civilians and terrorists, and include those killed by rockets that fell short in Gaza. Israel says it has killed over 7,000 Hamas operatives in Gaza.
“David Azoulai appears to wish to use the symbol of the largest cemetery in the world as some sort of a sick, hateful, pseudo-artistic, symbolic expression,” a spokesperson for the museum writes on X.
Azoulai’s remarks “may sound as a call for murder of the scale akin to Auschwitz,” the spokesperson writes, adding that Israeli “authorities” should act against Azoulai.
Azoulai says he never called for murdering anyone. “I would like to see Gaza’s population relocated,” he tells The Times of Israel.
Azoulai references Poland’s checkered Holocaust-era past and modern-day expressions of antisemitism in dismissing the museum’s criticism. “What a disgrace, after what happened to Jews in Poland, for them to defend lowly murderers. It’s not for me to educate Polish people, they are brought up to hate us,” he says.
